CHALLENGING DOMINANT POINTS OF VIEW
JENNIFER KAYLE, JULY 2019
INTERVIEW WITH LISA GONZALES
INTERVIEW WITH LISA GONZALES
Lisa Gonzales teaches at Columbia College of Chicago, and is the Chair of the Dance Program.
You can find her bios here:
The Architects | Columbia College of Chicago
In this conversation, a few recurring themes anchored our discussion. As we shared perspectives on feedback and evaluation, we found ourselves centered on issues of inclusivity and exclusivity, power and access, lineage and generational difference. We also found ourselves trying to name what’s being assessed if not the adherence to an aesthetic, and whether ensemble skills might be built and applied regardless of the movement vocabularies or movement values.
[JK]: How has your approach to feedback in your improvisation class changed over your time at Columbia? Were there turning points or tipping points to that? Moments where you can identify anything that caused a shift? And I’m asking you that because from our last couple conversations it sounded like there was some kind of transformation or evolution to your feedback there.
[Lisa]: Yeah, I would say I’d definitely gone through a transformation. I would say I still feel very much like I am in an evolving place with it. I think I came to Columbia still connected to a younger version of myself and our work and our improvisational practice together, and my ideas about it that were deeply connected to how I interpreted the lessons we learned from our mentors. (I actually do feel like I want to emphasize - my interpretation of those lessons).
[JK]: Yes, right.
[Lisa]: And I feel like I taught definitely from that point of view. And I would say that my feedback was, I would say, directed around trying to get the class to see, understand, own certain compositional ideas and values that I held dear that were inherent in the exercises that I presented.
[JK]: Right, the ones we both learned from our mentors.
[Lisa]: Exactly, and I had—certainly had some specific ideas about what/how I wanted them to turn out. What I thought was interesting and not interesting. And I can tell you, that hasn’t changed. I still think certain things are, you know, “I am not interested in what I just saw.”
[JK]: (Laughter). Yes.
[Lisa]: I remember my own willingness to be open to multiple perspectives, which is, I think a good thing, but also caused some challenges. I had certain instances where I felt like I actually couldn’t stand firmly behind a critique I might have held, in terms of my own aesthetic. But in terms of not wanting to alienate anybody I withheld it. Or I said, well, who am I to say that. Let me just let this unfold. This person wants to walk around and look around the space. Who am I to say that that’s not a fine choice to make? Even though we just spent the entire last semester focusing on detailed, nuanced, musical movement?
But I think that I definitely went through- can absolutely put my finger on a major turning point in terms of my own questioning of my position of power in the classroom, my authority in the classroom, and the way that my opinion and perspective holds weight and determines a dominant point of view. And that was when we did the anti-racism workshop with the People’s Institute of Survival and Beyond. I think through that work and the way that they identify positions of power, people who are in positions of power as gatekeepers, for what information can be held—what information gets through and what doesn’t, which people get through, who doesn’t. And then that just opened up all these ideas, what kind of compositional ideas get through, what doesn’t. Who feels most comfortable in the practice, who doesn’t. And who do I exclude by the very nature of standing in front of a very diverse group of people as a white woman speaking from my experience of having been immersed in postmodern dance. And so, I think that I had to do a lot of work. I could fall easily into ‘what am I even doing here, I’m doing more damage than good just by standing in front of the class’. That was kind of, like, the first reaction. In terms of working towards a productive relationship to this new information I think I realized certain things about…that I could not assume that people understood this…I could not overstate the fact that I was teaching from a specific point of view related to my specific history, influenced by my own history as a person and my own perspective, and that I really was interested and valued what every person brought to the class. That became very, very, very important for me to state over and over again. But what that did is it made me have to question then, well what does feedback look like in that context?
[JK]: Right, because if you’re framing it in that way, like, ‘here is where I come from, here are some of the frameworks that I learned about,’ but you know, in this context this is already implied in the ensemble form that we practiced- that every person has value. But then to sort of make it explicit, like, this (value) isn’t just if you follow these aesthetic rules. Or is it?
[Lisa]: Right, or--
[JK]: That’s one of my questions.
[Lisa]: Exactly, and who feels comfortable enough to really bring their voice in? And who is coming from certain cultures that they might have a lot—get a lot of negative feedback around working within uncertain situations, let’s say—dealing in the unknown. That their entire cultural relationship to their family and upbringing is opposed to that. And so, how do you—or, you say that but then you have, in the class, somebody whose relationship to dance is so deeply inseparably connected to the music but you don’t have live music because your department can’t fund that for you (and I prefer to use live music when teaching improvisation to emphasize that relationship in the work). Or a student’s relationship to improvising and music requires specific beats or rhythms. Then how do you create a situation that facilitates that person feeling welcome and able to participate equally? You know what I mean?
[JK]: And well, our aesthetic also has some things it’s interested in in terms of relationship to music. Which also might cut against somebody’s cultural values.
[Lisa]: Exactly, exactly. And so, then I think that part just really made me question some of the things that I have said in the past about our practice of improvisation- that it’s inclusive. It’s inclusive to all people and voices. And I’m like, it’s not, it could be depending on the strategies you use to bring people in and make them feel included. I think that then, that changed my relationship to feedback because I didn’t feel comfortable giving feedback in an improvisational context where I’m really talking about aesthetic. I don’t know, something about aesthetic value or whether I thought that was successful or not successful. It reminds me back when Michael Chorney talked about it being, ‘was this investigation worthwhile?’ So, I think my feedback began to take a lot more of a turn of like, ‘what did you learn from this? What did you see happening? What kind of forms did you see emerging? What are we interested in as a class? Is there anything that is not happening in the space that you would like to see happening? Can we develop some strategies together to practice those things? Even if they might be things I’m not interested in or I don’t know about.’ But I started to feel like, in terms of my intention to raise their compositional literacy and awareness, I could do that better by posing questions that I want them to pose for themselves when they are looking at something or noticing what they are bringing to the space rather than—I think also, I’m talking about primarily working with beginners here because—in a college context--
[JK]: Because that’s what we do.
[Lisa]: Exactly, exactly. So, I think there are ways as they get more advanced then you can start building a language together as a group, to build structures and scores and practices and compositional values that the entire group contributes to.
[JK]: Right. But as beginners, like what forms do you start with? And they’re Eurocentric forms.
[Lisa]: Yeah, if they are Eurocentric forms then you’ve already put a twist on it. You’ve weighted it in one direction especially to those people who feel alienated by that. It’s a problem. And I think the notion of movement invention is a great example of that.
[JK]: I was just writing about this. Is the very notion of movement research or innovation a hopelessly white, Euro concept? And if so, then how do we deal with that?
[Lisa]: Yeah, but it’s not. It just depends on, for example—I don’t think it is totally, but to various degrees. Every practice has innovation— and I think for example in Hip-Hop let’s say, or other street forms that are deeply connected to the music. Well, in order to participate in those kinds of improvisational experiences, let’s say, through a battle or jam, you are simultaneously proving that you have the chops to be within this form, but you are also expected to be able to innovate on the form. In my experience with improvisation in these forms you show your respect for the form first, you have to prove yourself first, and then you can innovate through your movement invention, through your relationship to rhythm, through your own wit and intelligence and playfulness. I think that those are our values too. It’s just that they are highlighted differently in the way we practice it. Just like, we are very rhythmic and related to sound and to music but it’s highlighted differently and the way that we invent upon those relationships in the body is prioritized differently.
[JK]: There’s so much to talk about there and that’s like a whole other interview.
[Lisa]: Before we move on I just wanna say one quick thing about—another thing that really influenced how I give feedback was a project I did with my colleague Kelsa Robinson where we brought together dancers who were students, most of whom were really immersed in a kind of postmodern or modern dance perspective, though there were a couple who crossed over into House or Hip-Hop, who had really begun to immerse themselves in these forms through their work with Kelsa, and we invited them into a space with professional Hip-Hop dancers and then we were trying to create an ensemble together. Kelsa really taught me that it can be difficult to make the space equal in terms of the power dynamic--that we had to keep giving the Hip-Hop dancers space in order to build their ability to be equal in the space, because the whole language around being in academia, the whole language around being in a studio, the whole language around this idea of being in an ensemble and performance, their point of view was already so not the dominant perspective in this space, in this context. Hold on, one, one quick second. I’m getting a call from the dean’s office.
[JK]: Oh, whoops. OK.
[Lisa]: I think it’s fine, I’m not going to consider it an emergency. OK, go ahead.
