Teaching Not Creating

I spent the afternoon working with students at James Madison University today. I first taught an improv class to 35+ dancers and then started rehearsing the Big Group cast for My ocean is never blue - which will combine The PlayGround with the student dancers. It went really well and I'm the good dancing-for-6-hours kind of sour.

It is so interesting setting My ocean is never blue on yet another group of dancers. When we were originally creating the work it was a real process of trying, changing, developing, dropping, editing, discussing and figuring it all out. Now, that same section that took many hours and rehearsals to develop takes almost no time to "teach". I'm struck by the difference between creating a work and teaching it. I try and guide the new dancers through a process to experience some of the same development that the original dancers did, but it is not the same - I am artificially leading them through the steps instead of us discovering the steps through the process together. This has to effect their experience, understanding and maybe even their dancing.

Tomorrow I have rehearsal with the dancers from 10am until 5pm so we will be going over everything again, add in some new stuff and start putting it in an order. The PlayGround's core company comes on Sunday so we can put it all together.