Author: Gemma Harman on behalf of the IADMS Dance Educators’ Committee

With the next annual conference in Helsinki fast approaching, it seems timely to reflect back on the Dance Educators’ Committee’s blog posts that have been shared since last year’s meeting in Houston, Texas. This year has seen a vast array of posts created by dancers, educators, researchers and clinicians on sharing the current happenings in the field of dance medicine and science specifically aimed at educators and teachers. These have included blog posts on the use of imagery in creative practice, measuring creativity and the use of attentional focus and constructive feedback on a dancers’ training and performance.

Starting in January of this year, there were a series of blog posts by experts in dance imagery and creativity. The first post by Katie Pavlik introduced simple and immediately usable ways for us to embed the use of imagery in our classes from both teaching and dancing perspectives. Klara Łucznik and Rebecca Weber blog on Mental Imagery and Creativity then offered ways to start practicing thinking creatively and presented ways to increase our awareness of the types of forms of mental imagery that we engage with in creative practice. As part of the In The Dancer’s Mind research project into creativity, novelty, and the imagination, the project has developed a set of workshop materials for use by higher education choreography teachers, which you can download here. The next blog post was written by Lucie Clements and discussed the measurement of creativity. In this blog Lucie discusses her research that set out to validate a new questionnaire that removes the emphasis on measurement of ‘creative’ or ‘not creative’ and instead emphasises engagement in the process, to give a more holistic view of dance creativity. A second post on creativity recreated a discussion between Kerry Chappell and Jon May derived from a duel held at the symposium for the In the Dancers’ Mind project at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance on December 7, 2017. Details of the In the Dancers’ Mind project can be found here.

In June, Karine Rathle’s blog post explored the use of constructive feedback in optimizing dancers’ performance and learning, highlighting how knowing more about how to cue and provide feedback to dancers is an important aspect of teaching practice. In a second blog post on feedback, Claire Guss-West provides a brief introduction to attentional focus and its potential impact on dance training and performance. The most recent blog in June was by Martha Wiekens, introducing a brilliant new resource paper on the shoulder complex, which has been written by Lisa Donegan Shoaf and Judith Steel. You can get the full resource paper here. Keep an eye on up and coming blog posts in the coming months – there are some great ones planned for teachers!

For those of you coming to Helsinki, Jarmo Ahonen, Host Committee Member has provided a great blog to give you some insight on Finland as a country and Helsinki as the capital. You can read this blog here. A Day for Teachers looks set to be a great day of informative sessions and food for thought to take back to your studio. You can see the schedule here and book here. Here's to a great conference– see you all there!

Gemma Harman, PhD, FHEA is a Senior Lecturer in Dance and Dance Science at the University of Chichester, UK. Gemma is also an Academic Tutor at Bird College of Dance, UK and a Lecturer at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, UK.