[JK]: (laughter) Um, yeah there is so much to talk about there. Like, I wanna hear more but I also wanna hear some of your other thoughts. So, this next—I mean in a way kind of connected—it’s another way to ask it, this next bit of questioning. How have the curricular changes and the population changes at Columbia caused you to reconsider your approach to feedback in improvisation in particular? I just wrote an essay that discusses the role of humility with regard to our roles as evaluators, and is this a word you would use to name your disposition? And then I know that you have also taught in this cross-genre setting, and how did you work out issues of evaluation there? There’s a bunch of questions in there. One is about just how the curriculum and the population changed and I know that’s part of this cross-genre approach that you’ve experienced. And then just this word, humility. Anyway, you don’t have to deal with that if it doesn’t make any sense to you, but…
[Lisa]: Yeah. I think that, I appreciate that word, humility. I think that it brings up something about how—within a context where there’s going to be evaluation, it’s just this similar idea about who participates, who has the benefit of being aligned with the dominant point of view and who doesn’t? Is there a dominant perspective in the space and how does that get established—what influence do I have in this process? And what does that do to your experience of what we’re trying to do as a class—you know, what does it do to that learning experience for those students? And so, I would say that—just by nature of standing in front of a room and presenting my point of view, I was helping to establish a dominant point of view—and this was often more bolstering to certain students than others. These students often happened to be white young women. No matter what I said at the beginning of class…
[JK]: What do you mean, ‘no matter what I said’?
[Lisa]: No matter if I said I’m in interested in all perspectives, I’m interested in everybody contributing and offering. I had to figure out ways to keep things more balanced for all my students. So, who gives feedback, like who feels comfortable talking, who feels comfortable critiquing somebody else’s work? I had to become much more sensitive and aware in terms of who—where is each person’s edge in the class. Some people are more comfortable working in the unknown than others, let’s just say, or some people—we consider improvisation ‘oh nobody knows what’s happening, everybody’s having to enter unknown territory,’ it’s scary for sure but it’s not equally scary for all—so, figuring out how to create a space, that meets students where they are and is open to what they’re bringing, doing a lot of work at the beginning of a course about our expectations as a group, with my own expectations about… Of course, I’m gonna have some expectations [but] it’s gotten more and more important for me to try to understand—what do these students value when they come into the class? Like what are their artistic values and their heart values as artists? What do they wanna be able to do? Because only then can I truly understand what they’ll be willing to risk and I can try to facilitate experiences that provide the opportunity to do so.
[JK]: I mean it’s a curious situation though when it comes to ensemble improvisation because it has its own values in a way, that are about making something together.
[Lisa]: Yeah, yeah.
[JK]: And to me maybe that’s one of the deal breakers, like if you’re not interested in making something together, whatever that might be, then this form is not for you.
[Lisa]: Right, yeah. I agree with that. So, if you are teaching ensemble improvisation in the classroom, then it’s a real problem if there are students in there who don’t wanna be making things together. Because, yeah, I believe you can make things together with this cross-genre population of students. Absolutely, I’ve been a part of it, it’s fantastic when it works. People from all different forms value listening, value collaboration, value this sense of having done it together.
[JK]: Yeah. And so, what comes with that is like, whatever your interests are, whatever your aesthetic is, whatever kind of movement you’re interested in, or whatever types of relationships you’re interested in between this movement and that movement, or this movement and that music, that there are things that come with that—there’s a technique that underpins your ability to construct those relationships on the fly. And so, can we—like is it still possible to teach those and give feedback on those skills without sort of quashing anybody’s aesthetic preferences? Or is that not possible, are they all bound up together?
[Lisa]: So, I like—wait the relationships between these different constructs, is that what you said? Then I think that what that might look like, I think we can accidentally limit what’s possible. But I think that naming those relationships is really interesting to do. Just by nature of saying, let’s talk about the relationship between what we saw in terms of the movement and the sound and the scenario.
[JK]: And, sort of, zoom out, the context, when you’re giving the blow by blow and saying what happened, and before you make that step from that to evaluating, you know like recognizing that different genres, different cultural traditions, have different aesthetic leanings in these relationships, right? So that might be for me, one of the important elements that all of a sudden now, well, teachers are responsible to know a lot of things in this form, including the widest possible contexts for composing with these relationships. So, that as you say, you don’t accidentally kind of rule out or squash or limit what people feel comfortable to bring into the process.
[Lisa]: Yeah, there is a different prioritizing of elements and these kinds of relationships in different forms get experienced differently. In terms of ensemble, building an ensemble, within that I feel like it gets—this is my own simplistic thinking but there are some people that are better at that than others, it doesn’t matter what form you’re from. You’re just, it doesn’t matter what form you value and practice, and what kind of dancer you are, it’s how you pay attention. It’s the ability to pay attention, we all know that those skills can grow. And, this is why we teach the form. But it goes back to what you had mentioned before, that it’s—some people will have a bone to pick with the practice, because it’s against their personality, they don’t wanna have to pay attention to other people. Other people will have a bone to pick with the practice because they feel alienated or excluded.
[JK]: And there’s a big, big difference in whose fault this is.
[Lisa]: There’s a big difference. Exactly.
[JK]: If there’s anything to be done about this, or what feedback would look like in this case, like—if someone feels alienated then maybe this is a problem of hegemony or feedback structures that are inappropriate to the people of the room. But on the other hand, if it’s about, one person doesn’t want to collaborate—an ensemble member doesn’t want to recognize everyone in the room, for whatever reason, aesthetic reasons, personal reasons, other reasons—you can’t do ensemble work with that kind of attitude.
[Lisa]: I’m just thinking about, when I feel a certain kind of resistance from somebody. So, I’ve noticed that the resistance is almost always about some kind of fear. And I just try to find out, well, how is this serving you? And what you just said is making me think—if a student is not going to acknowledge the other ensemble members for whatever reason, well then truly, they are not able to do the work, but if they are required to be in the classroom, then I feel like as the instructor…as the instructor I’m left with trying to find out the nature of their resistance.
[JK]: Right.
[Lisa]: But without taking away from the experience of everybody else.
[JK]: In the ensemble with Kelsa, you were investigating how the Hip-Hop language was intersecting with the, sort of, postmodern, quote unquote, movement research attitude. And I’m just wondering how did you guys work out issues of evaluation in that class?
[Lisa]: Well that was actually a performance project, a co-curricular performance project for the faculty concert. So, the evaluation would have been within the members of the ensemble talking about what we were making and that is a little bit different [but] in my dance improvisation class, which is the beginning course in the dance making sequence here, often, and for these last handful of years, I always have students whose primary form is Hip-Hop.
[JK] OK.
[Lisa]: I have had more successes in more recent years because I think I’m getting better, a little bit better I hope, at again, trying to make space for people to work within their own forms, while as a whole, in a class, we are all working towards innovating within these forms. So, I don’t care if you are coming out with your competition dance vocabulary, or your breaking vocabulary, or your lyrical jazz vocabulary, and I try to separate—so I know you keep talking about evaluation and I keep talking about process, I’m so sorry.
[JK]: (Laughter)
[Lisa]: (Laughter). We will do exercises about sensing the body--how does the body work, or movement invention in relationship to BMC body systems-- ‘let’s work from the sensations of different types of tissues in our bodies’, and sometimes we’ll focus on musicality and rhythm, and other methods . And, that’s gonna lead to lead to different kinds of movement investigations and invite different students in in different ways. So, I think when it comes to evaluation though, I focus on, and I talk about this with them, so what we are really able to do as a class is talk about what is the nature of being an ensemble and what kind of questions emerge in terms of ‘what do we call composition, and what are the questions that emerge in relationships to these different elements that we pull out? To look at?’
[JK]: Right.
[Lisa]: And then so, evaluation for me a lot of times just becomes how willing students are to engage in these conversations. Because almost everyone, if they are willing to engage in the conversation they’re doing interesting things. Making interesting choices.
[JK]: So, it’s like, you are evaluating their disposition toward seeing what could happen, or being curious about what they—how what they know could be applied, or how they could expand upon what they know, or curiosity about how what they wanna do can compose with what someone else wants to do.
[Lisa]: Right, and I combine it with conversations with each student about what their goals are for their own growth. And so, then I can help them track, and we determine that in order to make that growth, it’s going to take this kind of attention to your own personal practice when we’re warming up. It’s gonna take these kind of risks, because you feel uncomfortable with this, because it’s you’re growing edge. And I try to track that through writing, because I can’t always see it. Just like track their thinking about it. I combine it, of course, with my own perception, what I see. Then also trying to be very clear about the ensemble component, which they may or may have not had experience with—these are my values in terms of an ensemble, this kind of listening, working towards this kind of discernment.
