Meditations on Learning, Feedback & Marginalized Identities from a Perpetual Student/Teacher
I’ve been reflecting a lot about teaching strategies lately, both from the perspective of a student and teacher of movement arts. At this point in my life, I’ve recognized that I’ve worn a lot of proverbial hats. Or, to be more apt, I think it’s more accurate to say I’ve worn a lot of shoes: in my early 20s I clipped in and learned to race a bike surprisingly well, traded in my cycling shoes for character shoes and learned to swing dance, glued some rhinestones to those shoes and became a burlesque performer, traded my character shoes for bare feet and learned circus arts, and then threw some 7” Pleasers and learned to pole and chair dance. A couple years ago, I also started wearing the shoes (or lack thereof) of a circus arts and burlesque instructor while simultaneously wearing those of a student.
Shelter in Place orders really changed the experience of teaching and learning movement arts online; gym closures left many movement addicts— myself included— experimenting with online classes and attempting to adapt our training to within our homes, most of which were not equipped for aerial arts at the beginning of closures. It meant experimenting with new teaching styles and disciplines in order to accommodate the online format of classes; learning to effectively describe what my body was doing and trying to translate it to make sense to other less experienced bodies from the confines of a 2-dimensional screen, and, reciprocally, trying to learn arts I had little to no experience with, like handstands, pole and hip hop dancing. For me, teaching online really highlighted how much different bodies with different movement histories and experience levels learn differently. In May, when George Floyd was murdered and a wave of discourse regarding racism (and, subsequently, marginalized identities) washed over our country, conversations within my local circus arts and burlesque communities regarding the accessibility, learning environments and, to a point, technique emphasis in disciplines like pole, dance and circus arts sprung up. I found myself thinking about the privileges and disadvantages I’d both witnessed in others and experienced in myself in learning environments, often completely invisible and chalked up to “natural talent” or “lack of effort” until now. Some of my peers and teachers began to vocalize commitments to make their classes more accessible and more inclusive, challenging traditional (European) standards of beauty and movement quality.
AS A STUDENT, in many places it was like I was slowly learning to exhale. In burlesque and circus, I’d internalized this idea at some point that my body was bad, or ugly. I tried really hard to just be prettier and more feminine; reflecting on this, I think came from a combination of really unhelpful feedback, and, honestly, commonly witnessing thin, pretty, cis-, young-looking and/or white women being headliners and crowd favorites. I quadrupled the amount of makeup I owned, experimented with more traditionally feminine hair styles and tried losing weight while simultaneously picking my movement patterns apart. There was something wrong with my wrists and hands because dance teachers always pointed them out, yet I was never really sure what it meant because I’d “relax” my hands and that was wrong too. My feet naturally sickled. I was once told my shoulders looked too strong (I still to this day don’t know what I’m supposed to do about that; quite frankly I don’t personally want weaker shoulders.) There was too much tension or not enough. I was constantly taking classes in an attempt to make up for the years I didn’t dance as child because we’d been broke and too limited by my working class immigrant parents’ tight schedules— don’t even get me started on being an overweight child in the few dance environments I did enter into. I can think of at several classes I regularly attended as an adult, both in person and online where the instructor gave me either exclusively negative feedback or didn’t even bother to address me at all. Some of the worst experiences involved being personally called out by the instructor in beginner-level classes to be delivered personal corrections in front of the entire class— this actually ended my brief foray into hip hop.
Recently, hearing others finally name similar and in many cases egregiously worse experiences and challenge how fair or even effective the focus on the European ballet aesthetic in dance was blew my mind. Pole and floor flow master Marlo Fisken wrote a thoughtful article challenging toe point supremacy. I took an online floor dance class and an instructor actually stopped the class to compliment and highlight how much articulation I had in my ankles— including the foot sickle that had long been a festering emotional wound for me. (I couldn't turn my audio on that night because I would have cried if I’d had to talk.) Several of my peers began speaking up about subversive racism in the industry, citing how common it is for racially ambiguous or non-white identities to play up their exoticism and pointing to how underrepresented and pigeonholed POC and especially black and indigenous identities tend to be in variety shows. The shift to virtual shows meant we were no longer restricted to appealing to a couple established producers and venues to get on stage, and I’ve since watched many of my marginalized peers organize and participate in shows celebrating queer, nonwhite, fat bodies. We’re nowhere near normalizing marginalized identities, but it’s a start. We’ve just begun asking WHY we don’t see and retain more black bodies, more large bodies, more queer bodies in variety show arts. We began talking about HOW our unique identities affect our relationships with our bodies, our movement style and even our bodies themselves. I’ve spent countless hours discussing and thinking on what burlesque even is anymore; to be honest, I don’t think that inclusivity and accessibility is compatible with the more traditional definition of the traditional sparkly striptease that celebrates classically beautiful, able bodies and femininity as the gold standard.
