The dancer of the future: Michael Chekhov in cross-training practice

Abstract

Most studio-trained dancers arrive at a post-secondary programme with little training in personalised expression. Although some professional dancers possess a natural facility for interpretation, there has existed to date no methodology specifically designed to impart creative values to the dancer-in-process. The Michael Chekhov Technique offers a systematic and organic cross-training practice aligned with the dancer's fundamental métier: the body and movement. Chekhov's teachings in the psychophysical basics – Atmosphere, Qualities, Imagination, and Gesture – provide a bridge between the necessities of technical dance training and the energetic values of performance. This article presents a teacher-practitioner's ethnographic account exploring the way Chekhov's teachings can provide for the post-secondary dancer a path to awakened embodiment, power and emotionality.

Notes

^1. Most notably, with MICHA: The Michael Chekhov Association.

^2. Juilliard's Richard Feldman first suggested that as non-dancers, acting teachers might in fact have an advantage in teaching dancers.

^4. Lawrence Rhodes, appointed Artistic Director of the Dance Division at Juilliard in 2002, believed acting pedagogy reflected the kind of work that was transpiring in New York at the time: Lar Lubovitch, Mark Morris, and the growing use of dramatic text in movement creation.

^5. Instructors often suggest that the acquisition of technique must be solidly in place before artistic values can be considered, a perspective I do not share.

^6. In Acting for Dance, text serves as a tool, peripheral to the events.

^7. The March/April 2012 edition of Dance Current magazine calls competition dance, Canada's ‘growth industry’.

^8. Also see: Susan W. Stinson et al.'s 1990 landmark study of female post-secondary dance students between the ages of 16 and 18.

^9. Juilliard's Feldman closes the drapes across the wall of mirrors upon entering the room.

^10. Choreographer James Kudelka ‘s 1994 work entitled, The Actress, was specifically created for Kain.

^11. Beatty is a founder and artistic director of Toronto Dance Theatre (1968–1983), whose early training took place at Bennington College, and at the Martha Graham School in New York.

^12. Transcript of a videotaped interview with Trish Beatty at York University in 2011.

^13. Jacques Lecoq (2007, p. 189) states in his essay, ‘Movement Technique’: ‘Purely athletic exercises are … insufficient for actor training. I have known actors who were extremely stiff in the gym, who nevertheless moved with wonderful suppleness on stage, and others who were very supple in training, but who were incapable of creating an illusion.’

^14. Chekhov's contentious idiom, the term ‘psychological’, encompasses feelings and emotional experience arrived at through the artist's ability to resonate with a vast imagination rather than only by way of what is personal.

^15. This is a departure from the language of Laban's basic efforts: Pressing, Flicking, Slashing, Gliding, Wringing, Thrusting, Dabbing, and Floating.

^16. Despite the success of the exercise, Johnson does not identify how the experience can be replicated.

^17. College schedules rarely provide time to teach a comprehensive lesson that allows for something to ‘just happen’.

^18. One of the ‘Four Brothers’: feeling of form, ease, beauty, and the entirety.

^19. From an exercise with Ragnar Freidank and Jessica Cerullo at the MICHA Windsor conference in 2011.

^20. Although somewhat quelled, the spectre of doubt, ‘am I doing this right?’, hangs over all our explorations.

^21. Transcript of Ted Pugh teaching Ideal Center, at the MICHA conference in 2010, at the University of Windsor, Ontario.

^22. Paskevska suggests the heart as the ideal centre, as it was for Isadora Duncan.

^23. Chekhov's exercises allow for adaptation and experimentation.