[JK]: Because then again it is a course about ensemble dance making, and so in a way that’s the one thing that you can’t take off the table.
[Lisa]: Yeah–how that ensemble is gonna look—I can get better and better, and hope to get better and better at facilitating an experience that allows the ensemble to be completely unique to the individuals that make up that ensemble. But, in order to work as an ensemble there’s a kind of listening that we have to practice.
[JK]: Right, right. I mean that’s a good way to suss out what is being evaluated that’s necessary to the form (and sort of like demoting other things) for the form to still have its integrity.
[Lisa]: That is my goal, actually, I do think that is my goal. Or to try—to continue to figure out what has to be there in order for the form—what has to be there in order to be able to make something together as an ensemble. And how can I get better and better as a teacher at letting go of my own expectations about other things and letting in what the students are bringing to the room.
[JK]: Yeah, and likewise, getting better and better at articulating the difference between what the student has to do and what they don’t have to do. In order to participate in the ensemble, it really has nothing to do with vocabulary.
[Lisa]: Exactly.
[JK]: Or, even like, all different kinds of aesthetic values can be negotiated in the ensemble context. But in order to do that, you would need certain other skills, that are listening skills, that are knowledge based skills in composition, but if we can stretch open the palate of possibilities there, the better off we are right?
[Lisa]: Mm-hmm.
[JK]: Well I’m wondering if you have, like–you talked about some things you’d learned about this next generation, the millennials. Well, you learned some things about the millennials, and that generation and we had an interesting talk about challenges that we face as teachers because of that and how we’re from a different generation and we come from a different teaching and learning culture.
[Lisa]: Right, exactly, yeah.
[JK]: So, I just was wondering, in terms of improvisation, I mean, I just wonder how you’re dealing with that based on what you’ve learned about this generation and how they just wanna have everything laid out for them and just, the expectations are so different.
[Lisa]: Yeah, and I think it’s more, more transactional, they wanna know what they’re getting out of it. So, what was the nature of the question again? How do I deal with that in the classroom?
[JK]: Specifically, improvisation classroom because to me that’s intimately connected with feedback and evaluation. Because I thought that it was my job to have expertise and try to lead students through this thing that I know about and then give them feedback about how they’re doing. They think it’s their job to give me feedback about how I’m doing. (Laughter). And so, and they may or may not be in a position to do that in any kind of a fair or just, knowledgeable way.
[Lisa]: Right, right, right, right, right. That’s hilarious.
[JK]: Right, and they may not be. I’m not saying that’s any kind of a blanket idea here, but I’m just wondering if that sounds familiar and what you’re doing about it?
[Lisa]: (Laughter). That’s hilarious. Well, OK, let me think about it for a second.
[JK]: (Laughter).
[Lisa]: That’s so funny. I think that—I don’t know if I’ve experienced it in exactly that way though, I think what’s funny about it is that it might be happening and I just don’t notice.
[JK]: (Laughter).
[Lisa]: I’m still in a place where I’m like, they just still don’t get it. (Laughter). They just don’t get it or something. But I think that they –it’s difficult because they want to challenged, they want to feel challenged, but they don’t want it to feel like they don’t know what they’re being challenged for. Now, when I say that I’m actually like ‘well of course, I wouldn’t want to be challenged and not know what--
[JK]: (Laughter).
[Lisa]: --I’m challenged about.’ I think for this generation, I have to be better about being much more upfront about why we’re doing what we’re doing. I can’t expect them to come along for the ride. And I think in the past I used to teach very much from an element of surprise. Like, I know you don’t know what we’re kind of getting into but I’m gonna be inside, I’m gonna be teaching it with you, while I’m moving with you. And there was an element of like, sneaking it, like sneaking them into transformation. And I felt really capable, I think, as a facilitator in that way.
[JK]: Because it’s hard to explain the transformation that’s going to happen.
[Lisa]: Exactly.
[JK]: To people who haven’t been transformed yet. It’s almost like you can’t learn it before you learn it.
[Lisa]: It’s impossible.
[JK]: After you learn it you’ll understand what you’ve learned, but beforehand I can’t explain to you because it is inexplicable.
[Lisa]: Right, so I almost feel like I have to make up things. I just have to make up things.
[JK]: (Laughter).
[Lisa]: I just have to make it up so they know they’re doing an exercise to do this or that, and then after we have satisfied those expectations, then we can start challenging the forms that we’ve set up.
[JK]: Then later we are able to point out that, notice that, maybe this was about something I explained to you but notice also that it’s about so much more than that. I couldn’t have explained it to you beforehand.
[Lisa]: Yeah, exactly, and that’s when they sit there and they’re like, ‘oh my gosh’, you know. But you can’t even get to that point until you’ve told them what they’re gonna do. And that’s been a learning curve for me.
[JK]: Yeah, yeah. And this brings me to my last question here, I mean I have others but just for today–you know, in this article I wrote I’m kind of telling that funny joke that we say about well, ‘you guys are lucky because we’re nicer than our teachers’, and I’m trying to unpack that a little bit, like what does that even mean? They weren’t nice? I mean, maybe, I’m not sure. What do I even mean by that? What are we trying to say here? And are we saying that we’re not gonna evaluate them? Because I don’t think that’s true. So, I’m just wondering, does that joke resonate with you at all when we say it, or do you think it’s silly to say something like that? Or are there moments you can report about what we experienced, what you experienced, being evaluated by them, being called out, being supported? What do you make of that now that we are in this new teaching and learning culture?
[Lisa]: Yeah, right exactly. I think it’s confusing because I think that students, I think our students will say they want us to be meaner, actually. They want a culture of rigor that is about, basically it’s about telling them what to do because that’s what they are comfortable with.
[JK]: Right. And that they equate meanness with expertise, or meanness with somebody is really teaching you something.
[Lisa]: Right, exactly. But, in multiple situations where that’s actually happened and people come in and they teach in kind of an old school way, the students chafe against it because they are not used to it at all. They are not used to it. But there’s something else, I do think that—obviously, I am just eternally indebted to our mentors for all that they taught me to see and do and be willing to do—the things that they taught me were worthwhile, to take risks about, you know. I also recognize that I was working within a very narrow aesthetic, but I think that lots of teachers of that generation work that way and nobody apologized for what they did, or that they were teaching within a narrow aesthetic. That’s ok. I think that it is ok to do that, and that kind of exacting approach can be useful, and you see it all over—still—you know, in more traditional apprenticeships and the learning of a craft, of a skill.
[JK]: Ballet!
[Lisa]: Ballet, of course! Yeah.
[JK]: It’s like a craftsman approach. This is the craft. These are the aesthetics. This is what makes it good. This is what makes it bad. And you’re right or you’re wrong.
[Lisa]: And they’re like ‘we’re not gonna apologize about it.’ I think the ballet world is going through a bit of a—you know, they’re finally having to face some of their shit. So, I think though, if you’re working, it becomes very complicated, if you’re working in some sort of cross disciplinary practice or within a cross-discipline learning community. Because what are you being exacting about, and who are you excluding by the nature of who you are, how you present the material, and the values imbedded in the form you are teaching—especially if you are working within a narrow aesthetic? And again, I just can’t emphasize it enough, as a white woman in front of a diverse classroom presenting a narrow aesthetic—and you don’t wanna exclude people…that’s not gonna work. I need to always ask how this is relevant for my students. And, the form will change to meet those needs. And, this is innovation on the form.
[JK]: Does it matter, or is this irrelevant that all the people standing in front of you are also white females?
[Lisa]: You mean if you’re teaching a class full of white students?
[JK]: Yeah.
[Lisa]: In terms of the—in terms of being nice or not nice?
[JK]: Being exclusionary about an aesthetic.
[Lisa]: Oh, being exclusionary about an aesthetic. I think the most important thing—I think it’s a little bit less complicated in that kind of situation. I mean—in certain ways it’s less complicated—certainly if everyone in the room shared a similar background. In that situation it seems more likely that more people would share a perspective and not feel excluded by it because it might feel more familiar. So, it’s not as complicated in those ways. But, other things are [complicated] of course, if you care about the individual. And I think the most important thing, again, is to own an aesthetic as related to a culture and a heritage and having a history. The more that that can be owned, and explained, then it gives people the opportunity to make their own opinions about it and not think about it as truth or law or whatever.
