Flamenco is on my mind a whole lot, actually, increasingly so. As with most things significant in my life, Flamenco was an accident, unforeseen and unplanned; I did not know much about the dance when I began learning it about five years ago. Since then, it has become my main way for taking trips outside the academic bubble.
Besides functioning as my escape-mechanism, however, Flamenco serves me as metaphor for pedagogical praxis as well. My students tend to get a kick out of the fact that their “professor” is dancing away in her time off. (Is it just me, or our students really seem to lack imagination when it comes to their instructors?) So, I talk to them about it, not just in order to lighten up our conversations from time to time, but, also, to point out the importance of communication as a holistic, if you want, mind-body experience.
One of my favorite tricks is to shock them into awareness by interrupting the class at a given moment and asking them to hold, either sitting or standing up, a “Flamenco posture”: chest up, chin high, shoulders pushed back and down. (Depending upon the degree of intimacy with a given group of students, I risk one of my favorite quotes from my Spanish dance instructor, delivered with inimitable flair and seriousness: “Ladies and gentlemen, nipples to the sky!”) It always works and makes even the most sour and “I’m so bored!” face in the room crack a smile. I then tell them to internalize what their body communicates at that moment and to hold on to that sense of confidence and determination their posture projects. To think and write with originality and daring is like holding, both figuratively and literally, a beautiful Flamenco posture. The point is to make it real, real and lasting: live your ideas, live your writing, and live the dance that ensues!
I emphasized the importance of a good Flamenco posture when I gave a workshop on oral communication in an Accounting class the other day as well. I am not sure the professor in charge of the course was particularly convinced of the effectiveness of my dance-metaphor: it might have come across as a touch too flippant given the serious business of things under discussion like probability and interest-rates. (I asked him too, to hold the posture, but I do not think he followed my directions.) What told me, however, that I was making sense was the thing I have come to appreciate more and more in the course of my own teaching career: the students’ reactions.
The best performances I have ever had as a teacher, since teaching is a major act of performance, were those when I managed to pull in the students and let them take over. I have learned to really listen to those human beings masquerading as my students for a semester; their faces are the barometers that make me feel at the instinctive level of a gut reaction whether I am an effective communicator as an instructor. The magic of the classroom, when it happens, is like the perfect execution of a Flamenco move, showing you that what you rarely achieve and you are endlessly looking for is worth the trouble. It is, after all, art.
Szidonia, the connection between dance and writing/communication is just lovely. I don’t know any Flamenco moves but I will try the “nipples to the sky!” line to see if my sleepy students wake up.
City Center is having Flamenco festival in February: http://www.nycitycenter.org/tickets/productionNew.aspx?performanceNumber=4170.
Szidonia, I like the connection you made between dancing and communicating. We are continually communicating in life and life is certainly like a dance … sometimes slow and easy, other times energized and dramatic. I teach Confidence in Communications: A Holistic Approach and the idea of connecting communicating with performance art is a good one. Thank you.