the right steps

In efforts to select an ‘alternative’ or ‘non-traditional’ or ‘non-academic’ etc. etc. piece of pedagogy (realizing, of course, that even this selection is all of the above, plus institutionalized), I ended up in my personal archives. These pages have been chosen basically at random—read: I didn’t actually end up in my archives, but sent a brother in there whom I get to do my bidding back in Vancouver. I chose the scans based on my memory of the contents of this book, a transcription of the syllabus for Grade Four ballet in the Royal Academy of Dance program. The R.A.D. is an international training and education program based in the U.K. that was founded in 1920. This classical ballet method has been widely adopted, and functions to train child dancers from preschool age until their late teens, as well as offering extensive programming for dance teachers and administrators.

I’m uncertain as to the origins of this particular syllabus text: the transcriptions of exercises have been photocopied from a master text that each R.A.D. educator purchases as a part of their training and accreditation but I have no clear idea about the source of front matter of the book. I attended three different ballet schools in the Vancouver area before I was ten, and each of them provided me with the exact same type of book as I prepared for my yearly exam. The book came with a cassette copy of the music that accompanied these exercises (which was also played inc class on tape, and eventually on CD, but by a pianist during the exam) and the set cost $10—a mere drop in the bucket in the broader economic scheme of private dance education.

Okay, okay, that print cultural analysis is revealing parts of my education that are tangential to this sample. I’ll gloss the use value of these books: a R.A.D. student completes one exam per year, working progressively on either eight grades or through six Vocational Graded levels (for pre-professional study, after about age eleven). Purchase of these books means that the exercises can be practiced with the utmost accuracy at home—that is, barring (um, pun?) spatial constraints and familial collisions. I was sort of a daydreamy young dancer, so I really needed these books when I was outside the studio to remind me about what had happened in class beyond the jokes I cracked. I would pour over the descriptions and try to bridge the divide between the words on the page and my memory of how the steps worked in sequence.

I’ll venture that these scans are most valuable to us in that they draw on a pedagogical practice that is based outside of language, but that is being transmitted via language. It took me years to figure out that this is a major stumbling block for dancers, especially as ballet is a form that is particularly dependent on visual processes of imitation and embodiment (as opposed to other contemporary forms which draw on individuated gestural impulses instead of external systems). I included the page on posture to call attention to the modes we might use (and the shorthands we rely upon) to skip across fundamentals when teaching progressively. The following two scans are from a Character Dance (Character being a style based loosely on some European folkdance…a different problem…). I wanted to emphasize the intricacy of the instructions/notations; or rather, the gaps between the language used to describe what’s going on and the various levels of knowledge that are left out. I’m curious about the extent to which these problems come up in other pedagogical scenarios, especially the verbal ones we are generally ensconced in these days. Of course I could say more, but that problem was what nearly got me kicked outta ballet.