[JK]: Right, and then, I guess, one question that comes up for me is, I own certain knowledge and I’m ignorant of other things. And as a teacher, you know, we teach what we know.
[Lisa]: Yes
[JK]: We should teach what we know. And in this case, you know, I’m a practicing artist and not only do I have an aesthetic that was handed down to me but I’ve been honing one that’s also inflected with my own concerns. And so, there I am teaching a class and I’m evaluating them on what we’re doing and I do sort of expose, like, here are the values at work, but I don’t know how to hold the space for rigor in other value systems.
[Lisa]: This is a very—this is a whole other article, rigor—because I think that this is something we have to deal with a lot when we change the curriculum. What is rigor?
[JK]: What is it? Right. Even in my own aesthetic I can ask that question, but I’m not trained to ask it in other aesthetic forms to the same depth or degree.
[Lisa]: What does rigor look like from like a Eurocentric perspective in a particular practice, what does rigor look like from another perspective? That is a huge conversation. You’re bringing up something that is really complicated because I might, I might wanna teach what I know according to my own aesthetic--
[JK]: But depending on who’s in the room, is that appropriate?
[Lisa]: Exactly, depending on who’s in the room. Then I think you have to weigh the pluses and minuses, the benefits and the damage that can be done. And I think you make new choices, and I do think that the emerging—we value the emerging—I think questioning the emerging and practicing seeing it and honing skills towards developing form around it, not quite understanding what it is, but staying with it, staying with the questioning, staying with the practice, staying with the reporting, that’s a kind of rigor. And here the most obvious thing that we’ve got—I’ve mentioned this a million times—"you don’t take enough ballet,” or “your students don’t get enough technique,” and it just infuriates me every time I hear that. I am like, that is hogwash. It is so infuriating. And I thought that not just because we value West African in our curriculum, but I thought the same thing because of our background at Middlebury- we never took one ballet class.
[JK]: Not a one.
[Lisa]: Not a one during our entire time, and we were taught that improvisation was technique. And it is.
[JK]: I get the same compliment every time some traditionally technical person takes my class or sees my class, ‘well that was strangely technical,” or like “unexpectedly technical” or like, “technical in ways that I don’t recognize, but wow that was hard,” or whatever. This is what we learned. Technique is about supporting complicated or difficult dancing, but it doesn’t mean adherence to these predetermined forms.
[Lisa]: Yeah, yep. I know. I like the idea—I love having this conversation with my class, I love having the conversation around technique and improvisation as a means to developing your own sense of rigor. I love improvisation for that. It’s one of my favorite conversations to have. And where I do the whole thing around Bill Dixon kind of questioning Judy [Dunn] – ‘why do you stand at the barre and do frappes and tendus? When you perform you don’t want to be doing that!’ The story is around him teaching her how to create practices, to practice what you want to be able to do, to create processes for practicing what you want to be able to do—technique, technique practices.
[JK]: Right, this whole idea, I’m battling constantly here this idea that quote, ballet is the base, unquote, of technique. So, dismantling that whole idea is just this ongoing project and I get mad that we’re still doing it.
[Lisa]: I’m sure, I’m sure.
[JK]: Do you think that the teachers of the previous generation did something wrong in adhering to the aesthetic that they wanted to pass on? Or was that just a different era?
[Lisa]: Did they do any damage? No, but I think it’s obvious when you look around who was included in the form and who wasn’t. And I think that sometimes they gave their opinion when it wasn’t their place to do so. I think they did some emotional damage, probably. More to some than others. I didn’t feel that as a student at Middlebury, I felt like I was pretty supported. I was terrified of our teachers (laughter) but I was supported, I benefited from their support. But I do think that it was exclusive aesthetically. Not by intention, necessarily. Well, maybe by intention in certain ways, but it played out differently than was the intention perhaps.
[JK]: I mean it’s almost like the cultural version of ‘you can’t learn it until you learn it’. Right? We’ve been evolving and because of various people pushing and pulling us toward a more enlightened state vis-à-vis ethnicity and race and culture and power and access and inclusion and exclusion. But, in a way I feel like the millennials who are so mad that they were fed a line about, ‘oh and we’ve achieved equality, look the civil rights movement, Obama, blah die blah’, -no we haven’t! And they’re mad. Because their parents told them everything was fixed in a way, their schools did and obviously it’s not that way. I just feel like sometimes, I don’t know if we were fed a line about the Africanist or Jazz roots of our ensemble practice, or if it’s true, it gets invisiblized, or it gets deemphasized somehow. What I’m saying is, are we just erasing Bill Dixon’s roots in this thing that we practice?
[Lisa]: No, not at all. It’s just that what happened - It wasn’t represented within the dancer body—in the body, that’s the wrong way to put it.
[JK]: The identities of the people, the dancers, is that what you’re saying?
[Lisa]: Yes, the identities, that’s what I meant. The identities of the people. I don’t know everything that happened with Bill Dixon at Bennington or what happened when Arthur Brooks left. I do think that there must be something around bringing these Africanist forms into the academy; it’s difficult because then the academy, which is made to serve, which is embedded in the kind of, institutional racist structures, it takes these forms and it doesn’t allow them to be as they are, in a certain way. So, bringing Hip-Hop into the academy, bringing street forms into the academy is a complicated process. And what does it mean to be reciprocal with the community the academy is borrowing from? And what is the impact of the academy taking advantage of these forms, using them to their benefit? And I think there might be something in there about why Bill’s history got erased somewhat—because our practice of this form is so based in the academy.
[JK]: It’s deeply connected to a vision of dance-making that is aligned with what the academy values.
[Lisa]: Exactly, and free Jazz was not—it was opposed to those values in a lot of ways. And so, I think we can own it—we can really value it of course, but something gets off in the balance in terms of how we are really able to honor it as part of our heritage.
[JK]: I think this is what comes up for me a lot is, the ensemble dance making practice that we know about rides the line of - dances as they are recognized by the academy - but also it does have this interest in pushing out of that territory and creating a dance, creating performance that isn’t necessarily in line with those values, including the fact that it kind of eludes the usual evaluative structures that we would apply to choreography. You can’t use those measures in the same way. It’s inappropriate. So, then what evaluative measures do you use? So, this keeps me up at night. For some reason we have to, we’re supposed to say if it was good or not. But what we do and what our students do we can’t just say, ‘well what did you learn’, or ‘was it interesting,’.
[Lisa]: I’m worse and worse at it as I get older, I have to say. I really am getting worse and worse at evaluating--
[JK]: Me too!
[Lisa]: Because I don’t want to, I don’t want to—I get confused.
[JK]: I’m allergic to the whole idea. I think that’s why I’m writing this article, that’s why I’m interviewing you, because it goes so far beyond how we evaluate our students or our professional participants who are in front of us, and there’s all kinds of layers to the dynamic, like what students want from us, and what we want from them, and the expectations that we have about the exchange and what that has to do with what anyone thinks is good to do or bad to do. And then how all that intersects with how we work in the academy, even though youracademy is pretty radical considering the landscape.
[Lisa]: In certain ways, mm-hmm.
[JK]: I’m so tied up in knots about the whole thing and that’s why I’m trying to look at it more directly instead of avoiding it like I’ve done for the past 30 years.
[Lisa]: Yeah. I love that you’re doing that, I think it’s awesome. And thank you for letting me participate in the conversation.
[JK]: Oh my god, are you kidding? I have so many more questions for you. I know we can’t keep going, but maybe--
[Lisa]: Well, let’s talk about it again!
[JK]: Yeah, can I link you to my article and then we’ll just do one more talk at least in the short term? I’m just interested in your reaction. It’s just a start. I mean there are so many social and political and justice questions that follow from it. But I’m just trying to start out with, how does one even think about evaluation vis-a-vis improvisation? What does that even have to do with it? Something, for sure…but how do we understand it?
[Lisa]: Right, I know. I hate it. I actually can say outright, I hate evaluating improvisation. And that’s why I try—I end up basing my evaluation on a lot on their writing and their willingness to show up and be present in class, and I have to trust my perception on their –
[JK]: Engagement.
[Lisa]: --on their engagement, and then where I can’t, I go to their writing to confirm that they’re processing these thoughts.
[JK]: Right, that there’s something happening in them.
[Lisa]: Yeah, sometimes it’s obvious and sometimes it’s not.
