The American Dance Festival is one of the most important festivals and summer training programs in the United States. 2015 marks the 82nd year of ADF. Please join us on the blog this summer as Leah Cox, Associate Dean, offers a window into the festival through her lens as artist, teacher, administrator, and audience member. To read Leah's artist profile, click here.

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Photo: Grant Halverson   © ADF

Our last Choreolab class was Friday, July 24. Over the past week, I understood that this moment of ending would arrive, and it made me aware of the desire not to provide closure, not to tie things up with activities that would package our learning in distinct ways. It could be said that this is irresponsible, but I think, if framed properly, it teaches something that we don’t always have the opportunity to learn in a class setting.    

If I think of educational structures from a dramaturgical stance, their format—individual classes that form a course occurring over a distinct period of time within an academic institution of some sort, usually with some form of final deliverable (a showing or a grade)—often imposes a fairly rigid trajectory. We educators are expected to fill that time period in a way that is often without room for negotiation: final grades require deliverables of some sort, or the finality of the course itself implies a summation of the learning that has gone on within them. Responsible pedagogy often states that we provide students with moments of such closure. As the end of the course draws nearer, we shift the learning process from one of investigation to one of culmination, and we consider how to provide closing statements. To enable everyone involved in the class to “go away with something,” we package the class in a way that makes it self-contained. We teachers often express to students the sentiment that the learning is ongoing and that the end of the class doesn’t mean the end of their relationship with the course’s contents. However, the actual summary activities provide a different subtext: "The course is closing, and we are moving towards making the information concrete and available for your reuse at a future date. You can refer to it and use it as you like, but it’s not necessarily part of your active life anymore. You’re moving on. You’ve graduated.”  This is all very useful and important as a structure for teaching and learning.  

It’s also useful to allow students to experience what it means for different timelines to coexist by divorcing closure from ending, or to understand ongoingness as an alternative to ending. In Choreolab, I was interested in providing students with an opportunity to experience ongoingness by resisting closing activities. When new ideas arose in the last week of class related to something we were working on, we pursued them regardless of our ability to allow them ample development. On the last day of class, we worked with new ideas that we could only begin. (Perhaps this might be called a cliff-hanger version of concluding!) This way of relating to time and ideas echoes my lived experience of making dances. New developments, interests, and ideas continue to arise even as a creative process for a given work forces that piece to emerge onstage. Creativity and curiosity don’t have timelines; they are ongoing, with their own ebb and flow that works within and exceeds the timeline of distinct projects.  

By detaching closure and ending from one another, I hoped to give everyone in the class the option for ongoingness, to allow the investigations we had pursued to be processes and not concepts that could be captured and put away. I wanted the various practices and ideas to continue to fester in a way that might force each of us to keep working them, chewing on them long after we go our separate ways. Combined with our work on embodiment and phenomenological approaches to making, I hoped this pursuit of ongoingness would reinforce to students that they have the skills to continue to work on these ideas—or any new ones that come their way at a future date. We spent our last moments feeling full of all that still had to be done, wondering how on earth we would tackle them, and yet knowing we had—or would figure out how to develop—whatever we needed in order to do so.  I’m not sure if that’s closure without an ending, or ending without closure…

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