My Question..

After a useful email from Alan Durrant suggesting I hone into my Question slightly deeper and asking the question from different perspectives.


Firstly with analysing the question....


"Does having a qualification/degree benefit a performers transition into teaching and choreographing easily?''


These have just popped up in my head and with the help of Alan Durrant also-

• What does this actually mean????
• Who will find this transaction 'easy?'
• Who will this benefit?
• What would be the benefit?

Will a performer obtaining a degree successfully pursue and develop a career in teaching? The aspect of building a career based on Dance is a difficult one as there is so much competition practically. 

However, I do believe that when educating the mind in more depth within Dance, it can improve the ability of the dancer. Using history and the renowned names to instruct and teach the children/adults the correct way techniques in performing such movements without the cause of an injury. Understanding that this does not apply to every dancer and teacher, knowing some teachers that just gone from dancing to teaching as used their experience as a learning base of trail and error. 

Luigi style. In Northern I trained with the Luigi style of Jazz to trained my body for simple but effective movements. This all was taught by our teacher David Needham who worshipped the art form and history of the moves. As we all thought it was very old school but an excellent way to learn and develop our ability in dance.

The word 'Easy' is an opinion. Easy can be used differently in many terms and from each individual creative person. Using the word easy can offend students, As a dance student I had to work hard on my flexibility and the word easy was never used. Whereas many of my fellow dancers found it extremely easy to "wack their leg." As this was a personal experience, Generally I never use the word as to offend somebody who is struggling on one part, more often I say 'the step is less difficult.'

The word easy in my question states that moving from a dancer to a teacher with a national qualification should be obtainable. However, would every dancer be capable in such written work? As I have blogged before dancers are practical people and less writing is ever done, would other dancers find this difficult? Why can you not just teach the knowledge you already know from past experience and be recognised in Schools?

Benefit- I have asked whether having a degree would benefit a teacher, but will this qualification still benefit the teacher when all the curriculum has changed? When would the benefit happen? Will Dance keep changing and developing on better techniques? Having experience could help a successful dancer become a teacher or having the experience and the background in dance help a teacher become slightly more valuable.

I am beginning to believe my question would have to be broadened to be open to a bigger group of people. Questioning my question is giving me widen thoughts, that not everyone would feel the same about this and it wouldn't apply to everyone. It has made me critic myself to having such a small minded question using words such as Benefit and Easy. Analysing and looking deeper has given me the thoughts that using these words gives me a smaller target group and this could never really ben answered. I have to change the opinionated words.

My question is directly at dancers and performers that have a background in education and handling the thought of a degree or written work. Achieving my answer to my questions leads me to believe that after reading Steph's interview process that I should interview professional dancers who are currently teaching now and dance teachers with no experience in performing but more experience in teaching classes.