The Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast

Welcome to the Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast. This is your host, Maia. Today, I'm so excited to have an inspirational choreographer, dance educator, performing artist, and more joining us on the show, Anabella Lenzu.

Before we begin, I will tell you a little bit more about Anabella if you're not already familiar with her career. Annabella Lenzu is originally from Argentina and has over 35 years of experience working in Argentina, Chile, Italy, and the U.S. Lenzu directs her own company, Anabella Lenzu Dance Drama, which since 2006 has presented 400 performances, created 15 choreographic works, and performed at 100 venues, presenting thought-provoking and historically conscious dance theater in New York City. In 2023, Annabella received the National Award for Outstanding Leadership in the Independent Sector by NDEO, the National Dance Education Organization, and in 2022, the Innovative Dance Educator Award by New York State Dance Education Association, acknowledging her work as a dance educator who develops innovative pedagogy in the dance field.

Lenzu has written for various dance and arts magazine and published her first book in 2013, Unveiling Motion and Emotion. She also just published her second book, Teaching Dance Through Meaningful Gestures, which explores how technique is a philosophy and a theory and how the body is an instrument for expression. I had the great treat of reading Anabella's most recent book and I'm so happy to have her on the show today to unpack just a few of the little treasures that I unearthed, delve in a little bit more to her thought process and the background behind some of her ideas in the book.

So without further ado, let's talk to Anabella Lenzu. Anabella, thank you so much for being here today.

Anabella
Thank you so much for the invitation, Maia.

Maia
Yes, I absolutely loved reading your book recently. Thank you so much for sharing that. There's a lot to it that I loved, but one of the things that really struck me is the way that you differentiate dance education and the art of teaching dance as its own technique, its own thing that needs to be examined and taught and studied, just like the art of moving the body and dance technique. So I'm curious to hear kind of what your journey to get to that point was. It sounded like from such a young age, you understood that that was its own technique and you're really interested in that, but can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you grew into a dance educator?

Anabella
Sure, sure. Thank you for the question.

Well, you know, I'm originally from Argentina, so I grew up in a small town where, you know, we have our three or four dance studios. So I started to study flamenco, actually, and then later on, I started with ballet and it was interesting, like, you know, when you have a tendency to examine your own teachers, even when you are little, why they teach you this, why they're not teaching you that, why we imitate movement. I mean, my focus on pedagogy and methodology of teaching, it was always interesting since little, but let's say that through the different cultures that I teach, you know, I live in Argentina, then I taught a little bit in touring in Chile, then I came to United States in 1999 to study at Julliard School, and then I moved to Italy, and then I also teach in London and then coming back to stay for good here in New York City in 2006.

So it's been 19 years that I'm in the American culture of teaching dance. And so I feel that with each country that I teach, with each student, I need to adapt because for me, the word education is synonymous of service, perhaps because all my family are in the medical field, most of them that are nurses, and I really feel that when I am a dance educator and I'm in front of a class or different institution from private to a private studio to a public school to a public or private university, I need to encounter the student where they are in the place. And I need to learn about them personally, and then I can serve them.

Because it's not, like you say, it's not about, yeah, the information, the training. I was very lucky, even I was in Argentina, that we have a terrific ballet school, Vaganova Line. That's why in Argentina we have not just good soccer players, but we have, you know, most of the amazing ballet dancers in all the main companies around the world.

And so we have a very dedicated teachers that they are very technical, but at the same time, how you transfer this information to someone that you don't know. So for me, it's like, you know, student and teacher are walking in different sidewalks, but we need to encounter in the middle of the street to exchange our point of view, who we are and why dance is important. Basically, it's our point of view of life.

Because when I teach for an amateur versus for a professional, it's the same information that I share. That is, my pedagogical tools is the different methodologies that I use to arrive to them. So the information is the same.

I'm talking about alignment, I'm talking about breath, I'm talking about projection of energy, I'm talking about how they need to turn out, how they're going to do a turn. But how is the difference? So writing this book, teaching and learning dance through meaningful gesture, it was an exercise for me to put all these 35 years of experience in a book. And I'm like, okay, how I'm going to talk about this experience that is so vast, and what are the things that give me the keys to open the doors and understand how to establish this communication?

