Residency Story: They Won't Dance, Don't Ask Them

sidebar to Artists and Teachers Partner for School Reform
This story appeared in High Performance #71, Spring 1996.

Choreographer Celeste Miller has plenty of stories about how the arts can be used in schools in surprising ways. Here's a good one: During her 1995 Jacob's Pillow residency at Monument Mountain Regional High School in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, Miller had her choice of classes to work with. Noting that dance residencies are most often relegated to the P.E. classes, she decided to experiment with a Natural History class. The class teacher warned her that his seven 11th Grade male students were notorious troublemakers, were unlikely to graduate and certainly wouldn't dance. "Let me at 'em," said Miller, and the first thing she told the students was that they wouldn't have to dance, she was the dancer.

She began with questions about their class routine, and the students described their observation walks in nature, the last one being around the pond. As they talked she took notes, not only on their words but on their gestures. ("One guy kept going 'There was this frog!'—clapping his hands and shooting them high in the air," says Miller.) Asking them to go deeper, she got them to compare their observations in nature with feelings about their daily lives, sparking some poetic connections.

Then she went to her studio and returned the next day with a dance work made up of their words and their gestures. "Their self-esteem," she says, "skyrocketed. 'You mean you made that from what we said?'" They were even more elated when she requested their permission to show the dance to the rest of the school; the only time the other students heard their names was over the p.a. system when they were being requested to report to the principal's office. The students were so inspired they started firing off ideas for expanding the piece and creating other dances. ("What if you tried.....") The best part, says Miller, was that it didn't matter that they wouldn't dance, they had skipped over that step and become choreographers, illustrating how the arts spur students to grapple with abstract thought.

Here is the poem they created together. You'll have to imagine the choreography.

Natural History Class

I just spent two days with some
people in a Natural History class
in the Berkshires

Being with them was

like a pond—
cloudy on the surface with secrets hiding underneath.

These people get to spend forty minutes a day,
Monday through Friday,
with a teacher they call Hag.

We know about plants and trees and growth and change.
We go outside and hike around

and one boy has this thing about

frogs.

They know things like
stirring up a pond only makes it muddier.
You can just let it be
and the mud will settle
and the top water will clear
and underneath are the secrets, life, mystery.

Some days are like sinking deeper and deeper in the mud.
And the pond reminds you of death.
There are rainy days that make you crazy.

Sometimes
what makes you crazy
is carelessness,
violence,

there's
no
party.

Sometimes it's more than that.
It's having
no one to talk to
no one that will listen
no one that is there for us.

I just spent two days with some
people in a Natural History class
in the Berkshires.
They like
to snow ski and water ski
skateboard and snowboard
ride motor bikes and dirt bikes as
fast
as they can.

Some like sports and girls
one likes to drum
and one
likes to look at the stars and think

And they all know that sometimes you just feel like
getting down on one knee and saying

Thanks.

—Linda Frye Burnham

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Original CAN/API publication: December 1999