As she prepared for her ballet class, Adeline Lefèvre began to set up the tables and chairs in her home, creating a makeshift barre to practice on. Then she logged onto her computer to start her class via Zoom.
“[The professor] will just watch us on our little Zoom screens and give us corrections, which is really awesome because I think that’s the closest to an in-person technique class that I can get,” Lefèvre said.
Lefèvre is one of many University of Oregon dance students who are adapting to online classes for spring term. With classes usually taught in spacious studios, dance students and professors must now navigate the challenges of online learning in their own homes.
Related: “Snail mail, games and meditation: How UO professors teach in-person classes from home”
Maia De La Torre-Mackin, a first-year student at UO majoring in dance and pre-journalism, is currently taking a modern dance class.
Reflecting on her experience with remote learning, De La Torre-Mackin said, “Weirdly, it has worked out well because [the modern dance class] is not really instruction-based. It’s very much about your own movement patterns.”
According to De La Torre-Mackin, each week, the professor will post an instruction for the week and the students will create a dance and write a reflection about the prompt.
“This week we’re playing with the idea of beauty and dance,” De La Torre-Mackin said. “So we have to write a reflection about what you think beauty is, and then we go film ourselves dancing or improving to that idea of beauty.”
A common challenge for many of the dancers is the lack of physical interaction during classes.
Lefèvre is a senior at UO, double majoring in dance and human physiology. Along with her ballet class, she is taking a contemporary dance lab.
“I think the challenge is just that we can’t be in the same room together and that we can’t have that physical interaction, which is such a huge part of movement practice,” Lefèvre said. “Direct physical or vocal feedback is super critical to me in progressing technically and also to me progressing artistically.”
Amber Noel, a third-year dance major at UO, feels similarly.
“It’s been really difficult to not be in a studio with others,” Noel said.
Not only has Noel had to adapt to online classes, but she was also supposed to perform and choreograph a piece this term and now has to learn and teach choreography through an online platform.
Noel described the situation as a “blessing and a curse” when she found out the performances were still happening, just in a different format online.
“I was really, really bummed out because I had to pretty much change my entire plan for my piece,” Noel said. “But it’s going smoothly so far, and it’s going to be outdoors so I’m excited to see where it goes.”
Despite the unfortunate circumstances, Noel reflected on the unexpected benefits of learning remotely.
“We’ve kind of been given free rein to be creative and explore things for ourselves, so all of our experiences are really individual and really unique. It’s really inspiring as a choreographer and as a mover,” Noel said.
Brittney Hietala, a senior dance major at UO, is also choreographing virtual routines for the Student Dance Concert, which would normally be a fully-produced live concert, but is now happening virtually. She has already produced an individual screendance reflecting social distancing.
“It’s just me dancing and it’s about the idea of rejecting ‘social distancing’ and replacing it with the phrase ‘physical distancing and social solidarity,’” Hietala said. “Just because something may be different, we can still connect in all these ways.”
Hietala is also working virtually with a group of students on another screendance that focuses on connection. She said she had originally planned to include lots of partner work, but had to change the choreography entirely.
Despite the challenges, Hietala said that the dance community is trying its best to stay connected.
“Everybody in the department has been so supportive it’s been great really just having professors that have been like, ‘We feel you. We understand you. We’re here to help and really listen.’” Hietala said. “Everyone’s still being connected. All the seniors are still together, online, so that’s really nice.”
Shannon Mockli, a dance professor at the UO, shared that she is very impressed with how her advanced dance students are adapting to the changes.
“[Students] are re-tooling their creativity and expanding their notions of choreography to make virtual dance works, using remote methods to communicate with dancers,” Mockli said in an email. “All with their phones and all engaging the creative process in entirely new ways.”