[Lisa]: Yeah, I would say I’d definitely gone through a transformation. I would say I still feel very much like I am in an evolving place with it. I think I came to Columbia still connected to a younger version of myself and our work and our improvisational practice together, and my ideas about it that were deeply connected to how I interpreted the lessons we learned from our mentors. (I actually do feel like I want to emphasize - my interpretation of those lessons).
[JK]: Yes, right.
[Lisa]: And I feel like I taught definitely from that point of view. And I would say that my feedback was, I would say, directed around trying to get the class to see, understand, own certain compositional ideas and values that I held dear that were inherent in the exercises that I presented.
[JK]: Right, the ones we both learned from our mentors.
[Lisa]: Exactly, and I had—certainly had some specific ideas about what/how I wanted them to turn out. What I thought was interesting and not interesting. And I can tell you, that hasn’t changed. I still think certain things are, you know, “I am not interested in what I just saw.”
[JK]: (Laughter). Yes.
[Lisa]: I remember my own willingness to be open to multiple perspectives, which is, I think a good thing, but also caused some challenges. I had certain instances where I felt like I actually couldn’t stand firmly behind a critique I might have held, in terms of my own aesthetic. But in terms of not wanting to alienate anybody I withheld it. Or I said, well, who am I to say that. Let me just let this unfold. This person wants to walk around and look around the space. Who am I to say that that’s not a fine choice to make? Even though we just spent the entire last semester focusing on detailed, nuanced, musical movement?
But I think that I definitely went through- can absolutely put my finger on a major turning point in terms of my own questioning of my position of power in the classroom, my authority in the classroom, and the way that my opinion and perspective holds weight and determines a dominant point of view. And that was when we did the anti-racism workshop with the People’s Institute of Survival and Beyond. I think through that work and the way that they identify positions of power, people who are in positions of power as gatekeepers, for what information can be held—what information gets through and what doesn’t, which people get through, who doesn’t. And then that just opened up all these ideas, what kind of compositional ideas get through, what doesn’t. Who feels most comfortable in the practice, who doesn’t. And who do I exclude by the very nature of standing in front of a very diverse group of people as a white woman speaking from my experience of having been immersed in postmodern dance. And so, I think that I had to do a lot of work. I could fall easily into ‘what am I even doing here, I’m doing more damage than good just by standing in front of the class’. That was kind of, like, the first reaction. In terms of working towards a productive relationship to this new information I think I realized certain things about…that I could not assume that people understood this…I could not overstate the fact that I was teaching from a specific point of view related to my specific history, influenced by my own history as a person and my own perspective, and that I really was interested and valued what every person brought to the class. That became very, very, very important for me to state over and over again. But what that did is it made me have to question then, well what does feedback look like in that context?
[JK]: Right, because if you’re framing it in that way, like, ‘here is where I come from, here are some of the frameworks that I learned about,’ but you know, in this context this is already implied in the ensemble form that we practiced- that every person has value. But then to sort of make it explicit, like, this (value) isn’t just if you follow these aesthetic rules. Or is it?
[Lisa]: Right, or--
[JK]: That’s one of my questions.
[Lisa]: Exactly, and who feels comfortable enough to really bring their voice in? And who is coming from certain cultures that they might have a lot—get a lot of negative feedback around working within uncertain situations, let’s say—dealing in the unknown. That their entire cultural relationship to their family and upbringing is opposed to that. And so, how do you—or, you say that but then you have, in the class, somebody whose relationship to dance is so deeply inseparably connected to the music but you don’t have live music because your department can’t fund that for you (and I prefer to use live music when teaching improvisation to emphasize that relationship in the work). Or a student’s relationship to improvising and music requires specific beats or rhythms. Then how do you create a situation that facilitates that person feeling welcome and able to participate equally? You know what I mean?
[JK]: And well, our aesthetic also has some things it’s interested in in terms of relationship to music. Which also might cut against somebody’s cultural values.
[Lisa]: Exactly, exactly. And so, then I think that part just really made me question some of the things that I have said in the past about our practice of improvisation- that it’s inclusive. It’s inclusive to all people and voices. And I’m like, it’s not, it could be depending on the strategies you use to bring people in and make them feel included. I think that then, that changed my relationship to feedback because I didn’t feel comfortable giving feedback in an improvisational context where I’m really talking about aesthetic. I don’t know, something about aesthetic value or whether I thought that was successful or not successful. It reminds me back when Michael Chorney talked about it being, ‘was this investigation worthwhile?’ So, I think my feedback began to take a lot more of a turn of like, ‘what did you learn from this? What did you see happening? What kind of forms did you see emerging? What are we interested in as a class? Is there anything that is not happening in the space that you would like to see happening? Can we develop some strategies together to practice those things? Even if they might be things I’m not interested in or I don’t know about.’ But I started to feel like, in terms of my intention to raise their compositional literacy and awareness, I could do that better by posing questions that I want them to pose for themselves when they are looking at something or noticing what they are bringing to the space rather than—I think also, I’m talking about primarily working with beginners here because—in a college context--
[JK]: Because that’s what we do.
[Lisa]: Exactly, exactly. So, I think there are ways as they get more advanced then you can start building a language together as a group, to build structures and scores and practices and compositional values that the entire group contributes to.
[JK]: Right. But as beginners, like what forms do you start with? And they’re Eurocentric forms.
[Lisa]: Yeah, if they are Eurocentric forms then you’ve already put a twist on it. You’ve weighted it in one direction especially to those people who feel alienated by that. It’s a problem. And I think the notion of movement invention is a great example of that.
[JK]: I was just writing about this. Is the very notion of movement research or innovation a hopelessly white, Euro concept? And if so, then how do we deal with that?
[Lisa]: Yeah, but it’s not. It just depends on, for example—I don’t think it is totally, but to various degrees. Every practice has innovation— and I think for example in Hip-Hop let’s say, or other street forms that are deeply connected to the music. Well, in order to participate in those kinds of improvisational experiences, let’s say, through a battle or jam, you are simultaneously proving that you have the chops to be within this form, but you are also expected to be able to innovate on the form. In my experience with improvisation in these forms you show your respect for the form first, you have to prove yourself first, and then you can innovate through your movement invention, through your relationship to rhythm, through your own wit and intelligence and playfulness. I think that those are our values too. It’s just that they are highlighted differently in the way we practice it. Just like, we are very rhythmic and related to sound and to music but it’s highlighted differently and the way that we invent upon those relationships in the body is prioritized differently.
[JK]: There’s so much to talk about there and that’s like a whole other interview.
[Lisa]: Before we move on I just wanna say one quick thing about—another thing that really influenced how I give feedback was a project I did with my colleague Kelsa Robinson where we brought together dancers who were students, most of whom were really immersed in a kind of postmodern or modern dance perspective, though there were a couple who crossed over into House or Hip-Hop, who had really begun to immerse themselves in these forms through their work with Kelsa, and we invited them into a space with professional Hip-Hop dancers and then we were trying to create an ensemble together. Kelsa really taught me that it can be difficult to make the space equal in terms of the power dynamic--that we had to keep giving the Hip-Hop dancers space in order to build their ability to be equal in the space, because the whole language around being in academia, the whole language around being in a studio, the whole language around this idea of being in an ensemble and performance, their point of view was already so not the dominant perspective in this space, in this context. Hold on, one, one quick second. I’m getting a call from the dean’s office.
[JK]: Oh, whoops. OK.
[Lisa]: I think it’s fine, I’m not going to consider it an emergency. OK, go ahead.
[JK]: (laughter) Um, yeah there is so much to talk about there. Like, I wanna hear more but I also wanna hear some of your other thoughts. So, this next—I mean in a way kind of connected—it’s another way to ask it, this next bit of questioning. How have the curricular changes and the population changes at Columbia caused you to reconsider your approach to feedback in improvisation in particular? I just wrote an essay that discusses the role of humility with regard to our roles as evaluators, and is this a word you would use to name your disposition? And then I know that you have also taught in this cross-genre setting, and how did you work out issues of evaluation there? There’s a bunch of questions in there. One is about just how the curriculum and the population changed and I know that’s part of this cross-genre approach that you’ve experienced. And then just this word, humility. Anyway, you don’t have to deal with that if it doesn’t make any sense to you, but…
[Lisa]: Yeah. I think that, I appreciate that word, humility. I think that it brings up something about how—within a context where there’s going to be evaluation, it’s just this similar idea about who participates, who has the benefit of being aligned with the dominant point of view and who doesn’t? Is there a dominant perspective in the space and how does that get established—what influence do I have in this process? And what does that do to your experience of what we’re trying to do as a class—you know, what does it do to that learning experience for those students? And so, I would say that—just by nature of standing in front of a room and presenting my point of view, I was helping to establish a dominant point of view—and this was often more bolstering to certain students than others. These students often happened to be white young women. No matter what I said at the beginning of class…
[JK]: What do you mean, ‘no matter what I said’?