And then there’re things I can point to that I’ve had to work on to be a better learner, including discriminating between helpful and unhelpful feedback and listening to my gut reaction when I enter a learning space and recognizing that some teachers aren’t particularly invested in my success and won’t recognize my hard work. It’s an ongoing challenge to try new movement art disciplines and differentiate between feeling uncomfortable because I’m a beginner and have stepped out of my comfort zone, and feeling uncomfortable because the learning environment isn’t supportive to my growth regarding standards of beauty and natural movement patterns. (To complicate that thought process, the two aren’t mutually exclusive for me.)
AS A TEACHER, I’ve had to recognize that the way I teach is sometimes problematic. I didn’t train in a vacuum; I have, for better or for worse, acquired many of my teaching habits and hangups from my current and prior instructors, and internalized many the same emphases and values they bequeathed upon me. Some things were easy to identify; I stopped holding pointed toes and the signature “ready-to-please” showgirl smile as the gold standard of what performance was supposed to look like. I began encouraging people to experiment more with shapes and lines and reminding them that I’m teaching them my personal movement style, which is not necessarily the only way or even the right way for them and as such may not resonate the same way. I started incorporating more modifications for different bodies and abilities into my classes without waiting to be asked for one every time. I’ve been teaching almost exclusively sliding scale/donation-optional classes to remove the obstacle of cost to lower income folks (while still recognizing that time and energy are also often challenges for those same people.) I’ve also tried to verbalize positive feedback more often to more individuals on a regular basis so they know what they’re doing correctly, and remind students that not doing something perfectly or even successfully, especially immediately, is often not an indication that they aren’t working hard or taking the right steps.
Some things were harder and more subversive, and involve long term practice and continuous refinement. I sometimes overlook practical anatomical challenges to my students because my firsthand relationship with movement is, at this point, that of as an admittedly small, very strong, fairly flexible person… I’ve started “beta testing” new tricks and exercises for many of my classes on my cis-male partner and asking other bodies that are radically different than mine to demonstrate moves in class, which helps eliminate some but by no means all of my blind spots. I’ve been consciously recognizing that the exact same instruction can mean vastly different things to different bodies depending on movement histories— “relax your hands” has a very different significance to someone classically trained in ballet than someone with no formal dance experience. When we talk about different identities, it’s also worth including that many brains, mine very much included, are neuroatypical and process information differently, including getting overwhelmed by too much information at once, even if it pertains to one area or skill.
And then there’s the constant dilemma of looking at the relationships and differences between multifaceted privilege, hard work and entitlement. I want to offer fun, accessible classes that are also challenging and fulfilling, which sounds great on paper, but is incredibly challenging and I have to acknowledge at some point that it’s impossible to please everyone. I’ve taught classes where beginner level students get frustrated with me because they can’t do something difficult that I and the aerialist on the other side of the room who’s been training for 5 years can immediately, as if I have some sort of trick or secret I’m keeping from them, and it’s hard on my ego as a person because I know on a personal level how much work it takes; simultaneously I can reflect on those situations and recognize that in many situations where the roles were reversed, my instructors gave me bad cues and feedback and it really did feel like someone was hiding information from me when I trained under someone else who either explained it differently in a way that resonated with me (for clarity, this isn’t always the case: some stuff really is hard and takes practice and patience over time). “Beginner” in and of itself often means different things to different people; I started aerial arts as a beginner but I’d been an endurance athlete with giant legs and the aerobic conditioning to train for hours on end, while several of my friends began aerial arts with no formal athletic background.
I don’t have all the answers. It’s a lot. It’s a lot of me trying to identify the multitude of areas where I’m privileged and those where I’m marginalized, and the areas where my current, future and potential students are marginalized and privileged, and trying to utilize my limited resources to support and encourage them without discouraging myself and ignoring my own limitations. But it’s also a skill we can all keep learning and training, and that’s what I intend to do.
