TEACHING

© Julie Lemberger

When presenting information or suggesting areas for investigation, Greenberg employs a ‘possibilities-in-the-field’ approach, with the understanding that dance and the body are arenas of contested meanings, with no absolutes on which to rely. He encourages each student to try ideas on for size, while retaining the ability to choose what is best for herself or himself. His teaching is influenced by his work with Janet Panetta (ballet), Susan Klein and Barbara Mahler (Klein Technique™), RoseAnne Spradlin (Body-Mind Centering®), and June Ekman (Alexander Technique), and by his studies on teaching and learning with Alan Mandell at Empire State College. He currently holds the position of Professor of Choreography and Dance Program Coordinator at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts, and has also served on the dance faculties of the University of California, Riverside, Purchase College and Sarah Lawrence College, facilitating classes in composition, improvisation, and movement practice. Greenberg has served as artist-in-residence at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Minnesota, George Washington University, Teatro alla Scala in Milan, Greenwich Dance Agency in London and in Budapest and Taiwan under the auspices of DTW’s Suitcase Fund, and has conducted composition workshops through DANCEbank in Los Angeles, the International Summer School of Dance in Tokyo, and SUPA, a program initiated by Susan Rethorst and Paula Kellinger at Wilson College in Pennsylvania. He facilitated the Bessie Schönberg Laboratory in Composition at DTW in 2003 and conducts annual composition workshops through Movement Research in New York.

Dance-Making

A workshop for choreographers and others interested in dance-making processes, with the goal of exposing, distilling, and amplifying each artist’s individual voice and aesthetic point of view. Participants are asked to develop palettes of materials—movement, ideas, questions—through directed improvisation and/or other means, and to experiment to find strategies of organization so the material has the greatest potency to the dancemaker.

The workshop relies on discourse, both choreographic and verbal, as a means of critical reflection of our own taken-for-granted assumptions about dance and choreography, as well as the assumptions of the traditions in which we each participate. An aim, here, is to gradually move each discovered assumption from a place where we are ‘had by it’ (captive of it) to a place where we might instead ‘have it,’ and can be in relationship to it, presenting us with new awarenesses and increased possibilities.

Potential points-of-departure for investigation and class discussion include: How the audience builds a theory while watching a dance, what constitutes dance-events in each artist’s work, how events are framed within a dance, issues of consonance and dissonance, choreographing the relationship with the audience, and participation or non-participation in existing traditions.

Greenberg also opens his own choreographic process for study, revealing varied influences such as his inceptive aesthetic education with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, somatic techniques as movement liberators, and approaches of discontinuity from experimental theater and film. Individual mentoring is also available.

Improvisation

Greenberg asks participants to consider and collaborate with as much of ‘what is’ as possible—the body, time, space, sound, other dancers—in the creation of considered and specific dance moments. He utilizes concepts drawn from his study of somatic techniques—such as Klein Technique and Body-Mind Centering—as points of departure for directed improvisation and open investigation. Participants are given time to experiment with the physical and theoretical information, and to explore the continuums of leading/following, articulation/connection and conscious/subconscious decisions.

Improvisation is put forward as an arena for discourse, and an opportunity for the examination of the aesthetic values and assumptions behind improvisational decisions, preferences, and habits. Goals include fully individualized and idiosyncratic dancing, and an increased ability to make instantaneous choreographic decisions.

Potential points-of-departure for investigation and class discussion include: the distinction between representing and doing; the variety of foci to which the performer can attend—including an experiential awareness of the performer's own body (presenting an infinite number of possible proprioceptive foci); consideration of the inherent vulnerability in the act of performing; and the cultural implications of how the performer chooses to present himself or herself to an audience.

Movement Practice

A warm-up drawing largely from Greenberg’s study of somatic approaches, such as Klein Technique and Body-Mind Centering, is followed by an application of these concepts to both familiar and unfamiliar movements, including sequences from his choreography, and/or via directed improvisation.

A primary focus of Greenberg’s use of somatic approaches is to help the dancer find a connection to the floor from which she or he can stretch and move out into space. Greenberg also encourages the student to consider body systems in addition to, and in conjunction with, the prevalent skeletal/muscular model.

Attention is given to sharpening the dancer's awareness of time and energy, to educating the body to move with specificity, and to augmenting the dancer's range of qualitative possibilities.

Repertory and Performance

Greenberg works with the participants as he works with dancers of his company, developing new movement with them and/or teaching them movement from his existing choreography.

Dance materials are developed with the help of video techniques—learning movement ‘verbatim’ that has been improvised for the camera. This process involves gathering information from a source external to the body, a two-dimensional video image, and translating this to a three-dimensional, real and idiosyncratic physicality. Work is then begun structuring the material into choreographic sequences through which the dancers can experiment with performance skills.

As points-of-departure toward investing the movement with varying performance possibilities, Greenberg presents information and exercises from somatic approaches that influence the movement, as well as methods of presentation from experimental theater and film that influence the performance style.