Dance education in the P-12 setting serves many purposes, including creating technicians, producing creative thinkers, and increasing students' understanding of emotional and physical health. However, in settings where there is often only one teacher running an underfunded program, how is it possible to attain all these goals? The instructor…

Site-specific dance performance involves the presentation of choreography in connection with a site. The context of the site combined with a viewer's personal history, beliefs, and identity impact the reading and appreciation of the performance. Although both stage and site dance performance valuing elicit multiple interpretations of artistic…

Most dance departments in the United States require rigorous study of traditional Western dance forms. This is common; many developed countries cultivate the art forms that reflect the aesthetics and philosophies of the majority culture in that nation. However, demographics in the United States have changed greatly over the past 50 years, with…

This article explores ways of learning experienced by university dance students participating in a community dance project. The students were unfamiliar with community-based practices and found themselves needing to remediate held attitudes about dance. How the students came to approach their learning within the dance-making process drew on…

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…

As teachers of the arts we are committed to nurturing the creative potential of all our students. We value process and want to inspire young artists to find their unique voices. But do we? Habitual models of teaching, along with external pressures in the settings in which we teach--including pursuing models and language of "best…

Drawing on more than two decades of experience refining this teaching process, as well as insights from two consecutive research studies of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago's education work, this article presents best practice strategies for teaching choreography to elementary students in schools. The article outlines the rationale behind the…

The idea of "best practices" in the performing arts is introduced as a set of progressive educational values and pedagogical strategies that attempt to not only train youth in the performing arts, but also to be transformative. This article builds on the work of educational reformer John Dewey to describe progressive performing arts…

Dance programs in higher education offering both professional degrees (BFA) and liberal arts degrees (BA, BS) often focus most of their energy, attention, and resources to ever-increasing BFA programs. At the same time, liberal arts programs in dance often provide the real bread and butter of program headcounts, credit hours generated, and degrees…

This study reflects on teaching and learning contemporary dance in Amman, Jordan, focusing on the experiences of three contemporary dance students. Through the three case studies, various issues regarding teaching and learning contemporary dance in a Jordanian context are raised, revealing that contemporary dance can be perceived as a taboo and…

This study reevaluates modern dance training in Korea and attempts to identify possible improvements. This study is based on the rationale that Korean modern dance training must recover its nature of a holistic connection between body and mind. A qualitative methodology was used to interpret data from in-depth interviews and open-ended…

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…

Dance faculty members come from a variety of backgrounds, which lead to varied knowledge bases and varied teaching practices. More information is needed about the current pedagogical practices of higher education dance faculty. This study sought to provide a description of four faculty members' pedagogical approaches to a dance technique class in…

This article examines assessment of "intangible" concepts in dance education such as creativity, risk, originality, or artistic thinking. Through the development of assessment workshops for arts educators, conducted from 2009 through 2011 across the state of Illinois and supported by the Illinois Arts Council, the authors developed a clear model…