Open College of the Arts website more Trog reviews

As I have recently completed this course, I am in a good position to write something about it...

As with all courses offered by the Open College of the Arts, you very much get back from the course, what you are prepared to put in. Some of the college's courses carry university accreditation, that is you can earn higher education credit points, which may be put towards a university qualification. The Understanding Dance course is not one of these; it is a course that you undertake for the pure pleasure of doing so. This is study that you do just for that warm gooshy feeling inside.

To quote from the college's prospectus :-
"This course is a broadly-based introduction to a very wide range of activities. Dance lies at the very heart of human society; whether you are interested as a spectator or participant, this course will deepen your understanding of fundamental aspects of the human body in motion."

After enrolment, you receive the course materials in the post. These are a course handbook, a video cassette with clips of many different kinds of dance, an audio cassette with some music clips, a sheet of photographs of dance, a book of interviews with many luminaries of the British dance world (including David Bintley, Christopher Bruce, Siobhan Davis, Wayne McGregor and Shobana Jeyasingh), and a copy of the book Ballet and Modern Dance by Susan Au. It is worth taking the course for the book of interviews alone!

This is a correspondence course. As part of the course you are asked to keep a log book, which you send to your tutor three times for marking. The style of this log is entirely up to you. Mine was largely a series of essays. It could have been a series of audio or video tapes or other media. It is just a method of recording your work. The prospectus states that if you spend 5 hours a week on the course, you should complete it in 6 months. It took me a year to complete mine. Part of the delay was caused by the pressures of life. Later I suffered a lack of motivation. I did however complete the course and overall I feel all the better for it.

The course is split into eight chapters :-

• Ways of Looking: Awareness and perception

• Ways of Feeling: Your body and its action

• The Dance Map: What are dances for?

• Western Theatrical Dance: Time, place and type

• Making Dances: Methods, choices and attitudes

• The Craft of Choreography: A new work

• Social Dance Through the Ages: 12th-19th Century

• Social Dance Today: Your final project

Each chapter looks at a different aspect of dance. The first asks you to list as many kinds of dance as you can. I managed to list 46 but I have since realised that there are many more forms. Also in this chapter you are asked to categorise movement and perhaps to record movements. Anyone who has tried to describe a movement on paper knows how challenging this can be. You are also asked to create your first dance. Oh yes, there are partical as well as theoretical aspects to the course.

The second chapter is looking at the human body. I personally found this an easy and interesting chapter, as I am extremely interested in all aspects of the body, fitness, body awareness and stretching. The research materials for this chapter are very easy to come by. We all have ready access to at least one human body, which we can observe in motion. You are also asked to experiment with dance, inspired by water. While I was doing this, I came to the realisation that juggling (one of my interests) and water share a close relationship. While I will not expand further on this, I will just say that I found this realisation very stimulating.

The third chapter is (to me) basically an extension of the first.

I found the fourth chapter very interesting and I suspect that other ballet.co-ers would to. You are asked to give plot synopsis for the big six classical ballets, La Sylphide, Giselle, Coppelia, The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker and Swan Lake. I went a bit berko here and managed to write 32 sides of A4. Well it is a subject I am interested in. Later in the chapter you are asked to look at Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, modern American dance (Isadora Duncan, Ruth St Denis, Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey), modern European dance (Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, Hanya Holm and Kurt Josss), Merce Cunningham (so important that he rates his own section) and finally modern British dance.

Chapter five gives you the chance to investigate how dances are made. You are asked to imagine that you are choreographing six dances, which are categorised as :-

• Dances which are based on a narrative

• Dances which deal with human relationships

• Dances which follow a musical, poetic or dramatic theme

• Dances which are abstract

• Dances which deal with political issues

• Dances which are completely non-literal; made by chance

You do not have to produce a fully annotated Labanotation score, but just to describe them in broad stokes. I have a very blinkered view of dance, it just has to be ballet, and then it really must be tutus and tiaras. I managed to broaden my outlook a little here. For instance I tried to describe how I would present Verdi's Les Quatre Saisons with Latin/American dance. A part of this chapter also looks briefly as how dance is documented.

For the sixth chapter, you are asked to find a story for a dance and then describe how you would interpret this story using dance. This is a really good opportunity to get those creative juices flowing. You could, of course, continue on from the work undertaken in chapter five. I however decided to look an another story and describe it in terms of ballet, of course. I chose an Australian folk story and how this would be a ballet for us blokes to dance.

The final two chapters look at social dance through the ages, and I found these two chapters the least interesting. Early dance, from the medieval period (branles and farandole) I quite like, as I have interest in early music. Similar comments apply to the pavane, the galliarde and the volta from the Elizabethan period. After that I find it all gets a bit tedious, especially describing social dance today.

There are plenty of resources available for anyone wishing to take this course. The course materials are a good starting point. There are many books in libraries. The Internet is a very rich source of materials. The lazy would merely plagiarise, but the studious can use the web very effectively. Most of the material for modern social dance came from a couple of newspaper articles and the many flyers that get left on the windscreen of my car when I park in town on a Friday night.

The fee for this course is £330. Is is good value for money? Dunno! I certainly enjoyed most of the course and I did enjoy putting in the effort. Finding 5 hours per week was surprisingly easy. Working as I do in a boring office job and there is nothing much to do at lunchtime, I would just get out my course work and do a bit towards it. Of course, I started the course with much enthusiasm. I had lots of free time when I first started, but there were periods when the pressures of work and life meant that I couldn't put in the necessary time to produce an honest body of work. As you are setting your own pace, this is of no consequence. As I have previously said, I became unmotivated towards the end of the course. I find social dance quite tedious. You just go out and do it, you don't study it! Did the course help me to "understand dance"? Probably not. Did it broaden my horizons? Maybe. Did it give me that warm gooshy feeling inside? Yes. You do get a handsome certificate upon completion and I also have a couple of fat A4 folders sitting in my bookshelf.

Contact the Open College of the Arts on 01226 730 495 for further details. I also extend an open invitation to anyone who thinks that they might like to undertake this course to email me with any questions. You might even get a sensible answer from me!