Maia
Yes. It's really interesting to hear that you come from a family of medical practitioners, because it explains to me or gives a little bit additional insight to me of your really, really clear articulation of anatomy, and how that plays into technique. And you demonstrate that so well in the book. But one thing that I was hoping you wouldn't mind sharing with us on the podcast was your understanding of breath, which I feel is so difficult to convey in a visual sense, the way you wrote about it was really enlightening to me. Would you mind sharing some of your insight about teaching breath to the audience?

Anabella
Thank you. Well, I challenge myself to teach in different backgrounds. So if I, some educators are here, you know, listen to the podcast, as many students and type of students and type of institution you teach, and many kind of artists, the better teacher you become.

I feel that the articulation of the ideas start when I expose myself teaching movement and dance to unknown dancers. I mean, I work for opera singers, I choreograph, but I need to train them. And then the same thing for actors, and also for visual artists, and musicians.

So I arrived to another tribe of artists to teach what I know about the knowledge about the body, which is my field, and how I transmit this information, working with different type of artists, and have a deep dialogue, for example, with musicians, how they play and how they use breath, and make me understand how I need to articulate the fact how a dancer breathe. Because we all breathe. Yes, we need to oxygen our muscles as the process.

But the kind of breath that we use when you do, for example, musical theater versus ballet versus contemporary dance is different. And allowing also the experimentation, because the whole thing is that, and that is very true. I was talking this morning, teaching to the students, how your body look like a puppet on the stage, you look lifeless.

Even when we working on dance on the camera, for example, many people doesn't want to see themselves in the video. Oh, I don't look like I say, well, because you don't working on the breath, you don't working on your presence. So the kind of breath would help you is to give life and expression to the body.

So how you breathe? Well, there are different techniques. Coming back to my friends that are musicians, I ask them, how you play the piano? I say, where you play the piano from? And these are my friends that play for Juilliard or teach music at Juilliard school. And they say, oh, I play the piano through my breath.

And through my breath, I feel the weight of my muscles, the weight of my bones. I feel my center of gravity. And so this is the breath that I play.

I mean, the score of my music is the breath. And I say, oh, that's what I do in dance. The fact that I score my breath is the way that I expedite no sound, but the energy of my body.

So when you breathe, you know, it's a technical fact, you are connected with the gravity, you are connected to your center of gravity, and then you can let go and feel the weight and the expediture of air, also energy. So what happened is I feel that in the training of the dancer in the last period, and especially in America, I will say that very specifically, because, again, I work in different countries and different places where dance is not synonymous of competition. It's synonymous of an artistic adventure.

And why is that? Because we are not, you know, in another part of the world, we are not focusing on tricks. We are focusing how we put our body in this state of transparency or availability, where ideas, where thought, where emotion can pass through the body to the audience. And in order to do that, in order to make my body available, means also being flexible and be strong and have the right alignment, I have to do it through the breath.

And so through the breath control is how I project my energy into the space. If we're talking about an opera singer or an actor, they project their voice, or depending on how they play the instrument, depending on the weight, in case of the pianist, how the sound will be loud or, you know, the volume where it will be and the texture of the sound. So in the fact that we're training dancers to do tricks and to do things that are just visual, we forgot that we are training dancers.

And breath is one of the elements that make us different. We have a breath score. And that's when you work with different director or different choreographer is like working with different poets.

You have a different way to expedite this energy in a different phrases of movement, phrases of movement are not just 8 counts, 16 counts, is through the breath rhythm. And so I think in the game of teaching dance is like the game of the telephone where I tell someone something on the ear and I say banana and ended up saying a strawberry at the end of the game of the telephone because we forgot many basic things. So in my book, I named 30 other books about the training of the body and the training not just the dancer, also the performer, because in our journey to get, quote unquote, specialized, we forgot that we are all performing artists.

I mean, I don't make a difference between a musician that play in Carnegie Hall and an actor that work in a movie or for the stage and a dancer. I mean, we are all performance artists and we need to know how to breathe and we need to know our projection of energy. Our speciality is about the control, the muscular control and the nuances of movement.