[Lisa]: No matter if I said I’m in interested in all perspectives, I’m interested in everybody contributing and offering. I had to figure out ways to keep things more balanced for all my students. So, who gives feedback, like who feels comfortable talking, who feels comfortable critiquing somebody else’s work? I had to become much more sensitive and aware in terms of who—where is each person’s edge in the class. Some people are more comfortable working in the unknown than others, let’s just say, or some people—we consider improvisation ‘oh nobody knows what’s happening, everybody’s having to enter unknown territory,’ it’s scary for sure but it’s not equally scary for all—so, figuring out how to create a space, that meets students where they are and is open to what they’re bringing, doing a lot of work at the beginning of a course about our expectations as a group, with my own expectations about… Of course, I’m gonna have some expectations [but] it’s gotten more and more important for me to try to understand—what do these students value when they come into the class? Like what are their artistic values and their heart values as artists? What do they wanna be able to do? Because only then can I truly understand what they’ll be willing to risk and I can try to facilitate experiences that provide the opportunity to do so.
[JK]: I mean it’s a curious situation though when it comes to ensemble improvisation because it has its own values in a way, that are about making something together.
[Lisa]: Yeah, yeah.
[JK]: And to me maybe that’s one of the deal breakers, like if you’re not interested in making something together, whatever that might be, then this form is not for you.
[Lisa]: Right, yeah. I agree with that. So, if you are teaching ensemble improvisation in the classroom, then it’s a real problem if there are students in there who don’t wanna be making things together. Because, yeah, I believe you can make things together with this cross-genre population of students. Absolutely, I’ve been a part of it, it’s fantastic when it works. People from all different forms value listening, value collaboration, value this sense of having done it together.
[JK]: Yeah. And so, what comes with that is like, whatever your interests are, whatever your aesthetic is, whatever kind of movement you’re interested in, or whatever types of relationships you’re interested in between this movement and that movement, or this movement and that music, that there are things that come with that—there’s a technique that underpins your ability to construct those relationships on the fly. And so, can we—like is it still possible to teach those and give feedback on those skills without sort of quashing anybody’s aesthetic preferences? Or is that not possible, are they all bound up together?
[Lisa]: So, I like—wait the relationships between these different constructs, is that what you said? Then I think that what that might look like, I think we can accidentally limit what’s possible. But I think that naming those relationships is really interesting to do. Just by nature of saying, let’s talk about the relationship between what we saw in terms of the movement and the sound and the scenario.
[JK]: And, sort of, zoom out, the context, when you’re giving the blow by blow and saying what happened, and before you make that step from that to evaluating, you know like recognizing that different genres, different cultural traditions, have different aesthetic leanings in these relationships, right? So that might be for me, one of the important elements that all of a sudden now, well, teachers are responsible to know a lot of things in this form, including the widest possible contexts for composing with these relationships. So, that as you say, you don’t accidentally kind of rule out or squash or limit what people feel comfortable to bring into the process.
[Lisa]: Yeah, there is a different prioritizing of elements and these kinds of relationships in different forms get experienced differently. In terms of ensemble, building an ensemble, within that I feel like it gets—this is my own simplistic thinking but there are some people that are better at that than others, it doesn’t matter what form you’re from. You’re just, it doesn’t matter what form you value and practice, and what kind of dancer you are, it’s how you pay attention. It’s the ability to pay attention, we all know that those skills can grow. And, this is why we teach the form. But it goes back to what you had mentioned before, that it’s—some people will have a bone to pick with the practice, because it’s against their personality, they don’t wanna have to pay attention to other people. Other people will have a bone to pick with the practice because they feel alienated or excluded.
[JK]: And there’s a big, big difference in whose fault this is.
[Lisa]: There’s a big difference. Exactly.
[JK]: If there’s anything to be done about this, or what feedback would look like in this case, like—if someone feels alienated then maybe this is a problem of hegemony or feedback structures that are inappropriate to the people of the room. But on the other hand, if it’s about, one person doesn’t want to collaborate—an ensemble member doesn’t want to recognize everyone in the room, for whatever reason, aesthetic reasons, personal reasons, other reasons—you can’t do ensemble work with that kind of attitude.
[Lisa]: I’m just thinking about, when I feel a certain kind of resistance from somebody. So, I’ve noticed that the resistance is almost always about some kind of fear. And I just try to find out, well, how is this serving you? And what you just said is making me think—if a student is not going to acknowledge the other ensemble members for whatever reason, well then truly, they are not able to do the work, but if they are required to be in the classroom, then I feel like as the instructor…as the instructor I’m left with trying to find out the nature of their resistance.
[JK]: Right.
[Lisa]: But without taking away from the experience of everybody else.
[JK]: In the ensemble with Kelsa, you were investigating how the Hip-Hop language was intersecting with the, sort of, postmodern, quote unquote, movement research attitude. And I’m just wondering how did you guys work out issues of evaluation in that class?
[Lisa]: Well that was actually a performance project, a co-curricular performance project for the faculty concert. So, the evaluation would have been within the members of the ensemble talking about what we were making and that is a little bit different [but] in my dance improvisation class, which is the beginning course in the dance making sequence here, often, and for these last handful of years, I always have students whose primary form is Hip-Hop.
[JK] OK.
[Lisa]: I have had more successes in more recent years because I think I’m getting better, a little bit better I hope, at again, trying to make space for people to work within their own forms, while as a whole, in a class, we are all working towards innovating within these forms. So, I don’t care if you are coming out with your competition dance vocabulary, or your breaking vocabulary, or your lyrical jazz vocabulary, and I try to separate—so I know you keep talking about evaluation and I keep talking about process, I’m so sorry.
[JK]: (Laughter)
[Lisa]: (Laughter). We will do exercises about sensing the body--how does the body work, or movement invention in relationship to BMC body systems-- ‘let’s work from the sensations of different types of tissues in our bodies’, and sometimes we’ll focus on musicality and rhythm, and other methods . And, that’s gonna lead to lead to different kinds of movement investigations and invite different students in in different ways. So, I think when it comes to evaluation though, I focus on, and I talk about this with them, so what we are really able to do as a class is talk about what is the nature of being an ensemble and what kind of questions emerge in terms of ‘what do we call composition, and what are the questions that emerge in relationships to these different elements that we pull out? To look at?’
[JK]: Right.
[Lisa]: And then so, evaluation for me a lot of times just becomes how willing students are to engage in these conversations. Because almost everyone, if they are willing to engage in the conversation they’re doing interesting things. Making interesting choices.
[JK]: So, it’s like, you are evaluating their disposition toward seeing what could happen, or being curious about what they—how what they know could be applied, or how they could expand upon what they know, or curiosity about how what they wanna do can compose with what someone else wants to do.
[Lisa]: Right, and I combine it with conversations with each student about what their goals are for their own growth. And so, then I can help them track, and we determine that in order to make that growth, it’s going to take this kind of attention to your own personal practice when we’re warming up. It’s gonna take these kind of risks, because you feel uncomfortable with this, because it’s you’re growing edge. And I try to track that through writing, because I can’t always see it. Just like track their thinking about it. I combine it, of course, with my own perception, what I see. Then also trying to be very clear about the ensemble component, which they may or may have not had experience with—these are my values in terms of an ensemble, this kind of listening, working towards this kind of discernment.
[JK]: Because then again it is a course about ensemble dance making, and so in a way that’s the one thing that you can’t take off the table.
[Lisa]: Yeah–how that ensemble is gonna look—I can get better and better, and hope to get better and better at facilitating an experience that allows the ensemble to be completely unique to the individuals that make up that ensemble. But, in order to work as an ensemble there’s a kind of listening that we have to practice.
[JK]: Right, right. I mean that’s a good way to suss out what is being evaluated that’s necessary to the form (and sort of like demoting other things) for the form to still have its integrity.
[Lisa]: That is my goal, actually, I do think that is my goal. Or to try—to continue to figure out what has to be there in order for the form—what has to be there in order to be able to make something together as an ensemble. And how can I get better and better as a teacher at letting go of my own expectations about other things and letting in what the students are bringing to the room.
