Joint Concern: dance teaching as relational practice

Joint Concern: dance teaching as relational practice

Unitec is hosting Joint Concern: dance teaching as relational practice; a Workshop for Dance Teachers with leading teacher and choreographer, Michael Parmenter, at Unitec in Auckland from 7-9 July 2015.

Date: 7-9 July 2015
Time: 9:30am – 4:30pm daily
Venue: Unitec Dance Studios, Carrington Rd, Mt Albert, Auckland
Cost: $250 for 3 days, $100 for 1 day. (we can invoice your school as a payment option)
Book now: prees@unitec.ac.nz (09) 815 4321 ext. 7250
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(Registration form and Workshop schedule attached)

About the workshop
Dance teaching has traditionally been an authoritarian practice, entailing a determined body of knowledge that must be embodied and mastered by the dancer. Recent pedagogical trends have seen a shift to student-based learning. This gives ample room for individual creativity, but often results in the dancer failing to move beyond entrenched mannerisms and habits.

In the workshop Joint Concern, we will work with a relational-approach to dance training that combines the best of the earlier models by putting the pedagogical emphasis on the primacy of the dialogue between student and teacher. Encouraging dancers to actively participate in their own learning inaugurates the notion of personal practice and also prepares them for more collaborative approaches to dance making.

We will pursue the notion of the relation further with the idea of the dancer’s Five Relations in the learning and performing of dance: the relationship to self (somatics), the relation to space, the relation to others (other dancers and the audience), the relation to music, and the relation to the tradition (the language of contemporary dance).

Particular attention will be given to recent developments in contemporary dance technique, the incorporation of somatic principles in dance training and an introduction to fundamental principles of contemporary partnering.

Michael Parmenter
Michael Parmenter is a dancer/choreographer/teacher with over 35 experience in the teaching and creation of contemporary dance works. His dance training experience includes intensive training with contemporary dance master Erick Hawkins, and Butoh dancer Min Tanaka.

He was a founding member of celebrated New York Company, Stephen Petronio and Dancers, and has directed his own Michael Parmenter’s Commotion Company since 1990. He has choreographed major works for the Royal New Zealand Ballet, Footnote Dance Company and the New Zealand Dance Company.

Michael Parmenter has been movement teacher at Toi Whakaari/New Zealand Drama School, has been regular guest teacher and choreographer at the New Zealand School for Dance, and has been contemporary dance tutor/choreographer at in the Dance Programme of UNITEC School of Performing and Screen Arts since its inception.

Recently he has developed a partner-improvisation approach to dance training Piloting/TACTICS, and is currently in the final stages of a doctoral thesis entitled Pedagogies of Desire: dance training and the phenomenon of life.

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