News Story 2 (Edited)

Dance Majors Seek Curriculum Changes from Department

By Emily Katz

February 22, 2011

Keen on further improving their technique, the freshman dance majors at Eugene Lang College submitted requests on the Fall 2010 teacher evaluation forms for the dance department to offer more levels of dance technique classes and for an additional ballet class a week to be added to the curriculum, thereby prompting the potential program changes to be materialized.

“[Classes don’t] have to be [from] nine to five, but we need more technique classes,” Natalie Marrero, a freshman Dance and Education major at Lang, said. She and her fellow classmates voiced their requests for a third ballet class per week on the teacher evaluation forms for Mary Carpenter, the instructor for Ballet Technique 1.

Generally, dance majors take Modern Technique 1 and Ballet Technique 1 in their freshman year and move up to level two for both dance styles respectively in their sophomore year. In their junior year, dancers can take Modern level three but have to repeat Ballet level one or two. By their senior year, dancers have to inevitably repeat courses for both styles of dance.

Bach Mai, a BAFA major and a senior at Lang for a B.A. degree in Arts in Context with a Dance concentration, is currently repeating Ballet Technique 1 with the freshman dance majors. He wishes there were four levels of modern and ballet technique classes so that one’s skills can actually build up. “In an ideal world, we would have more technique classes so our technique can actually improve,” he said, “cause it is not.”

The freshman dance majors at Lang study four and half hours of Modern technique and three hours of Ballet technique per week.

Mary Carpenter, the instructor for Ballet Technique 1, recommends eight hours of ballet technique classes a week for serious dancers. “Students cannot improve at all with just two ballet classes a week. It is just a fact,” she said.

Being a liberal arts college, Lang’s dance program is not a program for professional ballerinas. Liberal arts colleges’ dance programs usually cater to those who wish to pursue academics as well as dance, and thus do not prepare the students for professional careers in dance. Danielle Goldman, the Dance Department coordinator at Lang, said, “We want to train dancers to be able to consider dance in a social and historical context, to gain diverse understandings of the body, and to be able to articulate their artistic choices.”

At Lang, academic and liberal arts classes receive equal weight with the studio dance classes. During the four years of a dance major’s college career, only nine credits of studio technique classes are required. The dancers satisfy the rest of their track requirements by taking Aesthetics, Anatomy and Kinesiology, Improvisation, Choreography, Dance History, and four Integrative Arts courses. Rather than training dancers to replicate existing idioms, the Lang dance program seeks to train dancers to think critically about their art.

The advantage of liberal arts dance programs is that it offers dancers more flexibility to explore other interests, take other liberal arts courses, or even double major. Unlike the dance conservatories in the country that offer Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees, Lang offers its dancers a Bachelor of the Arts degree. However, dance majors at Lang do not earn a bachelor’s degree in dance; rather they graduate with a B.A. in the Arts, with a Concentration in Dance.

When asked about the role that technique classes should play in a liberal arts dance program, Ms. Carpenter said, “I don’t think students should be in [technique] classes every minute, but if we are calling ourselves a dance program, technique classes need to have their due.”

The dance department is only allowed to offer thirteen courses a semester under the course master code LDAN. According to Ms. Goldman, the department is currently going through some changes, and there have been conversations between the dance department and Simonetta Moro, the Chair of the Arts. There has been talk about adding a third ballet class to the Fall 2011 curriculum for Ballet Technique courses. Ms. Goldman also alluded to a possible gathering of the dancers and the dance faculty sometime this semester. She sees the dance family get-together as an opportunity for all the students and faculty to get to know each other even better and to exchange ideas on how to improve the dance department.