Josephine Jewkes, “Teaching time...”
	Josephine Jewkes, dancer with Rambert and formerly an ENB Principal, writes each month on the "dancing life". Link to the previous column Link to later column. end of January 99 The New Year saw my first foray into teaching classical ballet when I accepted the offer of giving three classes to the graduating students at Central School of Ballet. In order to contribute something worthwhile to their development, I dropped in to watch a class beforehand to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. What I saw was a group of disciplined and conscientious dancers who were very preoccupied with precision, rather at the expense of covering space or expressing the music with different movement qualities. These are typical shortcomings in ballet studios and companies, especially in this country. I also felt that they were not using the floor deeply enough and therefore their plies were not 'juicy'. Plenty to build the theme of my classes around then. Fortunately I have a good collection of writings on teaching by the 'greats' such as Vaganova, Cecchetti, Preobajenskaja etc. as well as a lot of classes which I wrote down throughout my dancing career. Woytec Lowski also left his manuscripts to me containing years of his wonderful classes. All this 'ballast' behind me helped to give me confidence to construct my own classes inspired by this and, of course, my own observation and experience. Something which I was determined upon from the outset was to make sure the exercises were 'healthily' put together, following the logical rule that one does not plie, rise or jump on one leg until you have prepared the body on two legs. This may seem to be logical, but many teachers do not follow this pattern and it always irritated me when I was dancing. Perhaps I will come to understand them later, but my favourite teachers seem to follow this rule. Other ambitions I had were to heed Maria Fay's suggestions about not letting the injured students (who may have to sit out part of class) vegetate in a corner, but rather to encourage them to use their brains and powers of observation to educate themselves by bringing their attention to various points throughout the class. There are three sorts of teacher: the first type can walk into a studio and create a beautiful class on the spot with no previous preparation - Moheen El-Wakil can do this; the second type of teacher prepares every class in detail beforehand, often in writing - Woytec Lowski did this for twenty years; the third sort have a selection of classes which they notate from day to day as Enrico Cecchetti (teacher of Pavlova and Karsarvina) did. Not wishing to trust to my unknown and untried powers of improvisation, and not having a system to follow per se, I naturally fell into the second category and wrote down my classes so that I could learn them beforehand and refer to them should my memory crumble during the class. When teaching students one can be more experimental than when teaching a company (company dancers simply 'do their own thing' if they do not like the given class). I therefore began the class with the students barefoot (to feel their feet on the floor) facing the barre and practising their breathing (ballet dancers often do not breathe properly). Developing further, I had them doing simple demi-plies facing the barre in first position, pushing the feet into the floor and breathing out to straighten their knees and eventually rise. This simple movement is the motor behind every releve and every jump and is a much-neglected area in ballet technique at the moment as Balanchinesque tendu technique and speed are the big themes. I attempted to encourage the students to use full, generous epaulement (another neglected area) as well as a full, generous plie to enable them to cover space. This extra fluidity should then feed into the musical expressiveness, giving them a broader range of movement 'colours' to reflect the excellent accompaniment. (If dancers cannot match the range of a piano accompaniment, how feeble will they appear with an orchestra behind them?) It was an interesting experiment for me, but I felt very handicapped by my still-painful hip which restricted any demonstration to the barest minimum. This is not necessarily a bad thing (except for the pain) as students can pick up bad habits from a less-than-perfect full-out demonstration, but my lack of experience meant that this was a valuable resource which I missed. After the first class my corrections to myself were: to set the exercises even more clearly, resist the temptation to correct everybody all the time (calm down, stop buzzing about so much) and to check the number of injured dancers before class, as half of them were sitting down by the jumping section. When I asked about injuries before the second class, a long queue formed and I was horrified to hear the litany of knee and foot operations, hip bursitis and back strains. Doubtless I am super-sensitive about injuries at the moment, but so many serious-sounding problems worry and depress me ("It's not worth it" I was screaming inside). So much pain and yet I could not see an overflowing love of moving to music which is surely the only reason to keep going in such an unrelenting world. If nothing else, I hope that some of them were reminded of the FUN of melting to an adagio or soaring in a grand jete. It is over so quickly - a few photographs or a cringe-making, crackly video to remind you of the sensation of freeing your body to the torrent of music, and that's it. Dancers live for the moment and the intensity of the moment should be what makes it all worth while. I found the role of teacher interesting, nerve-wracking and oddly lonely. My present fragile psychological and physical state is not a good one in which to make big decisions, and so I plan to 'coast' for a while, hoping to heal myself and see what interests and possibilities emerge. As I am due another injection for yet more calcification and Rambert are witholding my statutory sick pay for 2 months to cover an overpayment, I am considering a part-time sedentary job to keep body and soul together. Real world, here I come.
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