Christy with James Madison University students, September 2016

Christy as a Fulbright Scholar with students from the Escola Superior de Dança, Lisbon, Portugal, December 2019

When teaching Contemporary Technique I work with somatics comparatively, accessing Laban Movement Analysis, Bartenieff Fundamentals, Irene Dowd’s Functional Anatomy, Alexander Technique, Qi Gong, Skinner Releasing, and Eric Franklin’s conditioning. Over time, students build familiarity with these modalities and by the end of the semester they are tailoring one or more of these practices to suit their individual needs.

When teaching Composition and Choreography, I turn again to multiplicity-for example developing five possible outcomes for any given choreographic set up. I encourage students to examine how their belief systems and politics subtextually inform their choreographies. I press them to own their directing choices as reflecting these beliefs. I use processes such as Susan Rethorst’s Wrecking to shake up agency and to expose habits.

I facilitate and prioritize student-generated discussion, and steer the class dynamic toward a more vulnerable, horizontally-shared power structure. In the dances I make, I recreate the world as I want it to be. In the classroom, I do the same thing by advocating for an inquisitive approach to the physical body, promoting students’ inner teachers, validating personal movement styles, identifying habits and patterns that may or may not be serving us, and instilling students with the discipline for and the rewards of daily practice to ensure their longevity in the field.

Christy’s teaching credits include: