Ebb and Fow: The Interactive Art of Teaching

Samantha Prigge
Drama Department
Stellenbosch University

Benjamin Franklin is credited with stating: “Humanity is divided into three classes: those who are immovable, those who are movable, and those who move.” In my current capacity as senior lecturer in Movement and Physical Theatre in the Drama Department at Stellenbosch University, and in my past capacity as freelance choreographer, dancer and dance educator, I fall naturally into the category of ‘those who move’. But of course Franklin’s statement is more than literal, and my belief is that an educator should be both ‘one who is movable’ – capable of remaining emotionally and intellectually fluid, adaptable and open to suggestion – and ‘one who moves’ – with the capacity to innovate, initiate, activate and inspire those who are fluid enough to follow.

As a young lecturer I wanted to answer every question that my students posed admirably, showing no chink in my armor-of-knowledge. But knowledge deepens into wisdom with experience, and I am now excited by questions that I can not answer easily and directly. I now recognize that ‘playing the fool’ is not equivalent to ‘being a fool’, and playing the fool is anything but foolish. The former is a conscious, deliberate act of receptivity in which old information is treated anew, potential problems are reviewed as creative challenges, and uncomfortable situations are allowed to ferment and give rise to innovative connections and unexplored associations. Playing the fool is an act where the limitations and boundaries of those that don’t know (including the ones that should know) become the inspiration for innovative and relevant theories and practices. In this way, the practical requirements and dynamic outcomes of classroom teaching become the points of origin for ongoing investigations and research outputs.

When I was first appointed as Movement lecturer in 1996, my experience in the professional sphere encouraged me to include contact improvisation as a module in undergraduate and postgraduate training. Contact improvisation is well known and fairly well established in many American and European countries as a tool for dance training and choreography, as well as an aid in alternative realms of psychological therapy, physiological healing and social work. In South Africa, however, this form of improvisation – which could be described as something like a ‘partnering dance’ / martial art / team sport rolled into one – was still relatively unexplored. Although today there are several practitioners offering it on an ad hoc basis within tertiary institutions, or using it as a training tool in professional companies, its rebellious origin (as a creative response to the more repetitive, standardized dance forms prevalent in America by the 1960s) has prevented it from being labeled and codified. Thus, although an experienced practitioner may well observe certain mutually agreed upon principles across disparate practicing groups and individuals, there is, as of yet, no internationally agreed upon curriculum for the training of contact improvisation; there are no generic outcomes, exercises, assignments or assessment methods, even though it has been included as a subject in the Dance Studies component of the National Arts and Culture Curriculum.

My husband (a freelance performer, educator and entrepreneur) and I were both introduced to contact improvisation as students simply through observing international physical theatre companies employing it in performance. Without a curriculum to follow, or specialized practitioners to train us, our approach to learning was a haphazard method of trial and error which worked because we were semi-professionals with a shared experience in gymnastics, contemporary dance and partnering work, and with lots of play time at our disposal. But, as I discovered when I started teaching, this same haphazard method was not time- or energy-efficient with the less experienced first- and second-year students – many of whom had not come into contact with any kind of physical training, sport or otherwise, during their childhood – and within the time restrictions of a general drama module.

My husband and I took up the challenge of working backwards, of deriving essential outcomes from this multi-dimensional movement experience that could be articulated clearly, demonstrated repeatedly, applied diversely and assessed fairly without denying its creative, fluid and individual nature. Although the form is based on maximizing natural principles of human movement, including gravity, momentum and friction, and does not rely on predetermined steps or choreographed phrasing, its effectiveness as a teaching tool relies on maximum exposure to, and first-hand experience of, clearly defined parameters. In this way, the more obvious meaning of the word ‘research’ was employed: as a process of searching again, of uncovering and remembering what is already in existence, but has not yet been given sufficient focused attention and critical rigor.

A ten-year process of experimentation, innovation, assessment and application with students drawn from differing year-groups, training backgrounds and specializations culminated in the development of over 45 original practical exercises – with clearly defined outcomes, assessment criteria and a unique vocabulary – that could be effectively incorporated into a Theatre Skills module. The research process was taken a step further with the production of a content-rich interactive CD-ROM entitled ‘Fluxing: the ebb and flow of contact improvisation’. The title reflects the fluid and interactive nature of contact improvisation, but is also a reflection of the continual and dynamic interactions between learner, subject, researcher and teacher that gave rise to this teaching tool. The CD-ROM includes a five-minute video documentary, over thirty minutes of originally devised practical exercises and more than a hundred pages of text with photographs, images, philosophical discussions, practical descriptions, troubleshooting tips and a glossary. The individuals used to demonstrate the exercises on the CD-ROM were students that had formed part of the original research team, and had been trained in contact improvisation using the same exercises. A few of these individuals are now professional practitioners and educators – including my two teaching assistants.

The CD-ROM was formatted using an electronic publishing application called NeoBook – a user-friendly, relatively inexpensive application which allows for multi-media electronic publications. The CD-ROM is used to complement a six-week Movement module in the second-year Theatre Skills course, the third-year Physical Theatre project block, as well as more specialized studies by postgraduate students.