Teaching is a partnership. The best students are the ones who have a lot of questions. And the best teachers provide not so much the answers as the tools for discovery.
When I am in the studio, I want my students to be thinking, thinking, thinking, all the time. We are here to explore, not just to copy. Where is your body headed? How does it feel? Can you sense the movement at every moment? And can you do it again?
Dance class gives us a laboratory to learn how to fail. Over and over, we come in, try something that we can't do, cope with the awkwardness and difficulty, then try again, returning and refining until we succeed. It is a great gift to find out that failure is not the end, but the beginning. In dance class, all of this plays out in front of people, too - no small barrier for the faint of heart. But the process gives us a certain toughness and resiliency that we can take into all areas of life. My goal is to make the studio a safe space to fall down and get back up again.
I believe that dance is a window into human existence. In ballet class, you can learn about how your joints are put together. In modern, you can see how different people hear a simple instruction like "make a circle" and interpret it in a dozen different ways. And in dance history, you can ask how cultures across time and space write their beliefs on the human body. Biology, psychology, culture, history, as well as theater, music, and visual arts: all intersect here.