Teaching
Ballet • Contact/Improvisation • Contemporary • Brain Gym® • Zena Rommett Floor-Barre®
My pedagogy shifts away from the exclusive – often harmful – physical and cultural stereotypes, and leans towards a wider, more inclusive, joyful landscape.
What matters to me is creating a sense of safety and play, grounding us all in the present as we acknowledge the past and look for potentiality of the future.
Throughout my 50+ years in dance, I have come to feel the outwardly silent, inwardly buzzing life of dance practice - in a studio, onstage, or down the street - as an exquisite, arduous, spiritual practice of polishing the soul, the character, the body, for moving through life.
Class Descriptions
Contact/Improvisation (Intro/Beginner/Intermediate)
Introducing C/I to new dancers incorporates historic overview of the practice, readings, writing, discussion, elements around safe-touch, boundaries, and behaviors, and viewing film and live performance. We are improvising all the time when we speak, when we navigate a crowded city sidewalk, when we recover from mistakes – how does this translate to performance? What muscles are we able to access and hone?
Zena Rommet Floor-Barre®
Certified since 2017, I teach group and private classes to all people. The method emphasizes strengthen, alignment, and length. It is part meditation, part exercise, and part physical therapy, and highly recommended for dancers to prevent and recover from injury.
Contemporary and Classical Ballet
I am charged to re-examine ballet’s lexicon and historical roots. I want to share the ability to move through ideas, steps, and difficulties with curiosity and to fashion a class that serves the now, dispelling the idea that ballet is only for certain (White, Eurocentric, skinny, rich) people. This architecture can be for every body and I am actively researching and investigating its sources and relevance to re-build a more sound structure.
With students, I shift the approach to the language of ballet, the lexicon, encouraging us to find words towards movement without fossilizing the terminology with static positions or nouns. Instead, we discover active verbs and metaphors that free – not freeze – our bodies.
Dance for Returning Adults and for
Musical Theater Artists
(different classes, similar approach)
I love teaching adults who have chosen to return to dance and I equally love teaching musical/theater artists focused on singing, acting, tap, jazz, hip-hop, who want or need the structure of ballet. Locating a pathway that connects to this structure, figuring out the benefits, how to navigate the obstacles, what is needed to look and feel “convincing” for auditions or an event, learning how to learn – I get an electric charge from this. Also, these movers are my best teachers.