This week has been a doozy and I can honestly say that I am not really sure where it went. On Monday I can distinctly recall bitching about the long week ahead and now it's Friday and I don't have to be anywhere and I can truly feel my body hurt.
I have been polling both of my hip hop classes and they're hurting, too. I feel much better about that. It is a good hurt, since I know I am getting back into shape, but my feet also hurt, which is not the best. If it wasn't for my slightly missing toenail I would go and get a pedicure. Hmmmm, maybe next week.
There have been numerous successes and set backs this week. In terms of hip hop, I feel that my choreography is always different and I have been coming up with SO MANY new playlists. However, one of my students sent me an email on Wednesday that pushed me into the dumps all morning. It read:
Hi Hope,
This is Paul from your section 1 hiphop class, and I have some
personal thoughts that I would like to share with you. First of all, I think our dance steps are a little bit too soft, and they seem more like jazz dance to me, because I think hiphop dance has much stronger and more powerful movements. And as well as the music. Second, as a dance class, I think we should spend more time on practicing our dance steps, like one and half hour maybe? Or we can apply those styles that we saw in the video [the David LaChapelle film, RIZE] to our dance. So all of these are only my personal opinions, I don't even know if I am right or wrong, I just want to share it with you, and its definitely no offense to you. Thank you so much for spending your time reading it. Have a great day.
Best,
Paul Lei
Right after I read it, I went into the studio and started choreographing and changing some of the current routine. He did come up to me in class and thanked me for my emailed response. In our conversation I came to find out that he didn't realize that this was Lyrical Hip Hop week. When I taught the routine on Monday I did so without counts. It allowed us to learn the movement and then place any song to it. I would then be able to tailor the piece to the song. Both classes chose to work more lyrically this week rather than the hard beats of more "traditional" hip hop music. A good idea in theory, but both classes picked totally different lyrical songs and the counts were very different from each other. Therefore it was difficult to keep them separate in my mind. Anyway, Paul was just talking about THIS week and he also thought that the class was 2 hours, rather than an hour 40. I started to feel better as I began the class and started the webcam up.
My mini-freak out that I am a bad teacher and have no right teaching hip hop did push me into two decisions. 1) Scheduling the teaching resource center (TRC) to come to both classes on Monday and survey my students and then give me feedback on the classes. and 2) on Monday on our drive home from Winters I will stop and talk with Q, the hip hop teacher I studied with last year.
I do feel like I have good dialogue with my students, but the TRC is such a good resource that it would be stupid not to use them. Especially since I am teaching the classes again in second session. In terms of meeting with Q, I feel like I am a little stuck in terms of choreography and it would be great to have a session with him to have him tweak my stuff. I realize that my choreography does not really use arms very much. I would love to play with that more. And unfortunately watching hours of youtube cannot offer the assistance I need.
I also spoke with Christine Chen who teaches the jazz class before me about how she structures her class. She gave me a great exercise which I used yesterday to wonderful outcomes. In most dance classes, you split the class in half and allow one half to dance at a time. It allows each half to perform for their classmates and to really spread out. I usually do this to encourage one half to "give love" to the other class. This usually includes a bit of a-hootin' and a-hollerin' and then smiles on the dancers faces. But what Christine recommended is having them pair up -- one from group A and one from group B. When group A dances their group B counterparts watch and give feedback afterwards. It really allowed my students to talk about the dance and give feedback and praise. Ah, the power of communication.
It gets me super excited about our hip hop poetry next week.
No comments:
Post a Comment