Latin American and Modern Ballroom ~ continued
RACHEL CHERRY
Focus On
Teaching all abilities Registered teacher, Roswitha Wetschka gives her perspective on an ‘all-abilitiesbeginners-class’ approach to ballroom and Latin American dance teaching
This article is presenting my concept of how to teach ballroom and Latin American dance classes that aim to be more inclusive for anybody who either feels that they have a hard time with learning dancing (“I have two left feet”) and/or has a health condition or physical or learning disability. Us dance teachers have all developed our methods of how to deal with people who claim to have two left feet as they are inquiring about our dance classes. We know what to say and have our ideas about how to help them in a class to ‘find their right leg’. After all beginners never have it easy, they are usually not immediately ‘able’ to dance and some of our beginners are people who find it very difficult to learn dancing. Usually we don’t give up on them so easily. But have you ever thought of offering an inclusive dance class? Or as a compromise an ‘all abilities forever beginners’ class? The teaching might be very close to your ideas and tricks! Let’s also keep in mind that at some point all of us, including our current students, have or will experience a disabling situation or condition through illness, injury and ageing, so let’s be ready. Now let’s look around and see what we can learn from other inclusive
(dance) teachers and from researchers: Disability Rights UK has put together a comprehensive list of adjustments during exams, depending on which disability or health condition (Disability Rights UK, 2019), while the concept of ‘adapted physical education’ in the US brings many more ideas for teaching movement. The most experience and research with inclusive dancing was made with modern and contemporary: “The current focus in inclusive dance is translation rather than adaptation: where adaptation implies that there is a ‘correct’ way of performing a movement task based on a non-disabled version, translation encourages each dancer to respond to tasks according to their own bodies. The aim is to achieve an equivalent outcome based on understanding of a particular movement principle rather than simply mimicking an aesthetic.” (I. Aujla, 2019, referring to Whatley, S., & Marsh, K. 2017) But what about classes with a traditional syllabus structure like ballet and ballroom/Latin American? Imogen Aujla researched recently for the Society three inclusive classes, whose teachers worked on translating the ballet, the modern or the ballroom/Latin syllabus for disabled young dancers. She found
that: “regardless of genre, teachers needed to break down each exercise to determine its key principles before building up to the final movement goal” (p 3). She found that: “differentiation was crucial and an understanding of each individual dancer ensured this was effective” (p. 3). On the other hand setting high expectations of the dancers was an important mindset for the teachers to motivate the dancers to challenge themselves. And free-flow movement and improvisation offered some relaxing and joyful playtime in between working on the syllabus. (I. Aujla, 2019)
The three pillars of my concept: A Making the bodies move according to the essence of a dance B Adapting the set dance steps to support this essence in the individual body C Translating communication and teaching methods to the abilities and learning styles of the students My concept of inclusive and ‘all abilities beginners’ teaching is focusing on building up from the essence of a dance or a dance
64 Dance | Issue 491
040_079_DANCE_491.indd 64
18/01/2021 12:42
