An interesting chapter
that I read in Julia Buckroyd’s book ‘The Student Dancer’ (Dance Books 2000)
highlighting many of the main issues that many trainee male dancers often face.
I read this book prior to me undertaking any teaching throughout my time as
dance ambassador for Matthew Bourne’s Lord of the Flies, as a means of gaining
a better understanding when teaching young males students, many of whom had
never participated in a dance class before. I also reflected back on my own
experiences when I was a dance student. I was often subjected to negative comments
from my peers because I attended dance classes, although these comments were
nothing more than narrow –minded, immature remarks, at a vulnerable age of ten
I often questioned if dancing was wrong for a boy to participate in and I
decided to keep my dance training a secret. This particular extract taken from
the book highlights the situation I experienced during my early training days
and throughout my experience working with the dancers during LOTF I can safely
say that it still exists today…
“ They described a wide range of ways of dealing with the reactions met. The commonest had been, and continued to be in some cases, to ‘keep
it a secret’, ‘keep it quiet’. One boy described how when it became knownat a new school that he did dance, he was subjected to a campaign of
mockery and bullying to such an extent that he gave up dance for a number of
years and had since been very careful about who he told’ ( Buckroyd 2000: 133)
This chapter also acts
as a support to my question “Is there a stigma attached to young male dancers?”
as a large part of this chapter focuses on the prejudices and stereotypes that
many male dancers are expected to be homosexual. As stated..
“ A great deal of the
verbal abuse had been to label the boy a sissy,like a girl, and
therefore homosexual. The boys reported that theyhad been called a
'wuss' ( current abusive term in Britain for homosexual male),
'poofs', 'poofter'. 'twinkletoes', 'gay'. They quoted explicitly comments such as 'you're a girl, you do ballet', 'if you do ballet,
you're a wuss'. (Buckroyd 2000:132)
Another article that I
read is called “Dancing Inside”. It is written by dancer Vanessa Cook and she
talks about her experience of working with inmates at HMP Dovegate Prison. I am
interested in this particular article as I believe it interlinks with my
experience of working with the male dancers in Matthew Bourne's LOTF and the
idea of bringing dance to those males who had never experienced dance or
participated in a dance class before. This is a specific interest of mine, and
something that I would like to develop throughout my career as a way of
breaking down the stigma attached to male dancers and introduce more males to
dance. I can also relate to Cooks way of inspiring and motivating the dancers
by disguising traditional dance movements with sport influenced movement. By
using imagery from sports such as football, table tennis and basketball we were
able to breakaway from traditional dance movement and encourage movement and
confidence within the group. By using sport related stimulus, we were able to
keep the movement 'masculine' and associate it with their everyday lives. It is
a really uplifting article to read and it coincides with both of my questions,
I have found it to be the most useful when researching my question “ How do you
inspire and motivate young males to dance?” see the full article below....
http://www.article19.co.uk/feature/dancing_inside_pt_one.php
In relation to my third question and “ Can
dance be used to develop academic performance?” I bring your attention to the
following article http://danceplus.uk.com/the-role-and-value-of-dance-in-education.
This article highlights the importance of
dance within the national curriculum and identifies the benefits physically,
academically and socially that dance can encourage. The article discusses the
idea that dance should be a core subject within itself and not purely looked
upon as an extended version of physical education. This is something that I
agree with as I believe that my own experiences with Matthew Bournes LOTF
introduced new concepts of teaching as we took a traditional novel and taught
it through the language of dance outside the conventional classroom
environment.
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