[JK]: Yeah, and likewise, getting better and better at articulating the difference between what the student has to do and what they don’t have to do. In order to participate in the ensemble, it really has nothing to do with vocabulary.
[Lisa]: Exactly.
[JK]: Or, even like, all different kinds of aesthetic values can be negotiated in the ensemble context. But in order to do that, you would need certain other skills, that are listening skills, that are knowledge based skills in composition, but if we can stretch open the palate of possibilities there, the better off we are right?
[Lisa]: Mm-hmm.
[JK]: Well I’m wondering if you have, like–you talked about some things you’d learned about this next generation, the millennials. Well, you learned some things about the millennials, and that generation and we had an interesting talk about challenges that we face as teachers because of that and how we’re from a different generation and we come from a different teaching and learning culture.
[Lisa]: Right, exactly, yeah.
[JK]: So, I just was wondering, in terms of improvisation, I mean, I just wonder how you’re dealing with that based on what you’ve learned about this generation and how they just wanna have everything laid out for them and just, the expectations are so different.
[Lisa]: Yeah, and I think it’s more, more transactional, they wanna know what they’re getting out of it. So, what was the nature of the question again? How do I deal with that in the classroom?
[JK]: Specifically, improvisation classroom because to me that’s intimately connected with feedback and evaluation. Because I thought that it was my job to have expertise and try to lead students through this thing that I know about and then give them feedback about how they’re doing. They think it’s their job to give me feedback about how I’m doing. (Laughter). And so, and they may or may not be in a position to do that in any kind of a fair or just, knowledgeable way.
[Lisa]: Right, right, right, right, right. That’s hilarious.
[JK]: Right, and they may not be. I’m not saying that’s any kind of a blanket idea here, but I’m just wondering if that sounds familiar and what you’re doing about it?
[Lisa]: (Laughter). That’s hilarious. Well, OK, let me think about it for a second.
[JK]: (Laughter).
[Lisa]: That’s so funny. I think that—I don’t know if I’ve experienced it in exactly that way though, I think what’s funny about it is that it might be happening and I just don’t notice.
[JK]: (Laughter).
[Lisa]: I’m still in a place where I’m like, they just still don’t get it. (Laughter). They just don’t get it or something. But I think that they –it’s difficult because they want to challenged, they want to feel challenged, but they don’t want it to feel like they don’t know what they’re being challenged for. Now, when I say that I’m actually like ‘well of course, I wouldn’t want to be challenged and not know what--
[JK]: (Laughter).
[Lisa]: --I’m challenged about.’ I think for this generation, I have to be better about being much more upfront about why we’re doing what we’re doing. I can’t expect them to come along for the ride. And I think in the past I used to teach very much from an element of surprise. Like, I know you don’t know what we’re kind of getting into but I’m gonna be inside, I’m gonna be teaching it with you, while I’m moving with you. And there was an element of like, sneaking it, like sneaking them into transformation. And I felt really capable, I think, as a facilitator in that way.
[JK]: Because it’s hard to explain the transformation that’s going to happen.
[Lisa]: Exactly.
[JK]: To people who haven’t been transformed yet. It’s almost like you can’t learn it before you learn it.
[Lisa]: It’s impossible.
[JK]: After you learn it you’ll understand what you’ve learned, but beforehand I can’t explain to you because it is inexplicable.
[Lisa]: Right, so I almost feel like I have to make up things. I just have to make up things.
[JK]: (Laughter).
[Lisa]: I just have to make it up so they know they’re doing an exercise to do this or that, and then after we have satisfied those expectations, then we can start challenging the forms that we’ve set up.
[JK]: Then later we are able to point out that, notice that, maybe this was about something I explained to you but notice also that it’s about so much more than that. I couldn’t have explained it to you beforehand.
[Lisa]: Yeah, exactly, and that’s when they sit there and they’re like, ‘oh my gosh’, you know. But you can’t even get to that point until you’ve told them what they’re gonna do. And that’s been a learning curve for me.
[JK]: Yeah, yeah. And this brings me to my last question here, I mean I have others but just for today–you know, in this article I wrote I’m kind of telling that funny joke that we say about well, ‘you guys are lucky because we’re nicer than our teachers’, and I’m trying to unpack that a little bit, like what does that even mean? They weren’t nice? I mean, maybe, I’m not sure. What do I even mean by that? What are we trying to say here? And are we saying that we’re not gonna evaluate them? Because I don’t think that’s true. So, I’m just wondering, does that joke resonate with you at all when we say it, or do you think it’s silly to say something like that? Or are there moments you can report about what we experienced, what you experienced, being evaluated by them, being called out, being supported? What do you make of that now that we are in this new teaching and learning culture?
[Lisa]: Yeah, right exactly. I think it’s confusing because I think that students, I think our students will say they want us to be meaner, actually. They want a culture of rigor that is about, basically it’s about telling them what to do because that’s what they are comfortable with.
[JK]: Right. And that they equate meanness with expertise, or meanness with somebody is really teaching you something.
[Lisa]: Right, exactly. But, in multiple situations where that’s actually happened and people come in and they teach in kind of an old school way, the students chafe against it because they are not used to it at all. They are not used to it. But there’s something else, I do think that—obviously, I am just eternally indebted to our mentors for all that they taught me to see and do and be willing to do—the things that they taught me were worthwhile, to take risks about, you know. I also recognize that I was working within a very narrow aesthetic, but I think that lots of teachers of that generation work that way and nobody apologized for what they did, or that they were teaching within a narrow aesthetic. That’s ok. I think that it is ok to do that, and that kind of exacting approach can be useful, and you see it all over—still—you know, in more traditional apprenticeships and the learning of a craft, of a skill.
[JK]: Ballet!
[Lisa]: Ballet, of course! Yeah.
[JK]: It’s like a craftsman approach. This is the craft. These are the aesthetics. This is what makes it good. This is what makes it bad. And you’re right or you’re wrong.
[Lisa]: And they’re like ‘we’re not gonna apologize about it.’ I think the ballet world is going through a bit of a—you know, they’re finally having to face some of their shit. So, I think though, if you’re working, it becomes very complicated, if you’re working in some sort of cross disciplinary practice or within a cross-discipline learning community. Because what are you being exacting about, and who are you excluding by the nature of who you are, how you present the material, and the values imbedded in the form you are teaching—especially if you are working within a narrow aesthetic? And again, I just can’t emphasize it enough, as a white woman in front of a diverse classroom presenting a narrow aesthetic—and you don’t wanna exclude people…that’s not gonna work. I need to always ask how this is relevant for my students. And, the form will change to meet those needs. And, this is innovation on the form.
[JK]: Does it matter, or is this irrelevant that all the people standing in front of you are also white females?
[Lisa]: You mean if you’re teaching a class full of white students?
[JK]: Yeah.
[Lisa]: In terms of the—in terms of being nice or not nice?
[JK]: Being exclusionary about an aesthetic.
[Lisa]: Oh, being exclusionary about an aesthetic. I think the most important thing—I think it’s a little bit less complicated in that kind of situation. I mean—in certain ways it’s less complicated—certainly if everyone in the room shared a similar background. In that situation it seems more likely that more people would share a perspective and not feel excluded by it because it might feel more familiar. So, it’s not as complicated in those ways. But, other things are [complicated] of course, if you care about the individual. And I think the most important thing, again, is to own an aesthetic as related to a culture and a heritage and having a history. The more that that can be owned, and explained, then it gives people the opportunity to make their own opinions about it and not think about it as truth or law or whatever.
[JK]: Right, and then, I guess, one question that comes up for me is, I own certain knowledge and I’m ignorant of other things. And as a teacher, you know, we teach what we know.
[Lisa]: Yes
[JK]: We should teach what we know. And in this case, you know, I’m a practicing artist and not only do I have an aesthetic that was handed down to me but I’ve been honing one that’s also inflected with my own concerns. And so, there I am teaching a class and I’m evaluating them on what we’re doing and I do sort of expose, like, here are the values at work, but I don’t know how to hold the space for rigor in other value systems.
[Lisa]: This is a very—this is a whole other article, rigor—because I think that this is something we have to deal with a lot when we change the curriculum. What is rigor?
[JK]: What is it? Right. Even in my own aesthetic I can ask that question, but I’m not trained to ask it in other aesthetic forms to the same depth or degree.
