As a part of my second degree for Art Pedagogy, Helsinki Uniarts ERPE ped­a­gog­i­cal stud­ies for teach­ers in the arts, I conducted a teacher-as-researcher training-period in Grand Popo, Benin, Africa.

Background for this pedagogical research

In the autumn of 2019, I taught children’s ballet and contemporary dance at the Ramallah Ballet School. I don’t speak Arabic, so the lessons were mainly in body language. At the end of the season we gave a final performance for the families in the dance studio.

This teaching period, with its many challenges and side effects, served as a starting point for thought processes that I am still working on in my teaching, my artistic work and also in the development of our new organisation, DANCO – School of Decolonising the Art of Dance.

My biggest challenge in Palestine was teaching a rather colonial and patriarchal dance discipline as a white European in an already subjugated community. Other challenges were the lack of a common spoken language and the curriculum and rehearsals: what would I teach children who have an inherently limited future in terms of continuity of dance practice? On the other hand, does it make more sense to organise temporary activities in captive or subjugated communities? On many occasions we have seen a benevolent European donor offer their expertise, money or objects to communities where these things were either not needed in the first place, or were desperately needed, but the short-term support has only lasted for a very short time, sometimes leaving more damage than support to the community.

In Benin I was interested in cross-cultural, non-verbal body language in teaching. This goal was inspired by my experience and idea in Palestine, that bodies and movement are sufficient for the teaching and sharing of dance. Unlike in Palestine, where my students came from privileged families, both Christian and the product of Muslim customary education, the children in Benin lacked the discipline and search for order that often comes from educational customs and sense of security that home offers.

So was it naive to think that what worked in Palestine could work in Benin? The experience was an enriching reminder of how important it can be to have an understanding of the cultural context and to discard assumptions based on experience at the outset.

I wanted to broaden my understanding of teaching dance that is not culturally bound, i.e. what moves and skills to teach and why. This subject would be easier to tackle without the burden of colonialism. Any export of European know-how always resonates with the arrogance of the past about any superiority associated with Westernisation, even if the intention is to be relatively free of this baggage. However, European art dance is too often seen as a global art dance, which necessarily makes its export problematic.

Some entries from my teaching diary:

“I have struggled with what to teach children, who already have an excellent sense of rhythm and movement and an unimaginably rich dance culture, about our western dance “tradition” and its potential in the body. And what tradition? A month as a dancer in Benin and I have begun to question the entire European contemporary dance construction. We have nothing decent compared to the physicality, polyrhythms, skills, living tradition, history and philosophy of this continent. What we have, is a flimsy philosophy of “ballet as mother of all dances”, followed by the bare tits of white Miss Duncan’s, when she leaps to freedom without any control of her limbs. And we have less than a hundred years of “exploration of the body’s movement potential”, left behind in the sixties when Paxton & Co discovered that you don’t have to dance to dance?

The bare tits of a white woman, whose symbolism of freedom was somehow far more dignified and powerful than the thousands of years of bare breasts of her dark-skinned sisters in Africa?

And now, on the basis of this ‘tradition’, we are to pretend that there is anything to give in a culture that has never stopped living in the body in order to ‘explore the potential’ in its overpriced dance institutions and experimental anatomy practices.”

I have begun to think of “contemporary dance” as a philosophy and a creative corporeal journey into the self, often through movement suggestions from the outside. Sometimes the movement suggestions are fixed into permanent ideas, movement-characters or “techniques” and named, such as axis syllabus, Flying Low, Play fight and so on. But personally, I never identified my actions with one particular technique. I did a little bit of this and that. From this this and that cake I can put together a “professional lesson” for Western dancers, because it’s about movement patterns and forms, a movement language that we’ve all studied and communicated out in some way. But its usefulness to the outsider to this dance culture is still obscure to me.

I danced with the American dancer Caleb Dowden, who was a brief guest of Villa Karo, once in the studio. We had nothing planned, other than “jamming together”. After a brief discussion, we learned that we had both done an extensive lesson in Graham, so we warmed up with that. We then created a dance sequence so that I started with a few moves, and he continued, and so on. The language we spoke was the same. It was a wonderful situation, to find a connection in a common dance language that we happened to speak. We call this “contemporary dance”. This language, like any language, has taken 15 years of study to get to the point where we come together and start communicating.

But what’s the point of teaching its basics for a few months to children who have their own strong, fun body language to jam with? Teaching ankle extensions, plié, chasse, swing, or even body control exercises to a gang whose body culture is so strong through the rhythm of daily life that the support is already there from daily life? We didn’t get to admire the local’s straight backs, balance, muscle definition, arms and abs. The children were already sinewy, strong, jumping high and standing on their hands.”