The instruction of Aleta Hayes and the Chocolate Heads Movement Band
(Chocolate Heads) increased my confidence to learn. This community encourages
public exclamations of recognition, or what Erving Goffman refers to as
“Response Cries”.
Just as most public arrangements oblige and induce us to be silent, and many other arrangements to talk, so a third set allows and obliges us momentarily to open up our thoughts and feelings and ourselves, through sound, to whoever is present. Response cries, do not mark a flooding of emotion outward, but a flooding of relevance in.
- Erving Goffman, “Response
Cries.”(1978, p. 814) [Formatting
added]
I sit in the Graduate Community Center laughing out loud while reading, “chuckling
aloud to ourselves in response to what we are reading is suspect; this can
imply that we are too freely immersed in the printed scene to retain
dissociated concern for the scene in which our reading occurs.” (Goffman p.
791) I make more “exclamatory interjections” (Goffman p. 800) since becoming a
Chocolate Head and I feel less obliged to be silent because expressive
outbursts are encouraged and appreciated among us. I approach life with more of
a willingness to learn and celebrate my mistakes in hopes of inspiring others
to join us. Aleta Hayes builds a company in which every artist (dancer,
musician, lyricist, technologist, director…) plays a part in the overall
construction of the piece. The style of collaboration used to choreograph our
movement is daringly complex, and wonderfully simple. It cultivates confidence,
learning to learn, and creative construction in a superior manner than I have
encountered in traditional learning environments.
Ray McDermott and Jason Raley made the claim that, “the social world is
built by people working together, and by their work we can know them.” (2011,
p. 388) and John Dewey warns that, “It is not enough just to introduce plays
and games, hand work and manual exercises. Everything depends upon the way in
which they are employed.” (1916, p. 3) There are myriad activities that Aleta
Hayes has our group perform, and this analysis is an attempt to connect my
learning in the Chocolate Heads Space to Dewey’s ideas around “Play and Work in
the Curriculum” (1916) and McDermott & Raley’s insights around “Human
Ingenuity” (2011). In their piece entitled, “Looking Closely: Toward a Natural
History of Human Ingenuity”, McDermott & Raley explain, “To fashion a
natural history approach, we state a problem, make a claim, and promise a
better way to proceed.” (p. 374)
Problem Statement
Often when teams
are working together, there is a lack
of trust needed to have effective
collaborative interaction. It is easy to doubt oneself or others. It is difficult to allow
oneself to be vulnerable.
Teacher-student interactions are a prime example of work between collaborators
who need to develop trust. McDermott and Raley describe the current extent of
that relationship (p. 381):
From the child’s point of
view, the day is spent arranging to not get caught not knowing something and/or
getting caught knowing something at just the right time. From the teacher’s
point of view, the day is spent finding failure while, at the same time,
preaching the availability of success for all and trying not to degrade those
who look less able.”
As far as ingenuity is concerned, McDermott and Raley
assert that “official school environments either make ingenuity appear scarce,
make ingenuity a refugee phenomenon, or bend the purposes of ingenuity toward
the pursuit of being seen being able.” (p. 387) How might we increase the level
of professional trust between collaborators, and will they
perform with more human ingenuity
once it is raised?
Claim
People want to build trust and be a source of ingenuity. People
enjoy spending time with their friends, family, and acquaintances because it is
more comfortable to be around others with whom we share reciprocal trust. We
often behave more playfully in trusting settings. “Persons who play are not
just doing something (pure physical movement); they are trying to do or effect
something“ (Dewey, p. 10). Work and play are not disjoint.
When fairly remote results
of a definite character are foreseen and enlist persistent effort for their
accomplishment, play passes into work. Like play, it signifies purposeful
activity and differs not in that activity is subordinated to an external
result, but in the fact that a longer course of activity is occasioned by the
idea of a result. (Dewey, pp.
11-12)
Promise
There are better ways to develop trusting relationships in learning
environments. Great teachers organize events to scrutinize people’s activities
and gain what McDermott & Raley describe as ability to, “see
accomplishments, critiques, and frustrations where others have seen only
disorder and stupidity.” (p.375) Aleta Hayes and the Chocolate Heads
incorporate methods that approach this promise and arrange events to promote
human ingenuity. “Given the materials and persons and moments at hand, what a
person does is ‘ingenious’ if it transforms those materials into something
interesting, fun, or new.” (McDermott & Raley, p. 387)
Observation
Collaboration
plays a pivotal role for dancers. If each individual movement doesn’t synch
with the whole group, the effect can be emotionally discordant. However, when
the movements are harmonious, the resulting expression becomes sublime. There
is a lot of pressure on choreographers because dancers need rehearsal time to
perfect a performance. This time constraint causes many choreographers to
develop whole pieces before working with the dancers, and leaves little time to
make adjustments based on the dancers’ abilities. However, that culture divides
“dancers” and “choreographers”. This division makes the role of the dancer
mimicry and memorization. Subsequently, most dancers aren’t allowed the freedom
to contribute to or alter the performance.