But the other things we share and we forgot in our process of teaching the things that make us differentiate between dance and gymnastics. You know, having my studio in Argentina for so long, the mother said, oh, what is the difference that my daughter does gymnastics or dance? I said, well, there are two different things. One is a sports and one is an art form.

And so I feel especially in the United States and in the teaching, we forgot about the artistic part. And if we forget about the artistic part, we forget about the joy of dancing and finding who we are, how we communicate with the community, because we are creating something that is very superficial and not deep. So you see, everything is related to the breath.

Maia
Yeah, I love how you talk about that. It's it's so beautiful. And I in one aspect, I agree with everything you're saying, but I'm going to play devil's advocate a little bit as a teacher with some more beginner intermediate students, younger students.

I don't think that I can grasp right now with what you're saying a really good way that I could incorporate that into our weekly ballet class and still teach them kind of the syllabus of steps that I want to teach them. So what's your response to that? How do I start?

Anabella
Well, I feel that, again, in the syllabi, you know, of many different institutions, I work and I teach pedagogy at the university. So the young educators, they bring in exercises, how to teach, you know, a beginner dancer, whatever is 15 years old, six years old.

Breath and movement for me is the encounter with themselves. So they're not like parrots doing shapes, imitating things. We need to make them find that's why the title of my book, Meaningful Gestures that come within inside.

So instead to teach them the arms, YMCA, I just put an example. I'm going to teach them why they're going to do so. They're going to find the shape that they doing is coming from inner necessity.

I mean, you're learning the movement not from the outside, going into the outside is the reverse, going from the inside to the outside. And that's the artistic practice. If you start to teach, you know, and I have an 11 years old daughter, I have a 16 years old son, but he doesn't dance.

He does sports, soccer. But my daughter, even he's 11, there are certain things that, you know, from little I start to teach and she's a living example how she can understand that this is an art form through the breath. So, for example, there are different ways to use the breath in the demi-plie.

So if I have a student doing a demi-plie, whatever is in sixth position or parallel or turn out in first position, I need to teach him how to breathe. Well, ballet demi-plie is different than modern dance demi-plie. You're like, what is the same step? No, because when you do modern dance, modern dance is about gravity.

So when you descend, when you bend your knees, when doing the demi-plie, you're going to exhale. And when you're going to push away the floor, you're going to exhale. That's modern dance.

But ballet is an anti-gravity. So when we bend our knees, when we descend, we inhale. And when we push away the floor, we exhale.

Just make them understand and score the breath from the beginning. When they're learning the vocabulary, you make them feel and understand, hmm, this is chocolate, hmm, this is vanilla. And they are already in the education, in the path, they know about the breath and how the breath change our perception of the body, change the gravity, but also change us emotionally.

It's very interesting these like, you know, I see my my 11 years old daughter and she go to a ballet school and then, you know, they are preparing for a performance. And the kids, they say, oh, but you're so expressive. How you do it? I don't know.

I feel my inside. Oh, but we thought that dance is about doing and executing to perfection the steps. No, it's not about that.

It's about the uniqueness of you doing that. Everybody's dancing together, but I don't want to look like anybody else. I don't want to look like a photocopy of anybody else.

Unless you're in the Bolshoi and you're doing Swan Lake and then you need to talk about your anonymity. That's not what we want. We want to encourage the person to accept who they are and to self-knowledge, because if dance education is not about self-knowledge, what is it about? So as a teacher, I need to give them the tools to understand who are breathing in and breathing out in demi-plié, two kinds of demi-plié change the way that I feel.

And let's talk about it and let's talk about the commonality. So you see, it's not a difference from a beginning to a professional. And so when I arrive to the professional level, pre-professional level, we're talking about another kind of craft that is not just two, two plus two is four, because in the artistic field, two plus two perhaps is 77.

That idea, that technique serve for the performer. I cannot separate the technique to the performative aspect. If I forgot what I'm doing, it's just going to be an empty base.

And so that's why, you know, if you're thinking about, you know, I teach in Italy and Italian people, culture love dance in comparison of United States. And I'm like, why? Because the way that they be teaching in Italy is very passionate, is very different than the United States. And so they take it like another, again, activity or sport.

And even though, you know, you're when you're thinking about training a beginner, you don't know what these people will ended up. They could be audience members. They could be famous choreographers, dancers or another dance team.

