Rūta Pūce*

Judith K. Steel is Associate Professor in Department of Dance and Choreography at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU in the USA). Steelholds an M.A. in Dance from the University of Colorado and is a Certified Movement Analyst through the Laban Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in NYC. At VCU, she teaches Contemporary Dance, Improvisation, Choreography, Anatomy for the Dancer and Dance Science. Ms. Steel was a Fulbright Scholar in Fall 2024, teaching dance and choreography in Riga, Latvia for three months.

Steel worked mainly with dance students from Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music and Dance but also gave a workshop at the Riga Ballet School and met dance students from the Latvian Academy of Culture. We have a lot in common and our chat in a cafe near the park, at the end of her time in Riga, was vibrant and full of joy. We shared our perception of teaching methods and approach to the dancer’s body. Steel’s teaching approach is clean and precise. She leans more towards human anatomy leading into aesthetics during her dance class and that inspired me to analyze my own teaching methods.

Rūta Pūce: Observing your workshop at the Riga Ballet School with ballet and contemporary dance students, I noticed that you give valuable information for a dancer to understand their own body, anatomically. What is the most difficult aspect in that kind of approach to teaching?

Judith Steel: In my experience, you have to learn from the inside, not the outside. And the problem is – integration. You know – the information is there, but it doesn’t always really flow and merge with the dance training. Because it takes time and planning – how to integrate. A dancer needs time to change movement patterns, but a dance teacher needs time to plan an approach and a pedagogy that supports that.  I am still grappling with that. Because as teachers, we also have to create dancers who can maximize their physicality, not just lie on the floor for an hour and internalize. 

How you describe your approach to dance pedagogy?

I think of it like a sandwich. A sandwich has many layers – protein in the middle, filling, etc. You can explore all the levels, but what is the actual ‘thing’? What is the most essential element upon which other things hang? To move in ballet or contemporary? I keep reducing it to weight and the connection to gravity. It is the first thing.

So, if I must design a class, I try to create a lens or main focus. Other things can come into it, but if I’m teaching a technique class and I don’t want to stop the class (to maintain a certain level of energy), I will embed that prompt at the beginning like a sandwich. And then I’ll come back to it during other tasks and say: “Hey, there is the same idea as in the beginning, here it comes again”. Now let’s do this phrase.  With that idea, I keep embedding the same thing through the class. This is how I try to figure out the teaching. Instead of teaching pieces, I try to embed the anatomy, integration of the parts, flow and weight throughout the class.

I constantly try to integrate, synthesize and consolidate. How can we package it, unpack it and then package it again. The more I learn about the patterns of thinking and motor learning, changing your thinking, is a big part of it.

How can I teach to change a way dancers think?

I give students choices – you can do this or that – you have to make a decision for yourself, which one feels better, which one do you want to allow rather than force? Let’s try A and then B. And that is really quick feedback for a dancer’s body. Dancers can discover themselves and that creates a somatic loop. Dancers discover it in their own experience, you didn’t tell them. And that makes progress.

How do you work with students from different backgrounds and levels ?

So, for example I give a little movement phrase with going into the floor which everybody knows. Everyone is doing it. We speed it up, then everyone find a partner and they watch the partner doing it. And they see that they are doing it differently, there is immediate feedback. And then I see who is doing it differently or having difficulty doing it, and then I can remind the one thing for everybody, the weight of a head for example, to think of that, and test it, and understand it in this phrase. Everybody works with that, no matter the skill and I see progress immediately in this specific thing.

Tell me about your experience in teaching here in Latvia

During my time in Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music, there were different levels and my job was to work with that. And I saw resistance, where some dancers said: “I do this, but I don’t do that and I’m not going to change that”. But I also got feedback that some of them loved how I keep giving them information how the body works so that they can understand better what are they doing. Rather than forcing them into specific style of moving, I am trying to provide universal body information. I am not forcing the aesthetic I enjoy most. I’ve been here for 3 months and there have been struggles, but I think we made it and I think they get it. I am not judgmental about anybody’s previous dance experience training, even if we dance different styles. I noticed that folk dancers in ballet class had incredible articulation and capacity in their lower body, but the torso needs bigger work – a connection how the limbs feed into the core.

We just finished a project with the Academy’s jazz ensemble. We put dancers and musicians to collaborate where they made duets. The work had a timing and collaborative structure for movement phrases. And it worked very well, because structure is an objective thing, and it helped both the dancers and musicians to hear and see structures in their different disciplines….to understand the form. But in terms of what movement they chose, some of it was based on their favorite aesthetic and one’s idea of beauty. And the opposite, if one is improvising, it could become repetitive. Or, if one keeps moving without a strong focus and intention, then the feeling dictates the form and we lose an overall point of view. Does this mean it is more “contemporary”?  I think improvisation takes a lot more work than what dancers realize; to practice this skill…. how to focus while inventing movement using variations on space, energy, time, weight.  This is the stuff of dance manifested in different ways as you devise frameworks.

The students take so many courses – history, musicology, pedagogy, very academically strong. There is a lot of talking, lecturing, but not as much process work, doing, and exploring. You can lecture, but one needs to apply this is an experiential way, because we’re talking about the body. A lot of teaching and learning is really front-brain based, which is useful and important, but dance is more about the back of the brain and emotional centers, intuition, connections. How do you put those two worlds together?  That is a question I ask myself. 

Your experience is also in dance science, how you integrate mind (science) into body (dance)?

