What is in this moment? What is showing up today?
Musings on Hope, Dance, and Teaching with Molly Heller
In early January, as the winter/spring semester had just begun, I got to catch up on the phone with University of Utah assistant professor Molly Heller. I had recently finished a magical 7-day asynchronous improv practice, facilitated by Molly, entitled Love Letters, and I was looking to her to help bring us into the next teaching semester with feelings of curiosity and hope. Molly and I were picking up and continuing the conversation we had started back in August 2020.
JR: What are you teaching this semester, and please remind me, what did you teach last fall?
MH: This fall I taught remotely, although some University of Utah courses met in person. In the fall, I taught Advanced Improvisation (for undergrads), a graduate level Pedagogy course, and Technique. It was a mixed level technique class, primarily for the juniors. It was also an option for students who wanted to take technique online versus in person.
This spring semester, I am teaching a Socially Engaged Art Making course for the Masters of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program for K-12 teachers (asynchronous), which is a heftier graduate level class. This is the second year teaching this particular course. I am teaching Technique again, for the seniors. I also teach Thesis Research Studio for our second year Modern MFA students who are preparing for their thesis work.
JR: What does engagement look like? How do you know when your students are engaged, in this new way of teaching and learning?
MH: Engagement is continually about transparency of involvement and clarifying expectations in this new virtual environment. I am exploring engagements that have a structure to them and a new rule system we create together. Honoring both their time and my time and the degree participation can happen. For example I might request, “I expect you to have your camera on for the full length of technique class. If you are unable to do that today, here is a second option. Please record yourself on your own time and send it to me.”
If I am overly focused on engagement, it is exhausting, and I feel like I am never satisfying anyone. If I avoid or ignore this aspect of class then focus, structure, and connection go out the window.
Communication now becomes even more of a 2-way street. Diverse modes of communication have now become engagement. Engagement is also taking responsibility for where you are and how you can show up.
JR: What about the topic of agency?
MH: I think agency goes hand in hand with engagement. The more agency you have, the more engaged you are. You care. There is a desire.
Priming the ability to respond. Agency is also not a free-for-all. You don’t have agency if you don’t know the container or structure. All humans have the tendency to stretch boundaries and test things. If you provide the walls to contain the practice and empower creative thinking/action, then students have agency to test perimeters.
JR: What are some movement themes and guiding questions important to you right now?
MH:
-What does it look like to do exactly what you want to do?
-What does it look like to break your own rules?
-What does it feel like to create connection with your immediate environment, home, and neighborhood?
-Movement prompts that pay attention to where and how your world gets shaken up for a second. Vibrancy through sound; changing your clothes. There is a comfort state being at home, but sometimes that can feel flat. If I can be reminded of something else beyond familiarity, then I want to move my body.
-I cannot change up my location, but what are ways to change up my senses? What is available to me?
The shaking up, feeling something! Wanting to feel something.
-Or, do a dance for someone else (but you don’t have to tell them). Partnership.
-Or, write down a list of tasks for yourself.
If I have some sort of rule or prompt, then I want to participate. There has to be some kind of impetus. Especially right now. I have to create some sort of structure to move within.
JR: This moment is all about, “For what, for whom?”
MH: And, “Why?”
I think about moving to survive. Right now moving is not about a product, but doing it for myself. Doing it for survival.
Sometimes the “act as if” nature helps me. In my imagination, for example, I am doing this dance for my best friend today. Finding reasons to care. Accountability (even to the invisible).
JR: How would you say you have grown as a teacher over the past year?
MH: Directness. This is something I have always been working on. How can I be more direct in my language. Maybe even how I could be a little simpler. Right now our capacity to hold info is on overdrive. Distillation and directness — what am I really saying? What do I really want to inspire?
I think I trust myself a bit more and what I have to offer. I am isolated and don’t see colleagues in person, and I miss the peer feedback process. Even though the tenure process can probe at self conviction, I am trying to trust what I have to offer, and trust that the students are receptive to that and want to be here.
Maybe I have grown in not being as timid. I feel a bit bigger in spirit. The moments of connections are really meaningful to me.
JR: I am thinking about an interview I did with University of Utah professor Abby Fiat a few years ago and this beautiful idea that “the learning environment has kept me whole.” Here is the full quote:
Learning is risky business. You are going through a treacherous landscape with peaks and valleys inside of it. In some ways, the learning environment has kept me whole. It has allowed me to feel full in my life, and human. It has given me an opportunity to get a perspective in this building and outside this building (both in my personal and professional life). With my students, there is an affirmation — “This is where you are. This is where you are right now.” And in that moment, that’s enough. They as people are enough. It’s not that they aren’t going to keep risking and stretching and growing, because they are.
Does any of the quote resonate for you at this moment?
MH: Always! I credit Abby as part of my teaching lineage. I studied with her and assisted her in pedagogy classes. She was a significant part of the first couple of years of my graduate studies. She had an influence on the way I think about my teaching and its holistic nature — how to really pay attention to people. It does not always matter what your material is for class, if it is not backed by the human component. How to see people fully. I learned this idea so much from her. Effortlessly and truthfully doing that. I very much connect to the quote.
It also speaks to her integrity. Her actions and words line up. If she said something, she lived it. I think about that in terms of my evolution as a teacher. I want students to build trust with me, that we are both aligned in action and in words.
Learning is risky because it is inherently courageous. You cannot look away. You cannot pretend. It does not allow us to hide. Then it is endless. Once you step into learning, then there is infinite possibility! And no going back from that place of inquiry.
JR: My last question is about HOPE. What is your hope for the dance field, and the future artists you are working with in your courses?
MH: Hope is in our imaginations. Priming students for confidence in imaginative design. They are the ones who are creating the next steps. In a way, boosting them to be creative thinkers and to empower them through their unique creativity. A belief in all of their skill sets.
The future is “multi.” Dance is important, but the singularity of it we have experienced prior to the pandemic…I think that it is going to have to become more of a complex web. Loosening up the preciousness of dance — our language around it, the spaces we present it.
It is not dishonoring what we did pre-Covid. But to sustain the field, complex thinking is necessary. And to have complex thinking, true change, evolution, and sustainability, you have to take a break. I feel as an artist a need to pull back, to reassess how to contribute to radical change.
I hope we are all asking these questions, and allowing our students to be asking these questions, and allowing them to lead the way.
Hope has become more of a daily practice than a long term goal. What is in this moment? What is showing up today?
To find out more about Molly Heller, please visit her website.
Also, check out the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company show HOME RUN, streaming now through March 11, 2021. HOME RUN includes Molly’s piece with the Heartland Collective and Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, “FULL VIEW.”
