Dancing has long been one of my favorite pastimes. Even if it’s just a little shoulder or hip action to the beat of a song, dance has a way of awakening the senses through the embodiment of sound. Without fail, dancing gets me out of my head and into my body (which is good for when I cannot move past certain thought processes). I dance in my car, in my room, at the store if there’s a good song on, etc.
While in grad school, I wrote a brief assignment on how dance worked as a metaphor for teaching through the aspect of performance. I cannot fully remember the thoughts I articulated in the assignment but my guess is that I wrote something like ‘both teachers and dancers must engage in a certain amount of physical embodiment in their respective performance spaces’. Professional dancers have a physically strenuous engagement with the body, but it is the allusion of ease in a performance that shows the power of their talents. With teachers, their aura and/or physical body impacts the learning space in a minute way compared to dancers, but from posture to non-verbal signals, understanding movement through the lens of dance is interesting to think about, in terms of how we play in the classroom, and elsewhere.
All that to say, dance combines internal rhythm, musicality, and overall the importance of creative expression; which is why, when I need an extra boost, I put on some pop, funk…you name it and get to moving.
Jamie's Portfolio 
Leave a comment