A role model for community-based dance

By Rachel Berman 
 

Patricia Reedy and Nancy Ng have an audacious plan: to change the perception of the field of dance, one teacher at a time, and to cultivate choreographers from childhood, while the limits of imagination are boundless. Their plan takes tangible form as the nonprofit Luna Dance Institute, based in Emeryville, California, just across the bay from San Francisco.

Simple choreographic ideas about space, energy, and levels are taught to youngsters through the LDI program. (Photo by Lauren Forbus)

Over the past 19 years, Luna Dance Institute has established a strong foothold in the San Francisco Bay Area dance community, reaching children, teens, parents, and dance educators of all levels. Last year alone LDI provided resources for 250 dance artists and teachers, thereby enhancing the dance instruction for more than 24,500 students.

Presenting a line of thinking that deviates from the traditional focus of a beginning dance class, Reedy, Ng, and their teaching artists encourage children to create rather than re-create. Their goal is to redefine the role of teacher as we know it, transforming the old paradigm of technical mastery to developing a dancer’s whole-body intelligence through a composition-based dance-learning curriculum. 

How it began
Reedy and Ng—both performers, choreographers, teachers, and mothers—met as graduate students at Mills College in Oakland, California. Reedy founded the first incarnation of LDI after earning an MA in creativity and education from Mills. The author of Body, Mind & Spirit IN ACTION: A Teacher’s Guide to Creative Dance, she now holds the title of LDI’s director of teaching and learning. Ng holds an MFA from Mills in performance and choreography and is LDI’s director of community development.

As directors, the two have a symbiotic partnership that keeps them on track. Reedy says her vision is “far-reaching” while Ng “stays the course.” Reedy spends time in the studio teaching and training staff, while Ng is often the face of LDI for funders. Ng, Reedy says, has the uncanny ability and imagination to “stand in another’s shoes in any situation.” Both women, having been recognized in the dance field numerous times, were the first to receive the national award for mentorship (in 2003) from the National Dance Education Organization. In 2008, NDEO awarded Reedy the Outstanding Educator award.

In 1992, responding to the lack of neighborhood studios in Oakland (many of which were displaced by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake), Reedy opened Luna—A Dance World, a community space used for rehearsals and gatherings, as a hub for classes, teachers, and choreographers. Ng was on faculty before becoming co-director.

It was a magical time of collaboration, which Reedy speaks of with nostalgia and warmth.

However, she and Ng found that they could reach more students and train more teachers (with less overhead) by developing in-school programs and cultivating artist– teacher partnerships. So in 1998 they closed the studio and rebranded as Luna Kids Dance, training teachers and establishing partnerships with the Oakland Unified School District. LKD was committed to children’s education and its mission of “bringing all children to dance.”

In 2005, in order to expand their teaching roster and spread the word of dance, Reedy and Ng founded the California Institute for Dance Learning (CIDL) to serve as the pedagogy engine of Luna Kids Dance. The institute provided comprehensive education and support for all who teach dance, encompassing LKD’s professional development work. However, Reedy and Ng realized that although they were focused on children’s education, it was the educators who were driving their mission.

So in the fall of 2010 they rebranded yet again, placing all programs under the Luna Dance Institute heading and opening a new space with studios, administrative offices, and a Professional Learning Resource Center in Emeryville. Reedy is excited about once again having a physical space, realizing its potential for collaborations, classes, and audience-building for LDI’s programs.

Ng agrees, pointing out that “place is so important in dance, in choreographic terms, and now structurally, in the evolution of LDI.” Both are excited about re-creating the sense of dancers, teachers, and choreographers gathering in community that they fostered almost two decades ago. 
 
 
 

Luna in action
On a sunny Northern California day, energetic fourth-grade students at New Highland Academy in Oakland file into the classroom for their weekly dance class. Wearing their street clothes, they go through simple warm-up exercises led by Luna Dance Institute instructor Danae Rees, who bangs on a small drum to keep time.

Then, dividing the students into groups of three, Rees guides them through a game called “shape museum,” in which they take turns playing the “statue,” freezing in complementary or asymmetrical shapes. The two not frozen are asked to interact with their friend’s still body, moving “over and under” or “near and far.” Rees is complimentary, singling out individuals for their interesting choices.

Across town at Marshall Elementary, another set of 10-year-olds, almost all rambunctious boys, is following the same curriculum. The students run across the room to illustrate “near” and “far” and slither on the ground to get “under” their friends. LDI instructor Erin Lally keeps them focused, using a drum and rhythmic clapping to bring them to attention when necessary.

At this age, as expected, some students are more reticent to participate while others jump at the chance to show off for their peers. Most are having a great time. All are encouraged to try and are told that there are no wrong answers. In less than an hour both classes will have made rudimentary trios, with a beginning, middle, and end, utilizing space, energy, and levels, along with college-level concepts like counterpoint. Students are able to verbalize recognizable elements in their own compositions and their classmates’ and fill out assessment worksheets to record actions and observations each week.

The LDI curriculum embraces creativity in a playful environment, yet pays rigorous attention to the principles of child development. The students are allowed to be adaptable and flexible. Given parameters framed as a game, they learn an important part of dancemaking: making choices. Following the appropriate National Dance Standards guidelines (and grade-level benchmarks), LDI aims to provide children with the tools to create, perform, and respond.

Just as academic schools aspire to instill in all students the ability to put words together, make sentences, and write complete essays, LDI wants children to do the same with movement—to put expressive ideas into a complete dance. The goal is not to make choreographers but to help children understand the building blocks of creating, no matter what they do later in life.

