The Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast

Hey everyone, this is Maia. Listen, before we get into the episode, I just want to share one thing really quick. I promise it's not salesy.

I am truly just trying to help and put resources out there for everyone. So from December 1st through 12th, I'm offering the 12 texts of Christmas. All you have to do is sign up with your first name and phone number, and I will send you one text per day from December 1st through 12th.

Each text will have some sort of holiday or winter themed activity that you can implement in your dance class, as well as a song suggestion, and some other fun little tidbits that you can implement in your dance classes, regardless of what style you teach, where you teach, what levels, ages, it doesn't matter. It's going to be very varied. There will be value in it for everyone.

In order to sign up, you do have to share your name and phone number with me through the form that is available only in the Casual Dance Teachers Network Facebook group. Join the group. Be sure to answer the group questions when you ask to join so that you will be approved.

You will find the form to sign up for the 12 texts of Christmas pinned at the top of the group. Again, all I need is a name and a textable number, and you will get that content sent right to you daily. I thought it would be fun to do that in a different format, similar to an advent calendar where you are actually opening something every day looking forward to like, oh, what is this fun little tidbit? What is this little gift that I'm getting each day for the first 12 days of December? I know that's a wild time to be a dance teacher.

Things can get really crazy in classes just with the energy of the students and everything else we have going on personally during this time of year. So what better way to like, keep us engaged and keep us pushing through until the end of the season by every day having some little kind of fresh inspiration that we can implement that very day or whenever the next time we have dance classes in our classes. 12 Texts of Christmas, make sure you sign up in the Casual Dance Teachers Network Facebook group.

I will link that group in the show notes for this episode, and I hope to see you there. Now let's get on to the episode.

Welcome to the Casual Dance Teachers Podcast. I'm your host, Maia. No matter who, what, or when you teach, I'm here to share all my best tips and tools, along with real and practical conversations with fellow dance educators to help you be the very best dance teacher you can be.

Let's talk about it. Hi, everyone. Welcome back.

I am so excited for today's topic, and it is a little bit different than what I typically do, but also, in my opinion, so, so important for every dance teacher. Just everyone. I think for everyone to hear.

And that is four lessons that I learned from studying dance in West Africa. To give you a little bit of background, when I was in college, I had the opportunity to study abroad for a semester in Ghana. I had an amazing, amazing experience, and I did a program that did encompass a number of different art forms, as well as daily language classes in one of the primary languages spoken in Ghana, which is tree, and other general social and cultural courses.

But during the first couple months of my time there, I did take periodic dance classes as part of my program. And then in the final month or so, we were able to do an independent study. So that was when I had no organized coursework with my program.

I was living on my own, and I could completely personalize my field of study. So at that time, I chose to study with Kofi Gidema, who is the director of Calabash Dance Theater in Accra, Ghana, which is the capital. And I worked with him for about four hours a day, intensively training every single day.

And in my free time, when I wasn't dancing with him or writing my actual like thesis paper or doing research in the library, I also attended some dance groups in some of the local churches. I went to the dance clubs at the university there. I worked with a couple other guest instructors doing drop-in classes and attended some local community clubs as well.

So I was a really, really super immersed in the dance scene in Accra during that time. And that was about a decade ago at the time that I'm releasing this. So since then, I have taken some additional West African classes back here in the States.

I've also taught a few workshops, where I share typically the repertory that I learned from Kofi Gademeh, I try to keep it extremely authentic to exactly what I learned while I was there, which was a lot of traditional Ghanaian repertory, as well as a few more contemporary pieces. And I did learn a lot about the Africanist aesthetics and how contemporary African creators are building and creating dances in really innovative ways as well. But again, I'm not trying to create my own like West African style repertory, I just feel like within the limited scope of what I learned there, I don't want to kind of oversell my own knowledge and experience.

But it is a topic that I'm so passionate about, and I love sharing. So for today's episode, I'm not telling you how to teach West African class, I'm not talking about technique, I'm not even really going to go too much into the Africanist aesthetics, and what classifies West African style dance. Although I could absolutely nerd out about that sometime if you want to just ask me.

But instead, I just wanted to share four general life lessons that I learned from going over there and having that experience that I feel can apply to every single dance educator. And the first one is dance and music are the same. So this was really eye opening for me when I did start my private training with Kofi Gademeh.

