Luna posed this question on their blog a few weeks ago. I’ve been mulling it over.

When I think back to my dance classes in college, so much of what I grew up unquestioningly accepting, learning, and trying to perfect was a codified system of movements and rules that, from the teacher’s perspective, were necessary in order for me to dance without injuring myself, and accurately replicate / recreate / reproduce the movements and style of dance that s/he was teaching us. And that was OK. In fact I quiet enjoyed it (and still do).

Later I crossed paths with a dance theatre artist / professor / mentor figure (a kind of a revolutionary in our department at the time) who had a different perspective on what technique was. His view of technique was more particular. He viewed it as “cultivating the skills that you need, to be able to do what you want to do, as an artist, without injuring yourself.” I really connected with that definition, and even more so when I started creating my own work as a dance theatre artist. I realized that there wasn’t tremendous overlap with the skills I had learned in my technique classes and the skill set I had to cultivate to do the work that I wanted to do on my little 4x4 box in the middle of a bar.

I guess the big difference is that with the latter view, you start with the question first. You start by asking “What do I want to do / say / express / communicate as an artist? The answer to that question dictates the skills you need to cultivate in order to do it well and safely. With the former, you learn the vocabulary of the style (a codified movement system) first, and then see what kind of sentence you can put together with what you’ve learned (the phrase / the piece).