My experience with Science people is – they are more clinical and more academic. I teach a dance science course with a physical therapist, so we have art and science together. And there are two of us and we keep pushing – the cognitive approach is this, but what does it look like in the laboratory – what happens in the dance studio with this science information? We make it applicable to dance training. We use scientific concepts to inform what we are doing, for instance, we are looking in physical laws of the universe – leverage, momentum, gravity, energy. So, we look at the laws of physics but immediately we translate it to dance. That’s what I love about it. There is a huge body of knowledge in science that directly connects to dance, if we can actualize it and embody it.

The brain records patterns. Like if I learn pliés and do a certain sequence, my brain learns that pattern in a neurological way. When I think about that next time, my brain will ‘fire’ a set of nerves and muscles to repeat that pattern unless I want to change it. Then, I must take it out of my ‘movement memory’ brain an reprocess or relearn it. That’s why it is hard to unlearn a pattern. And that is motor-learning.

So, you have to change your thinking to change how you do the movement, That is why we have to go back and look at ‘how do I start a movement’…. what do I have to change in the pattern to move better and safer.  A synapse is when two nerves have grabbed onto each other and send a signal to a muscle- it is hard to undo it. And the nervous system is chaotic; you have to slow down, breathe, regroup, in order to create a new pathway. That fascinates me. People who work with somatics like “Body Mind Centering”, like “Alexander Technique” have tapped into something that is very very true to how the body works. Alexander says “pause before you do the movement – notice what your shoulders do, how you breathe and then do the movement”. You pause before, because otherwise the movement is just a reflex of what you already know how to do.

In dance teaching also – pause or reverse. You need disruption to change something. We love disruption as choreographers, but it’s the same thing in a technique class. If you are used to doing it in one way, disrupt it! In terms of phrasing, you can completely change the timing. You change a placement of the emphasis. A lot of diversity – change in direction, change in timing, change in space, gives students a chance to re-strategize and challenge their nervous system which allows for more fluency and proficiency rather than how we did it before. If it is not working, then disruptions are good.  Students have many ways to challenge themselves and enhance their performance-  get out of the swamp of sameness and ‘auto-pilot’.

How can we be sustainable in dance body wise?

When I was a young dancer, I had a few injuries.  If I had to sit out because I was injured or in pain, that devastated me, so I learned how to change the way I move. I needed more information, not just doing more exercises, I needed to change the way I was working. It also asks for patience – to recognize and to discover, what is the real problem. I had to investigate – what it is that I can do differently.

Every body is different; the bone structures, the proportions. So here is what we are aiming for, but how everyone gets there is different. We might have to find a modification to a movement that fits your body. I think giving people permission to find what fits your body and giving them encouragement can improve their performance.

The definition to sustainability is to move your body through the least amount of stress on joints and tissue as possible. It requires body conditioning and flexibility. How can I find ease in the body, what do I have to do? And that goes back to that basic – where is your head, where is your tail, where are your feet? They say (like in Alexander technique), if you can find good head and foot placement, everything will kind of fall into place. I think everyone can move well if you work with that.

When I look to a dance company I want to see diverse body types. We can’t all look the same on the stage, we have to allow for differences, but you can’t be messy about it. You have to know what you are doing

How do you live through the moments when you are disrupted yourself? When do you have the feeling that everything is different and you have to change your own patterns?

Somebody once said, ‘you go through seven-year cycles’. In 7 years’, time, with something like we do (becoming a dancer), things change, you ‘hit the wall, you find you are not evolving, and then something needs to shift – the way I am dancing, the way I am thinking, or the way I am teaching, or choreographing. So, I back off, step away from what I know. And somehow – look for new information, ask questions, take workshops.

In my personal journey I hit a wall at one point and I decided I needed to do a better job. I’ve trained in ballet, modern, there are years of dancing, so I decided to go back to school. I taught in England, at the Laban Center but then I heard about Irmgard Bartenieff and so I enrolled in the certificate program in New York City in Laban movement studies program.  Irmgard came to the U.S. from Germany and was a physical therapist; she started using her ideas of how the body works and about kinetic chains and how you organize the body through the fundamentals, using Laban’s principles. It was a lot about working with the whole person, so you are not just isolating body parts. For example, my leg is lengthening downward, but what happens with my arm? It is integration work, more of connectivity and less of just exercises. Coordination of movement that goes through the body’s kinetic channels.

Irmgard taught that there are core principles in creating functionally efficient and expressive movement.  You explore on the floor but then you have to get up and experiment in space. That’s what I love about this process of working with principles; and then others keep practicing and develop ideas to further it. But it has to come from a solid core base, you can’t just slap it on from outside. I kind of have a problem with teachers who borrow something from some techniques, practices and just put it into their classes without understanding the fundamentals, the basis, because you don’t really know where it is coming from. Deep learning and deep investigation takes time.

What can you recommend to new dance students?

A holistic approach…dancers are passionate…tap into what resonates, what is the feeling of the movement? Try out all forms of dance.  When it comes to making dance, enjoy exploring movements and trying out lots of different approaches. Avoid making pieces as if making a necklace – here is a pearl and here is next one. No matter how great the pearls are, it is still linear. No complexity… or becomes 2-dimensional losing the fullness of the expression. If it’s short, it can be sweet, but it is really hard to build connections with a linear approach.

Big picture in the body, big picture in the composition. Controlling and then letting it loose and see what happens. Control and release and that is what movement is. What is stable now will soon be mobile. There is no such thing as an isolation. Everything is connected.

To be a valued dancer you need all of these skills – improvisation, composition, technique. You need to be an intelligent movement maker who can make decisions. We have to train creative artists.

The Artists!

Photo: Marta Ozoliņa

*Rūta Pūce is Latvian choreographer and dance teacher in Riga Ballet School’s contemporary dance department. She is also an editor for “Dance.lv Journal” and board member of the Latvian Dance Information Center.