I have experience teaching modern, jazz, tap, ballet, and hip hop.
Teaching Philosophy:
My approach to teaching reflects my values as a dance artist and evokes a sense of mental and physical awareness that captures an intellectually present dancer, and encourages personal growth and experience from the inside out. By focusing on improving the awareness of one’s physical and artistic self, the students will improve in their ability to track their movement through space, to disrupt or exaggerate patterns within the body, to avoid potential injury, and to trust in their own physical and artistic capacities.
Through various modern exercises drawn from somatic, release, and improvisational techniques I encourage each student to expand their knowledge of their body's capabilities and its patterns or habits in order to increase an overall body-mind awareness. I explore somatic exercises as a way to help the students understand natural, anatomical ways of moving. I also utilize release and improvisational exercises to reveal the body's innate habits or patterns and develop each dancers individual methods of following their natural rhythms.
Each student is unique and has their own artistic voice; therefore each dancer’s journey in my class is different. I encourage individuality within a dance artist in order to develop a deep connection between the self and movement and that connection to creative choice. I believe that each person’s background highly influences his or her spiritual and internal connections to movement choices. I would like to help each dancer recognize what it is that makes him or her distinct and utilize those abilities and life experiences to their fullest potential.
Teaching requires open-mindedness; therefore my process is continuously expanding as I grow and learn as a dance artist. My goal is to offer developing artists my own gathered knowledge while learning from them through the practice of teaching. As I learn a develop as a teacher I am able to better understand how to approach the unique processes each dancer needs to develop modern technique skills and mind-body wholeness. Through my process the dancers will be able to draw on their own experience to invest themselves deeper into movement and find their own artistic voices.