One of the first things that he did was have me sit down and learn to play the djembe, which is a common style of drum there. We spent many, many, many hours on my training on the djembe, where I wasn't even really moving my body other than, you know, my hands, my arms, learning the technique and the different sounds and different rhythms. But what he told me is that the way you move your body and the way that you play the djembe in West African dance technique are basically one in the same.

And if you're considered a master dancer, that means typically that you're a master drummer. And if you're a master drummer, that typically means that you're also a master dancer, they go hand in hand, because you have to have an understanding of the way the rhythm is played in order to dance to it. And you have to have an understanding of the way that the body is going to move and react to the rhythm in order to play it on the drum.

So that really informed so much of my choreography and the way that I approach dance and performance in all styles now, because I just feel that it's so important to understand every single layer of the rhythm and the music and the instrumentation in order to do it justice as a dancer and as a performer. And as a teacher, I'm not having my students sit down and actually play rhythms, you know, for a large portion of our classes, because that's just not like the Western approach to dance classes typically. But I do try to incorporate musicality and rhythm into a lot of my lessons.

And really stress the importance of that to my dancers, and the nuance of music in my choreography and in the way that I teach them to perform and to improvise as well. So that's lesson number one. Lesson number two, and remember this because I'm going to come back to it, is if you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together. You might have heard this before. It's a very often quoted African proverb.

And it was also I would say the first lesson that I learned because it's written on the wall in the airport at a cross. So right when I landed and walked off the plane, there it was. And I was like, Oh, that's a good one.

And it really, really, really came back so many times throughout my stay because I am a super efficiency driven person. And I also thank God, I did this study abroad experience at a time in my collegiate experience as a whole where I was really burnt out. And I won't go into my whole story of kind of my collegiate dance journey and how I got to that place.

But I really had lost a lot of my passion and kind of my just joy of dancing, because I had gotten so caught up in trying to be a top performer, and trying to be really efficient in my use of time so that I could do everything. And studying in West Africa really beat that right out of me real quick because it is not an efficiency driven culture at all. The Western idea of trying to succeed in a vacuum and be able to say that you did it yourself is so not a thing there at all.

And that was so healing for me in my journey of kind of recovering from that burnout that I had experienced in my dance program back in the States. So I had to really lean into collaborating on everything. And when I mentioned like all of the different school groups and church groups and community groups that I studied with, yes, my one on one time was great.

And I'm a big bookworm like I would be so happy to just go to the library and read every single book and write my paper and do my lecture on everything that I learned like that is kind of my style. But I would have missed so much if I had not leaned into being collaborative and taking every opportunity and every single offer that I received for help along the way. And I'm still not great at it.

Maybe I should go back because it's been a little bit too long and that's starting to wear off. But this podcast as an example, when I started it, I did try to like pre record some episodes to get ahead and make sure that I was staying on schedule. But once people started reaching out to me saying like, Hey, I'd love to contribute to your podcast.

Do you want to have a conversation? Yes, I have said yes to almost everyone, even when it was really hard to schedule. Even when I had to edit late into the night, because we couldn't schedule until close to the release date. And it kind of put me behind because, yes, I could so easily get ahead on my recording schedule and have all these episodes lined up and not be stressed about deadlines and stuff.

But the content that I would be releasing, and what I personally would be learning about teaching dance would not be anywhere close to what I've been able to learn through having all of these conversations and collaborating with guests. So this applies to everything in life. And just one other thing that I want to say about that too, is time.

I'm extremely deadline oriented as I've kind of already alluded to here and it was sometimes cause for annoyance in Ghana because things can tend to run really late, like three or four hours late, a number of different events that I went to. And these are events that were like advertised as starting at seven and they would start at 1030. So that's not just like missing it by a little bit.

So it's super, super hard for me to get out of the mentality of that just being straight up disrespectful. But the way it was explained to me was that connection is the top priority in West African culture. So everything will be put on hold for absolutely as long as it needs to be to build connection and support your community.

So it is totally valid. And I'm, I guess I can't speak for like everything, every situation. But again, this is just how it was explained to me and how I noticed many, many of my interactions going.

You can roll into class late in Ghana and say, oh, sorry, I'm late. I ran into a friend on the way here. And that is so valid.

You don't have to explain yourself. It's like, oh, you ran into a friend. You had to have a moment of connection.

You had to greet your friend. You had to have a conversation that made you late for this. That's okay.

The priority is that connection. The priority is, you know, you're going to go farther by prioritizing that. Even if it takes a lot longer, and that's okay.

And it's almost impossible to operate that way in the United States. In my experience, I still am extremely deadline oriented, very timely. That's very important to me still.