You don't know who you have in front. But the information need to be the same, need to be with quality. And I mean quality because you understand why you teaching them, why they should find the movement from the inside to the outside and not from the outside to the inside.

Yeah, because why are we doing it if they don't feel something while they're doing it? And I feel that everybody love dance. And there's so many kind of dance in the world from ritual dances, folk dances, social dances, spectacular dances. There when someone told me, oh, I don't like that.

I say, well, do you try? I don't know. But at the end, do you try hula? Do you try Irish dance? There are so many dances, you know, and I feel that that's also our job as an educators. Provide a full dinner so that people can choose whatever they want.

Maia
Yeah. Yeah. I am so glad that you brought up the demi plié and the barre in ballet because I also wanted to pick your brain about your teaching of barre a terre, which you talk about in the book quite a bit, which I thought is kind of unique.

I mean, I know it's utilized especially in the pre-professional and collegiate classrooms, but in sort of your conventional quote unquote studio setting, you don't see barre a terre utilized very much, I don't think. So I want to hear a little bit about did you train in that growing up? What made that click for you as a really useful teaching tool?

Anabella
Sure, sure, sure. Well, barre a terre or what here we can call floor barre in the United States, there is many different methods around the world.

There is a French school. There is a Russian school. There is a Cuban.

There are different methodologies. What they do is not also for injury preventions or when you get injury that you do exercises laying down on your on the floor, either on your back or on your tummy or on the side. We can do also barre a terre laying down on the floor with our feet against the wall.

There are many different ways and many different variations. In Argentina, as I say, I have an amazing teacher, Boazil Tupin, who he was a Russian teacher teaching, but he also was part of a circus and he was a contortionist. So imagine all the things that we did with him.

But when I remember studying, working in barre a terre at 12 years old, I understood, for example, alignment and gravity much quicker than any other student that didn't do it. Because when you realize there's certain things like, oh, you know, being standing up in one foot or do demi plie, let's continue that line, do demi plie on the floor on your tummy is a different experience than do demi plie standing up than do demi plie laying down on your back in turn out in a first position, because the way even they are the same muscles that work, how gravity affects you make you understand the different biomechanics of the movement. So experiencing doing the same exercises on the floor is that can open you to awareness of how the movement is done and what are the inner processes of your own body.

So at 12 years old, started out when I started teaching ballet at 15 years old, I continue applying to my students and I saw the result immediately. Even though I was teaching a regular class Monday to Friday, like one hour and a half each day, I always start the week on Mondays with Barreter and then just Tuesday we stand up and do it. And the results are super quick in the sense of people understand and they can connect the different muscle use in the consciousness of the body through how the gravity hit them in a different way.

So I always say that is not my favorite class that I teach Barreter, I mean, I have to teach it because it's my duty as a teacher. I'm like when they understand that to be able to do a turnout, you don't need to use the gluteus maximus, then you need to use your super six rotators. How are they going to access that if the teacher, previous teacher, they told them squeeze the butt and tummy in and prevent them to feel all the mechanisms that are within.

So in my book, I talk about principles, but I don't do exercises. It's a purpose that I don't want to give a recipe. I tell you about principles.

It's like, oh, explain to you how, you know, scientifically, how flour, you know, and eggs work together. But I'm not going to give you a recipe because for me that will kill the creativity of the dance teacher. We need to play with the principles to do our own cake because if art is not about creativity, it's about doing the same, quote unquote, exercises.

We're killing the art form of dance. So I don't want to give a recipe. Many of my students say, oh, but you can do now a series of videos.

And no, that's it. I did the book. Now it's up to you to experiment with these principles.

Maia
With that said, you have another book. This is your second book that you just published. And this book itself is filled with additional resources that you give. I love that explanation. It's not like a step by step. This is how you teach. It's just delving into the concepts of what makes teaching successful and exciting for the teacher.

Boazil Tupin
It's exciting. You know, when when you've been teaching a beginner ballet or beginner jazz or beginner tap for six plus more years, you're like, oh, my God, how I can get new energy.

Well, I think it's always come back to the principles. And then it's in your creative process. If you teacher get bored teaching, the student will get bored.

So you bring in your own questions, your own intention, your own curiosity into the classroom. And so the process of teaching is alive, is not dead.

