Analyzing the Aesthetics of Dance Instructional Design: An Example from Greek Traditional Dance Teaching

Abstract

Within the context of dance education, the quality of students’ learning experiences during instruction affects their ability to coordinate body and mind effectively. The more these experiences are invested with emotionally motivated expectation, the more pervasive will students’ occupation with dance be. On this premise, the learning of dance is realized as a continuous process of aesthetic understanding, appreciation, and evaluation of the form of dance, as a learning object per se. Such a perspective upgrades instructional design to the level of art making, where every dancer can experience the aesthetically acceptable and “beautiful” while participating in dance lesson activities. The review of relevant literature shows that the application of solely reproductive practices in dance teaching cannot support the establishment of a learning environment that is rich in aesthetic experiences.The aim of this paper is to analyze those principles that should govern dance lesson design so that dance teaching can have the impact of an aesthetically elevated experience on every student dancer. With Greek traditional dance at the background and under the prism of modern socio-cognitive and aesthetic theories, the attributes of aesthetic teaching practices are reviewed. The design and implementation of a newly established method, the Laban Notation method for Teaching Dance, is used as an example. The author's objective is to add a new perspective to the design of dance teaching-a perspective that will balance student dancers' potential between passion for performance, conceptual appraising and personal identity.