[Lisa]: What does rigor look like from like a Eurocentric perspective in a particular practice, what does rigor look like from another perspective? That is a huge conversation. You’re bringing up something that is really complicated because I might, I might wanna teach what I know according to my own aesthetic--
[JK]: But depending on who’s in the room, is that appropriate?
[Lisa]: Exactly, depending on who’s in the room. Then I think you have to weigh the pluses and minuses, the benefits and the damage that can be done. And I think you make new choices, and I do think that the emerging—we value the emerging—I think questioning the emerging and practicing seeing it and honing skills towards developing form around it, not quite understanding what it is, but staying with it, staying with the questioning, staying with the practice, staying with the reporting, that’s a kind of rigor. And here the most obvious thing that we’ve got—I’ve mentioned this a million times—"you don’t take enough ballet,” or “your students don’t get enough technique,” and it just infuriates me every time I hear that. I am like, that is hogwash. It is so infuriating. And I thought that not just because we value West African in our curriculum, but I thought the same thing because of our background at Middlebury- we never took one ballet class.
[JK]: Not a one.
[Lisa]: Not a one during our entire time, and we were taught that improvisation was technique. And it is.
[JK]: I get the same compliment every time some traditionally technical person takes my class or sees my class, ‘well that was strangely technical,” or like “unexpectedly technical” or like, “technical in ways that I don’t recognize, but wow that was hard,” or whatever. This is what we learned. Technique is about supporting complicated or difficult dancing, but it doesn’t mean adherence to these predetermined forms.
[Lisa]: Yeah, yep. I know. I like the idea—I love having this conversation with my class, I love having the conversation around technique and improvisation as a means to developing your own sense of rigor. I love improvisation for that. It’s one of my favorite conversations to have. And where I do the whole thing around Bill Dixon kind of questioning Judy [Dunn] – ‘why do you stand at the barre and do frappes and tendus? When you perform you don’t want to be doing that!’ The story is around him teaching her how to create practices, to practice what you want to be able to do, to create processes for practicing what you want to be able to do—technique, technique practices.
[JK]: Right, this whole idea, I’m battling constantly here this idea that quote, ballet is the base, unquote, of technique. So, dismantling that whole idea is just this ongoing project and I get mad that we’re still doing it.
[Lisa]: I’m sure, I’m sure.
[JK]: Do you think that the teachers of the previous generation did something wrong in adhering to the aesthetic that they wanted to pass on? Or was that just a different era?
[Lisa]: Did they do any damage? No, but I think it’s obvious when you look around who was included in the form and who wasn’t. And I think that sometimes they gave their opinion when it wasn’t their place to do so. I think they did some emotional damage, probably. More to some than others. I didn’t feel that as a student at Middlebury, I felt like I was pretty supported. I was terrified of our teachers (laughter) but I was supported, I benefited from their support. But I do think that it was exclusive aesthetically. Not by intention, necessarily. Well, maybe by intention in certain ways, but it played out differently than was the intention perhaps.
[JK]: I mean it’s almost like the cultural version of ‘you can’t learn it until you learn it’. Right? We’ve been evolving and because of various people pushing and pulling us toward a more enlightened state vis-à-vis ethnicity and race and culture and power and access and inclusion and exclusion. But, in a way I feel like the millennials who are so mad that they were fed a line about, ‘oh and we’ve achieved equality, look the civil rights movement, Obama, blah die blah’, -no we haven’t! And they’re mad. Because their parents told them everything was fixed in a way, their schools did and obviously it’s not that way. I just feel like sometimes, I don’t know if we were fed a line about the Africanist or Jazz roots of our ensemble practice, or if it’s true, it gets invisiblized, or it gets deemphasized somehow. What I’m saying is, are we just erasing Bill Dixon’s roots in this thing that we practice?
[Lisa]: No, not at all. It’s just that what happened - It wasn’t represented within the dancer body—in the body, that’s the wrong way to put it.
[JK]: The identities of the people, the dancers, is that what you’re saying?
[Lisa]: Yes, the identities, that’s what I meant. The identities of the people. I don’t know everything that happened with Bill Dixon at Bennington or what happened when Arthur Brooks left. I do think that there must be something around bringing these Africanist forms into the academy; it’s difficult because then the academy, which is made to serve, which is embedded in the kind of, institutional racist structures, it takes these forms and it doesn’t allow them to be as they are, in a certain way. So, bringing Hip-Hop into the academy, bringing street forms into the academy is a complicated process. And what does it mean to be reciprocal with the community the academy is borrowing from? And what is the impact of the academy taking advantage of these forms, using them to their benefit? And I think there might be something in there about why Bill’s history got erased somewhat—because our practice of this form is so based in the academy.
[JK]: It’s deeply connected to a vision of dance-making that is aligned with what the academy values.
[Lisa]: Exactly, and free Jazz was not—it was opposed to those values in a lot of ways. And so, I think we can own it—we can really value it of course, but something gets off in the balance in terms of how we are really able to honor it as part of our heritage.
[JK]: I think this is what comes up for me a lot is, the ensemble dance making practice that we know about rides the line of - dances as they are recognized by the academy - but also it does have this interest in pushing out of that territory and creating a dance, creating performance that isn’t necessarily in line with those values, including the fact that it kind of eludes the usual evaluative structures that we would apply to choreography. You can’t use those measures in the same way. It’s inappropriate. So, then what evaluative measures do you use? So, this keeps me up at night. For some reason we have to, we’re supposed to say if it was good or not. But what we do and what our students do we can’t just say, ‘well what did you learn’, or ‘was it interesting,’.
[Lisa]: I’m worse and worse at it as I get older, I have to say. I really am getting worse and worse at evaluating--
[JK]: Me too!
[Lisa]: Because I don’t want to, I don’t want to—I get confused.
[JK]: I’m allergic to the whole idea. I think that’s why I’m writing this article, that’s why I’m interviewing you, because it goes so far beyond how we evaluate our students or our professional participants who are in front of us, and there’s all kinds of layers to the dynamic, like what students want from us, and what we want from them, and the expectations that we have about the exchange and what that has to do with what anyone thinks is good to do or bad to do. And then how all that intersects with how we work in the academy, even though youracademy is pretty radical considering the landscape.
[Lisa]: In certain ways, mm-hmm.
[JK]: I’m so tied up in knots about the whole thing and that’s why I’m trying to look at it more directly instead of avoiding it like I’ve done for the past 30 years.
[Lisa]: Yeah. I love that you’re doing that, I think it’s awesome. And thank you for letting me participate in the conversation.
[JK]: Oh my god, are you kidding? I have so many more questions for you. I know we can’t keep going, but maybe--
[Lisa]: Well, let’s talk about it again!
[JK]: Yeah, can I link you to my article and then we’ll just do one more talk at least in the short term? I’m just interested in your reaction. It’s just a start. I mean there are so many social and political and justice questions that follow from it. But I’m just trying to start out with, how does one even think about evaluation vis-a-vis improvisation? What does that even have to do with it? Something, for sure…but how do we understand it?
[Lisa]: Right, I know. I hate it. I actually can say outright, I hate evaluating improvisation. And that’s why I try—I end up basing my evaluation on a lot on their writing and their willingness to show up and be present in class, and I have to trust my perception on their –
[JK]: Engagement.
[Lisa]: --on their engagement, and then where I can’t, I go to their writing to confirm that they’re processing these thoughts.
[JK]: Right, that there’s something happening in them.
[Lisa]: Yeah, sometimes it’s obvious and sometimes it’s not.
Reading through this conversation and thinking on it later, the idea that “sometimes it’s obvious and sometimes it’s not,” is really leading me to some profound pondering. If you’ve lived a while, chances are you’ve learned that appearances don’t always match internal workings and substances are often more complicated than what’s on the surface. When engaging in feedback, I sometimes say what seems obvious to me, only to see on a student’s face that what I’ve said is far from obvious to her – but instead it’s surprising, revelatory, or disorienting. When I’m in the position of evaluating young improvisers, a big wave of humility creates hesitation- a nagging feeling arrives that I know I don’t know the whole story, can’t see the whole picture. But I do know how I experienced a student’s work (in the studio and on paper), and I can try to reflect that back somehow. Narrative evaluations are exhausting to produce, but they allow for actual feedback, and can gesture toward the nuances. Boiling all of that human and artistic complexity down to a number? Worst part of teaching. When I decided to examine the whole issue, I planned to gain insight and update my perspective. In the end, I’m not sure I’ll do anything differently (or at least not in ways that are obvious to my students), but I will be doing it with more awareness, and more confidence.