So it's not like I just let go of that and was like, oh, okay, fine. I can just be late for anything. But understanding that sometimes I cannot get so bent out of shape about efficiency and deadlines, if there's an opportunity for personal connection and relationship building to come above that, that has really helped me.

It's really helped my mental health because I have been able to table some things that I probably otherwise wouldn't have to say, you know what, what I need right now is not like another notch in my belt to say that I did this thing. It's to have a chat with a close friend, or it's to build relationship with my students. You know, maybe we're gonna run a couple minutes over because we had to do a little group powwow and get on the same page about how we're feeling and calming recital nerves or something like that.

All of those things play into this concept. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

Okay, another one that is also related, but I consider this to be a separate lesson, and that is that rest is essential. So the way it ties into this whole efficiency thing and me getting annoyed coming from the US to go study in Accra was for my research. At one point, I made an appointment with one of the professors at the university to interview him and get some more information about the background of West African dance, and some of the history there.

And we went back and forth a lot. He wasn't there for some of his advertised office hours so I couldn't get in touch with him and I tried calling the number that was listed on his office he didn't answer. I finally got this appointment but it was quite close to the deadline for my thesis paper.

So I knew that it was going to have to be a pretty quick turnaround. Well, the university was across town from where I was staying. I took the trotro over, you know, it's like a 45 minute trip to get there, get there.

He's not there. I wait and wait and wait, and he never showed up. So I never did end up being able to interview him and include any of that in my research paper, but I did run into him, like the day before I was going to present, and he was like, Oh, yeah, sorry, I missed our appointment.

I was so tired. And that was it. And I'm still annoyed saying it, you can probably tell.

I'm still annoyed. Because I'm like, well, that's just too bad. You just have to work.

It's, you know, I don't care if you're tired, you just have to show up to work when you say you're going to. But that's really not always the case. Rest is essential and can be prioritized over work sometimes.

So again, I'm not here advocating for people to not show up to teach their dance classes because they're tired. It's just not going to work in 99% of our situations for those listening. But can you have a system in place, like an on-call sub in case you're not feeling well, because I think many of us go to work sick.

You know, and we teach when we're really not feeling up to it. And that's not serving our students great. So can we have an on-call sub, some kind of system where if we're not feeling up to it, if we really, really can't, we can call this person and know that our classes will be covered.

Or I need to do this. I'm not preaching this because I'm not good at it. But can we put a system in place where after we get home from our dance classes, we have a wind down system that gets us to bed at a somewhat reasonable time, instead of just doom scrolling and telling ourselves we're unwinding for hours and then getting to bed really late and not being rested the next day.

Rest is essential and it is a totally valid reason to make little adjustments within your schedule to make sure that you can prioritize that. And the fourth and final lesson that I learned from studying dance in Ghana is that joy is an aesthetic. So the way that it was taught to me when I learned the Africanist aesthetics was actually childlike exuberance is one of the Africanist aesthetics.

But joy in general is so integral to all of the art that you will experience in West Africa. And if you don't have that, it's not truly West African dance. So when I'm teaching a West African workshop, and I'm teaching the traditional dances that I learned, I don't start with the steps.

I start with the Africanist aesthetics and specifically checking in with every dancer in my class and having them experience exuberance and joy, and making sure that everyone in that classroom is experiencing exuberance and joy before we move on. You can do the steps exactly the way they were taught. But if you're not doing them with joy, it's not West African dance.

It's not correct. So while joy might not be the aesthetic that we apply to all of our dances that we create, I think it's important to understand what emotion is and to try to make sure that our dancers can really resonate with that in a real way. And that if we are asking the dancers to smile, it's not just a simple like, put a smile on your face for this dance.

But that we're truly teaching them that joy is an aesthetic element of the dance. And how can we as teachers facilitate that? Not just tell our students that, but facilitate their joy. Bring them joy through the dance so that it can come out when they perform it so that it is correct.

And everyone who watches them can see that and that will be a reflection of you as their teacher. So those are four lessons that I learned while studying dance in Ghana. And I hope that this helped some of you.

Of course, as I said, I would love to talk more about it. Just ask me. You can ask me in the Casual Dance Teachers Network on Facebook or through the Casual Dance Teachers Podcast Instagram page.

I also do want to thank GB Mystical for the theme music for the show. And I'm not even going to do a separate quote for today's episode. I just think it's really important to leave you with this core lesson.

So just to reiterate my favorite quote, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.