Dance Kinesiology Special Interest Group Meeting
International Association for Dance Medicine and Science Annual Meeting
Stockholm, Sweden
November 2005

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Small group results
Margaret Wilson, recorder

Participants: Jarmo Ahonen, Steven Chatfield, Annabelle Couillandre, Morten Dithmer, Eric Franklin, Amanda Herman, Evangelous Koudigleis, Adrienne Nicolaides, Janice Plastino, Stephanie Saland, Margaret Wilson

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Where is field going and what to take forward?

• Janice Plastino -- Has students for one quarter – what do you teach them? Anatomy? Somatics, Efficiency? You try to get the information into their hands to incorporate safe practice in their body. Sees that technology is misplacing the emphasis on kinesiology and dance medicine because this is the new field where jobs are. Digital arts are taking over curriculums in universities. How many jobs list dance medicine and science as the number one thing they want to have you teach?
• Steven Chatfield– most are looking for dance teachers who teach Pilates or Alexander.
• Adrienne Nicolaides, PT from Greece – schools want her to teach anatomy to their students, but she would like to teach ballet students about trigger points to prevent injuries – is researching this and wants to share this information – simple information about how using their own hands will increase range of motion, pointe work.
• Morton Dithmer – working with Eric Franklin – seeing that somatics are not bridged into dance classes – dancers don’t see how it is applicable to technique. If you ask them what they want to work on in their technique, it generates interest in the work. Make it applicable and take the scientific facts and make it directly applicable.
• Eric Franklin – I teach somatics through technique, and at a somatic conference recently this was challenged. Feldenkrais teachers feel ballet is unhealthy, so why would I use that approach. I had a science background and Martha Meyers coached me to teach somatics. At the time I started I had to develop my method because nothing else was available. I looked at what people need – explain the body in anatomical way, but I didn’t have a body therapy to rest on. Everywhere we go we encounter a cluelessness in the dance students and teachers. We teach the students while the teachers watch, then the teachers get a class – see what we are doing with the students, then the teachers get a class.
• Janice Plastino – Because dancers get hurt, teachers will listen if they think the students won’t get hurt. I teach ABT summer schools. The children are open, but I have no say in who teachers are.
• Stephanie Saland – Pain and injury motivate students to learn about the body.
• Janice Plastino – choreographers will listen when someone is hurt. The kids know, but they can’t apply it in class. Not just ballet, but modern and jazz. I have to come back to it as a reality.
• Eric Franklin – Teaching starts with curiosity. Show them the benefit from their point of view. After they experience somatic or anatomical information and see how it directly relates, it does help my technique. Later on the injury part comes in.
• Stephanie Saland -- Asked the Post-Modern community – what is it that has kept people from coming to my class – my teaching of ballet is non-traditional. What is being assumed about what is going on in the studio as opposed to what is going on? Don’t want to engage with the learning process. How do you address attitude? What do you do when you have something to offer and people won’t listen? Where does this resistance begin?
• Eric Franklin – knows he has to go where people want to learn. Have resistance if you start the wrong way. You need to have a strategy for evaluating what they want. Do you want to improve performance – pirouettes, legs? Then they feel this is for them.
• Margaret Wilson – You as a teacher are in a unique position to talk to other teachers, especially ballet teachers.
• Stephanie Saland – Many people who teach have territory to defend, and it is not collaborative. Every time there is a collaboration it needs to be witnessed. (Like the work that Annabelle and Peter have done.) It is necessary and it plays out – it seems to be the way things need to work.
• Adrienne Nicolaides -- How do you present the information so that they want to follow you?
• Eric Franklin – I have developed this over many years. It requires inspiration, presentation and knowledge – you need all three. The atmosphere you create is very important. Let the students do the teaching. Students figure it out – this gets them inspired, involved. Throw the material at the students.
• Amanda Herman -- this made the material inspiring for me as a student – to get in and experience.
• Eric Franklin -- Sensing, processing, application – have to all three, or it won’t work.
• Morton Dithmer – the gap between what is here – between the movement sessions and presentations is self perpetuating. Especially at IADMS.
• Jarmo Ahonen – Where to go from here? We come to this meeting to be on the same turf as everyone else, to get that which we can’t get at home. Gives us a playground where we don’t have to only focus on one thing. Kinesiology gives people a chance to apply different disciplines and bring them together. The field where we play is applied knowledge. It is impossible to take this to dance unless it is applied. I enjoy IADMS because they don’t categorize. When I started teaching ballet students anatomy, after a few weeks they asked me what this had to do with dance. I had to find ways to break this down so people can understand that. It is good to remember that we are challenging tradition of several hundred years –they are protective. When I first got my Pilates certification – I sent letters to the company director – I knew the dancers would benefit so I taught them without pay – I taught them for one year twice a week – then some of the dancers talked to the director, he asked me if I would teach it, and agreed to pay me.
• Amanda Herman -- change takes time – when I first encountered anatomical images in ballet, that was not what I wanted to be thinking about – that is not pretty. It didn’t make sense, but since it was coming from my ballet teacher who I thought was wonderful and then I took kinesiology and thought this information was wonderful. Yesterday two people were talking about needing to teach the teachers. I feel like that the knowledge needs to be in place in the studio – it make take time to get to everyone.
• Eric Franklin – a class needs to be designed on the NUF principle: what is necessary, what is useful and what is fluff. When talking about the pelvis, at some time you need to talk about the hip joint. And you need something that is fun. Teachers need to have a lot of boxes they can pull from, to adapt to the student’s ways of learning. Need to cover anatomic, metaphor, kinesthetic learning experiences. You need to prepare your class on ‘nuf’. You prepare on SSD after that – select, sequence and dosage; everything has to be in place.
• Steven Chatfield – I see a lot of change when I address joints – arthrology – I am more focused on that, and the other big frontier is mind -- brain and mind. I read an article on retrograde transmission in brain cells. We thought that nerves connect only one way – but there is evidence that the post synaptic nerves communicate back to the pre-synaptic. I also teach in an institution where students have to take my class. I struggle with attitudes, but I have an opportunity to contact them at a certain point in their development. I have always worked with somaticists and I adopted this as a mission – I believe that movers know something that I don’t know- my job is to validate and help them understand what they are doing right.
• Annabelle Couillandre – watching the performance (professional dancers), I realized they knew what they were doing – we must not say this is not right, but just help and help them understand what they are doing.
• Steven Chatfield – people are intimidated by change – when I go into a class they think I am only thinking negative thoughts.
• Jarmo Ahonen – this seems to be coming down to one thing and that is respect of the dancer. I am so overwhelmed by the talent I see in the dance class. I think if we keep this in mind, we will try to help them understand, but they are very intelligent.
• Annabelle Couillandre -- working with Peter, and working with the dancers I am so impressed and I know he was impressed – we are two people and collaborate. I wish I could find some person to work with again in that way.
• Stephanie Saland – as a dancer I realize that the levels that you are working on are not conscious to you – the things that happen in one moment when everything is working well. The people who can help you discover that are important – it is an information system. The experience in performance – is not something that we cannot describe – that is why we call it dance.

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