This is not what dance is about - Dance Saturday
Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,
On Thursday, I had a contemporary dance workshop at school with a young lady from the Sababa Company. As you all already know, for the beginning of year 13, I have not been doing many practical dance sessions at school because my teachers decided to focus more on coursework. As a result, I've been trying to get involved in more dance workshops to keep up with the momentum of general training. A few weeks ago, I did an urban dance workshop with IRIE Dance Theatre which was great and you can read all about my experience of that here. However, on Thursday I decided to attend this contemporary dance workshop that had a feminist twist and in my humble opinion, it was not a great workshop and I will tell you why. Dance is a beautiful art form that allows one to freely interpret their emotions and thoughts through movement, without having the societal or cultural constraints imposed upon them. When you therefore attach feminism, a culture of thinking that is developed by a society of people, to an art form that is based on individual style and originality, you kill the art form. I attended that class to be taught new movement by an experienced teacher and practitioner of contemporary dance and to be encouraged to devise something of my own. However, I left the studio after I was given a lecture on the basis of feminism from a dance teacher who wanted us to dance in the way that she wanted us to dance. We focused on things that were not important and that only seemed to resonate with her. We were asked our pronouns just incase of accidental offence. We talked about periods, what we thought about periods, and how periods made us feel as young women. We also talked about why we cannot speak to men about these things and what that told us about the society in which we live. We were then about to create choreography based on the words that resonated with us most about our periods but thankfully, I went to my English class before that horrendous activity began. Not to mention the incident when a male teacher accidentally walked into the dance studio in search of a student. Our workshop leader looked very much annoyed and ensured that no one else walked into on our session, especially anyone who was male. I get that we were focusing on really female-orientated topics for the session but she wouldn't have to deploy such segregationist tactics if she actually focused on the true meaning of dance over expressing her political stance. How such a session was even allowed to happen in a school, a place of enlightenment, is beyond me. I just wanted to spend some time dancing after not dancing properly for so long and I ended up feeling very uncomfortable as I left the studio. I had a general bad feeling about the dance teacher who led the workshop anyway. On the surface she tried to present herself well but beneath the facade she seemed to be very angry at the society that we are currently living in and she wanted everyone else taking the class in the room with her to be annoyed at life too. I assumed that she was annoyed at the patriarchal tyranny, the invisible tyrannical system that is probably invisible because it doesn't exist. I have things to be annoyed about but I hope to never be so overcome by hatred as she was. Hate in the way she implemented it, did not look pretty and it clearly ate her alive. If this dance workshop taught me anything, it has taught me to not mix politics with dance and it has taught me to favour positivity over negativity because clearly bad things tend to happen when people choose to act otherwise.
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Bye,
XOX, Juliette
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