Maia
Yeah, because I think even if your favorite cake in the world is chocolate cake, if you have to eat chocolate cake every single day for 10 years, you're not going to like it.

Anabella
Exactly, exactly. And also as a teacher, your methodologies change. You know, during the pandemic, it was very interesting for me to be able to teach online and teach like barter or teaching, you know, choreography or the theoreticals was easy.

But to teach technique, it made me refine my vocabulary, my lexicon, the way that I give images, you know, it was not the ideal because what I missed was touch. And when you touch, sometimes you can talk for half an hour, but you touch a student, you touch, you know, the quadriceps and they're like, oh, my God, I'm numbing my whole leg, what I call the chorizo leg. I say, how are you going to find your abductors if your leg is like a rock in Central Park? I'm like, how you find this, that is a reality, how your bones are floating inside your muscles.

This is a fact. Our muscles, they're like balloons, the connection to the air and the bones are floating inside the muscles. So already giving this imagery that has happened, this is a real happen, is not using the imagination.

I mean, you use the imagination to imagine this, but this is the process. If we didn't have bones, muscles and ligaments, our skeleton would be on the ground. It's not our bones that support us.

So the methodology that you use in the vocabulary, the didactic change depend on who's in front of you. Are you teaching online? Are you teaching in person? Are you touching the students or not?

Maia
So one of the key takeaways here, I think, is to read your book, because there's just not time to debrief on all of it. Outside of that, though, can you also tell listeners ways that they can connect with you and get some additional resources from you?

Anabella
Sure. I'm in social media and all the platforms as Annabella Lenzu. And inside my website, you can find all the resources. I have two books that I published.

The first one is a travelogue about teaching in different countries. So it's more like a like a journey as a pedagogue. And this second one is more about how to teach, give you strategies.

And then the second part of the book is about the technical aspect of the performer. And the third part of the back of the book is all the other resources. But everything is in social media.

So AnnabellaLenzu.com.

Maia
Awesome. Thank you. And actually, genuinely, I like highlighted some quotes from your book to share with my own students because it's like, oh, yes, this is so good.

Maybe this will make them finally get this thing I've been trying to teach them for the past three years or whatever. But do you personally have a favorite quote related to dance that you'd like to share with us?

Anabella
In this period, I think the pandemic hit me in that direction when I say, you know, enjoy it like a dark chocolate melting in your mouth. I think sometimes the process of becoming a dancer is hard.

But if you don't enjoy the muscular effort, if you don't enjoy the challenge, why are we doing this? I mean, dancers, we have certain characteristics. We like to work hard. But sometimes working hard, it means working tense and deprive ourself of joy.

So that's why I say enjoy it. Enjoy it like a chocolate melting in your mouth that you have a process to feel. So I'm in that time right now, maybe because it's winter too.

Maia
Well, as we're recording this, it'll come out later, but as we're recording this, it's almost Valentine's Day. So that's a great analogy to think about chocolate and enjoying it, feeling the love.

Anabella
But, you know, I feel that also when you're in front of a student, again, like the nurse experience that I have, I need to make them understand and quick how to help them.

And so many of the images come from a specific student. Sometimes I use that image for everybody, but sometimes it's about this particular student that, you know, today I was teaching and there was these two male dancers in the 20, 24, 26 years old. And, you know, I say, you feel like a Tutankhamen, you know, I say, what is this chess? I'm like, I understand this is about survival, but you don't need to survive in a dance class.

Actually, I want you to be vulnerable. And so the whole tension on the neck, on the upper trapezius, on the pectoral muscles, you know, of a dancer carry themselves into the space. I was like, you know, no, no, no, no, no.

You're not a superhero in the class. I don't want you to be that, because if you are a superhero and you have this shield that doesn't allow to share your emotions, then when I see you perform, I will not feel this identification. You're going to see a dancer because of the metakinesis, because of the empathy, the muscular empathy.

So if you have someone that is stiff dancing, the people in the audience will feel stiff. So thinking about that, you know how we respond is like when a little kid, you know, a baby is in the stroller and watching five, six years old kid climbing everything. And it's like devouring this muscular activity.

That's why I say that we don't need to lose track is we are doing this.