This article describes Communication by Design, a year-long project developed to foster an important dialogue between emerging student costume designers and student choreographers. Two university professors, one teaching costume design and one teaching dance, collaborated to help their students gain an understanding of how these two disciplines…

In this article the author, Rachel Rimmer, explores how improvisation can facilitate skills that are transferable to other areas of dance practice, enabling different areas of study to complement each other. The experimental forum of improvisation as an alternative method of learning technique is considered, contemplating the value of this…

In her experience teaching modern dance at a range of institutions, the author has noticed that even as many students exhibit superior physical skill in technique class, most are lacking when it comes to expression. From large university BFA to smaller liberal arts programs, she finds that her students often fall into a land of physical imitation,…

Contact improvisation can serve as a way to access new understandings of Bartenieff Fundamentals. Inherent elements of contact improvisation such as thinking and feeling bodily in the moment, sensitivity to activated weight along with weight sharing and bearing, flow, whole-body organization, and immediacy of embodied presence provide fertile…

For intermediate and advanced university students, technique class has traditionally been the place to study a particular teacher's style and to hone technical skills. This article suggests a pedagogy that broadens standard practice by focusing additionally on both performance principles and spontaneous problem solving in the technique classroom.…

Although contemporary dance improvisation techniques and comedy improvisation are seldom linked, the two forms evolved around the same time and have many similarities. Both forms exist in the moment, share a highly ephemeral nature, and make use of physical games and structures. Both forms teach students the skill of being present, so essential to…

Within the Western fine arts tradition of concert and theatrical dance, new dances may be created in any number of ways. No matter how dance making begins, however, unless the work is to be improvised afresh each time it is performed, a process of developing, revising, and "setting" the work needs to take place. To move confidently and…

This study examines the cognitive experiences of children as they engage in creative projects in both dance and poetry. The data includes interviews with fifth graders from an elementary School in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, about their lived experience of writing poetry and creating dances. Students interviewed for this study participated in a…

Based in bodily awareness, somatic education has many points of relationship with dance education. Body-Mind Centering[R] (BMC), with some of its roots in Laban Movement Analysis/Bartenieff Fundamentals (LMA/BF), has a particularly easy link to dance. When studying Body-Mind Centering, the theoretical components are often taught through dance…

As a Certified Laban Movement Analyst and a classically trained ballet dancer, I consistently weave the Laban Movement Analysis/Bartenieff Fundamentals (LMA/BF) theories and philosophies into the ballet class. This integration assists in: (1) Identifying the qualitative movement elements both in the art of ballet and in the students' dancing…

Crossing artistic modalities so that students respond aesthetically to dances rather than through written critiques can enhance the teaching of dance technique. This integrative method encourages the practice of artistry, the act of finding voice, along side the learning of technique. The use of a basic premise from expressive arts--that art…