Lisa Wilson
Lisa Wilson is Head of Dance and Senior lecturer in the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. Her research and teaching interests are in the fields of dance education, dance pedagogy, decolonial dance practices and African/African Diasporic dance performance. She convenes the Postgraduate Certificate in Education (dance) and all dance pedagogy undergraduate courses. Her publications include journal articles and book chapters in the Caribbean Journal of Education, South African Dance Journal, Research in Dance Education, Journal of Dance Education, Dance Current Research, Intercultural Education Journal and International Journal of Education and the Arts. In 2023 she was the recipient of the University of Cape Town’s Vice-Chancellor Excellence Award for Global Citizenship. This award recognises individuals or teams who have demonstrated excellence in living out the university’s institutional mission through areas of service, the pursuit of knowledge, the dignity of the human being and contributions to the common good. Her research and teaching aim to meaningfully connect her multiple identities and experiences as dance artist, academic, pedagogue, activist, advocate, mother, sister and human.
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identity. In the eyes of their gatekeepers, they also serve as instruments of decolonization, and cultural resistance against North Atlantic domination in post-colonial Caribbean societies.This paper will focus on pedagogical measures that four dance teachers from Jamaica, Grenada, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines have used in their vocational dance education context (two in a studio dance context and two in a higher education context) to give power to the Afro-Caribbean dancing body in vocational dance training, and as such resist the potential domination of Eurocentric, Western aesthetic values in studio dance education or, said in globalized terms, resists the unidirectional flow from the center to the periphery in vocational dance teaching and learning. These measures ranged from fusing the indigenous with the global in the artistic processes of dance making and technique training, to challenging narrow Western perceptions of the dancing body through their pedagogy and actions.
fixated on the concert stage, some student artists deeply resent having to take a mandatory dance pedagogy course. They strongly argue that the time and effortthey will expend on assignments and participating in a pedagogical course could bemore productively spent on building their technique or pursuing their choreographic fermentations. Those student artists who generally perceive some benefit in takinga dance pedagogy course often do so on the futuristic grounds of having a career backup plan. Rarely do they see pedagogical knowledge and skills as contributing to their growth and development as artists in the here and now. Fundamentally, I believe these tensions arise from students’ misperceptions that the domains of dance teaching and dance performance and choreography are mutually
exclusive. Students conceptualize an artist–educator dichotomy that blurs their ability to meaningfully experience, and optimally benefit from, how dance pedagogy, dance performance, and choreography reciprocally inform,
shape, and support each other. Among dance scholars, there is a commonly held viewpoint that such an artist–educator divide is not only fallacious, but counterproductive to the overall growth and expansion of an already marginalized and misunderstood field of dance (Kerr-Berry 2007;
Andrzejewski 2009; Musil 2010; Risner 2010; Stinson 2010). I also share this perspective and will argue in this article that certain knowledge, strategies, and experiences called on in dance pedagogy to nurture and develop the student teacher can jointly nurture and develop the student artist.
Books by Lisa Wilson
identity. In the eyes of their gatekeepers, they also serve as instruments of decolonization, and cultural resistance against North Atlantic domination in post-colonial Caribbean societies.This paper will focus on pedagogical measures that four dance teachers from Jamaica, Grenada, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines have used in their vocational dance education context (two in a studio dance context and two in a higher education context) to give power to the Afro-Caribbean dancing body in vocational dance training, and as such resist the potential domination of Eurocentric, Western aesthetic values in studio dance education or, said in globalized terms, resists the unidirectional flow from the center to the periphery in vocational dance teaching and learning. These measures ranged from fusing the indigenous with the global in the artistic processes of dance making and technique training, to challenging narrow Western perceptions of the dancing body through their pedagogy and actions.
fixated on the concert stage, some student artists deeply resent having to take a mandatory dance pedagogy course. They strongly argue that the time and effortthey will expend on assignments and participating in a pedagogical course could bemore productively spent on building their technique or pursuing their choreographic fermentations. Those student artists who generally perceive some benefit in takinga dance pedagogy course often do so on the futuristic grounds of having a career backup plan. Rarely do they see pedagogical knowledge and skills as contributing to their growth and development as artists in the here and now. Fundamentally, I believe these tensions arise from students’ misperceptions that the domains of dance teaching and dance performance and choreography are mutually
exclusive. Students conceptualize an artist–educator dichotomy that blurs their ability to meaningfully experience, and optimally benefit from, how dance pedagogy, dance performance, and choreography reciprocally inform,
shape, and support each other. Among dance scholars, there is a commonly held viewpoint that such an artist–educator divide is not only fallacious, but counterproductive to the overall growth and expansion of an already marginalized and misunderstood field of dance (Kerr-Berry 2007;
Andrzejewski 2009; Musil 2010; Risner 2010; Stinson 2010). I also share this perspective and will argue in this article that certain knowledge, strategies, and experiences called on in dance pedagogy to nurture and develop the student teacher can jointly nurture and develop the student artist.