The notion that a pupil
operating with such material will somehow absorb the intelligence that went
originally to its shaping is fallacious. Only by starting with crude material
and subjecting it to purposeful handling will he gain the intelligence embodied
in finished material. (Dewey p. 5)
Aleta agrees. The
resulting choreography, music, and visual design of the Chocolate Heads
Movement Band become an amalgam of the “crude material” that each individual’s
particular talents helps mold. They develop individual parts that change with
time. They mix and combine different elements from each artist's part to build whole
movements. There is an overarching structure of a story, but it is loosely
constructed and freely changes day to day. Aleta emphasizes the feeling of a
movement over the idea of a narrative. Dancers practice and iterate on their
choreography while the instructor circulates the floor and critiques each
routine. Aleta recognizes what looks good; and when she sees it, she has
dancers teach each other the appropriate way to perform a movement. It
constantly develops through this “purposeful handling” as an artistic production
being orchestrated by a great teacher. It begs the question, what is the
underlying mechanism that allows Aleta to create such a creative culture among
artists who have often just met?
Of course there
are numerous confounds: Stanford students are motivated, artists and dancers
self-identify as creative, the Bay Area is full of unrealistic optimism and
positivity, but there is something different about the Chocolate Heads even
when compared to other dance groups on Stanford’s campus.
 |
| Fig. 1 |
Chocolate
Heads have a culture of connectedness.
On
my second night dancing with the Chocolate Heads (and for many of them, it was
anywhere from their 10-20th rehearsal), I found it interesting that
when Aleta came to help this pair of dancers (Fig. 1), she noted that they were
not doing as well in her presence than when she was glancing at them from
across the floor. It was a very astute observation and an example of the
inviting, honest, and loving way that Aleta nurtures a relationship with us. My
interpretation of this was that the connection between the students was
stronger than their connection to the instructor at that time. She was building
trust, and after making the imbalance explicit, the dancers embraced the
confidence she instilled in them. Aleta then arranged the whole group to focus
on our connectedness. For inspiration, we watched a clip with professional
dancers who were so connected that they moved as if they were "one
body". Imagine a group of twelve dancers making uninhibited “response
cries” when the relevance of connected movement hits them all at once. To help
foster this among us, she had everyone move in sync through different
activities: traversing the floor in groups of four with the “same foot-fall”, having
each member create a movement and asking each group of four to “copy dancer
____” while maintaining the “same foot-fall”. Near the end of our rehearsal
session, and in the beginning of subsequent sessions, we perform synchronous
movements to get in-tune with each other’s body. We make "waves",
create “seas”, and develop trust for each other.
This process is an ongoing acculturation. I produce movement with this
group part-time, and started this school year late (in winter quarter).
Nonetheless, I have been embraced by the group’s loving energy, and feel myself
growing both as a dancer and team member. My continued involvement has exposed
me to some of the ways that Aleta pushes each individual dancer to pull the
desired expression out of themselves, and the qualities that make her an
excellent teacher:
· Public Recognition with Repetition:
“Whoa! Look how ____ did it! Do it again, everyone watch.”
· Fostering Creativity with our Bodies:
“What else can you do? No… what else? YES!”
·
Attention to Detail, Noticing Bad Habits and
Targeting Mismovements: (“Stay in your heels”, “sexy is an inside job”,
“from the outside in”, “from the inside out”, “five-pointed star”, “out your
toes”, “out your hands”, “flex your feet”, “point your toes”, “get up like a
dancer”, “be the master of all that you survey”, “honey hands”…)
These are important points, because it is Aleta’s expertise and ability to transform us
as dancers that solidifies our trust in her and each other. She demonstrates
these qualities as a teacher and successfully leads a group of artists to
organically synthesize an endless array of new ideas. Her orchestration is an
act of ingenuity, and as a result of it, she enables her students to behave
ingeniously in turn.
References
Dewey, John (1916). “Play and work in the curriculum,” Democracy in Education. Pp. 194-206.
Goffman,
Erving (1978). “Response Cries.” Language, 54: Pp. 787-815.
McDermott,
Ray & Raley, Jason (2011). “Looking closely: Toward a natural history of
human ingenuity.” In E. Margolis & L. Pauwels (eds.), Handbook of Visual
Research Methods. Pp. 272-291. Sage.
Appendix
A: Theory Drawings
Finite or Infinite Games?
Who is "Yourself"?