A presence in schools
Strong partnerships within the Oakland Unified School District, from administration to the classroom teachers, are what make the LDI program successful. The classes at New Highland Academy and Marshall Elementary are offered through LDI’s School and Community Alliances program, which also offers coaching and consulting to public schools and teachers throughout the Bay Area.

Most dance-in-schools programs in California differ structurally from LDI, offering a residency model in which guest teachers, for a finite amount of time, focus on a culminating performance. Luna believes in continuity and putting down roots. The LDI program encompasses one hour a week for the entire school year and makes sure each grade is involved in successive years, thereby building students’ skills in scope and sequence.

“One of the things we do best is help dance teachers become their best teaching selves, gaining in skill and confidence. I delight in watching them start, expand, and improve the programs they work in, stay in the field, and mentor others.” —Patricia Reedy

Other programs offered through LDI include the Studio Lab, a choreography program for children and teens, and Moving Parents and Children Together (MPACT), which offers parent–child dance classes to families in Alameda County (where Oakland is located) and through the child welfare system.

Teaching teachers
But LDI doesn’t target only kids. Each week on the Mills College campus, Reedy guides MFA candidates in dance through exercises that have the same sense of play and self-discovery. The course’s focus: to incorporate compositional ideas into technique class syllabuses. Her students practice their ideas on classmates and later in studio settings as part of their fieldwork.

Reedy and Ng would like to see the establishment of a national dance credential that supports high-quality, rigorous programs in schools and studios. Their goal is to help establish a California teaching credential for standards-based dance classes within the public school system. If and when a national credential is established, they hope it will align with the state’s.

LDI operates on the dual premise that all students deserve teaching of the highest quality and that all teachers deserve opportunities for continued professional growth (and should be recognized for their mastery and compensated accordingly). Currently, to teach dance in California public schools, one must complete requirements for a general BA degree plus 32 units of dance instruction. LDI offers courses that fulfill the latter requirement, and its Certificate of Study—CIDL Foundations of Dance Teaching—is the first step in working toward a California credential. The Mills College course Reedy teaches is part of this certification program, open to both Mills dance majors and non-Mills students for continuing education credit.

According to Reedy, states that offer certification (like New York) have robust dance-in-schools programs. She thinks California is stuck in a catch-22: there’s no need for certification because dance isn’t being taught in the school system, and dance isn’t being offered because of the dearth of certified dance teachers. Of course there is the bigger picture that the performing arts at all levels are scrambling for funds and that dance is not as valued in our society as it should be.

Another way LDI serves teachers is with its 10-year-old, nationally recognized Summer Institute, held on the Mills campus each July. Twelve people (six dance artists and six classroom teachers) from diverse teaching backgrounds participate in an intense six-day exploration, followed by a year of collegial activities in dance learning, all free of charge. These artists work together in studying state and national standards for dance, child development principles, and learning theories. They investigate the teacher–artist partnership and strategies for partnering with schools, districts, organizations, and the community to bring dance to life in their individual settings. 

Follow-up collegial activities are mandatory and include a midyear meeting, an end-of-year reflection, regular participation in the interactive forum on LDI’s website, and communication with an assigned coach. The coaching, tailored to each participant, may include curricular design, observation and feedback on teaching, or assessment or strategic planning of a dance program. During the follow-up year, all Summer Institute participants may also take any LDI workshop or participate in any professional learning community activity.

More than 120 teachers have participated to date, teaching collectively more than 25,000 children. Reedy says, “One of the things we do best is help dance teachers become their best teaching selves, gaining in skill and confidence. I delight in watching them start, expand, and improve the programs they work in, stay in the field, and mentor others.” 
 

An LDI success story
A 2005 Summer Institute graduate, Erica Rose Jeffrey, speaks glowingly of LDI, calling it an “oasis.” Jeffrey has degrees in ballet and mediation and conflict resolution. She now teaches dance in Bay Area public schools, through San Francisco Ballet’s Dance in Schools and Communities program, in recreation programs, and at local dance studios. She is outreach director for Let’s All Dance!, a dance-in-schools residency program at Marin Dance Theatre in San Rafael.

Jeffrey calls the ongoing mentorship of the LDI program and its collegiality “invaluable.” Unless they have studied pedagogy in college, dancers often come to teaching in a solitary rite of passage, learning through trial and error and without professional support. LDI offers semi-annual Issues of Practice seminars as well as two events per month—free brunches and happy-hour get-togethers, plus consultations and workshops for the community.

Jeffrey, who is interested in leadership and dance advocacy, believes she emerged from the Summer Institute with renewed skills, concrete exercises, individual lesson plans, and the confidence to direct a program. “LDI encouraged me to look at complexities within the field,” she says.

She has stayed connected to her LDI family, serving as a facilitator and mentor to new program participants. She also takes part in the Advanced Summer Institute, a four-day workshop for Summer Institute graduates that furthers their knowledge and solidifies their sense of community. She will expand her own conflict-resolution dance education program, Moving Toward Peace, when she travels to Australia on a Rotary Peace Fellowship in 2012.

Promoting the power of dance
Reedy and Ng are role models, innovative thinkers who allow their students the freedom to explore and help connect them to the greater dance community. They believe in the power of dance education to bring about social change, heal communities, and develop future leaders. Their philosophy begins with the idea that, as Ng points out, “working with composition makes for thoughtful dancers.” Thoughtful dancers in turn make thoughtful choreographers and teachers, or transfer to any vocation. They believe that putting nonverbal expressive ideas into motion and crafting them into a dance utilizes a whole-brain approach to learning.

The National Art Education Association claims that the arts make a tremendous impact on the developmental growth of every child and help level the learning field across socioeconomic boundaries. Reedy and Ng simply want every child to be able to create and to have access to qualified dance teachers to guide them in the process.