teaching practice

Creative research underpins my pedagogy and student mentorship.

Prior to my home at UW-Milwaukee, I worked in Los Angeles for 18 years where I was a choreographer, director, performer, dance educator, and Pilates instructor. I founded and was artistic director of LA-based company Oni Dance from 2003-2013 and taught Postmodern Dance at UCLA’s Department of World Arts & Cultures/Dance from 2001-2012 as well as being a lecturer and commissioned choreographer at several other universities. What I have synthesized over these past 3 decades of creative research, I now hone here at UWM in collective community with the students and my community. This work is grounded in a praxis I continually evolve in collaboration and interweaves these approaches: 1) embodiment and embodied subjectivity as nexus for the translation of language, narrative, and metaphor in dancing bodies, 2) experimentation with technology and new media as method for enlivening personal archives within auto-ethnographic research, 3) interdisciplinary collaboration as the site for creating community performance collectives, 4) improvisation performance methodologies, and 5) applied creative somatics toward transformative justice and abolitionist teaching. These choreographic and collaborative methods inform and reveal stories of migration, restoration of my erased Mexican ethnicity, body as site for liberation, and embodied storytelling that heals as oppressive histories are retold and rewritten. Each year, I mentor students in choreographic research through UWM’s Student Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF), within which I explore the methods above as students gain experience developing their own research mission. My specialties as a professor lie within composition and creative/choreographic methods, improvisation practices as performance, curation of dance production, contemporary/postmodern technique dance training, anatomy, kinesiology, and somatics (Pilates, LBMA).

Parts of the whole - the body is home

in 2020, I created Parts of the Whole - The Body is Home, a movement-based education program that cultivates creativity and healing with incarcerated, system impacted youth and adults, and under-resources folks. Our creative somatics and movement workshops offer space for youth to attune their bodies and minds, embody coping strategies, develop their creativity, and discover and express their voice by sharing creative movement and writing practices in community. Our starting point is the Soma, “the living body”, as the site and the source for awareness, agency, and possibilities for intentional function and expression. I work closes with students from UW-Milwaukee to design and share classes in the community that

• cultivate healing and community with creative somatics and movement arts.

• connect, inspire, and heal through shared movement.

• offer movement and dance as community resources to those impacted by the carceral system.

• share movement education for body-mind wellness, creativity and kinesthetic expression.

• Check out our Movement Snacks on Instagram.

Read about Parts of the Whole teaching project here.

Maria Gillespie - 2024

teaching philosophy

My role as an educator is not to offer dance training but to mentor the individual and to guide students as they find a meaningful path in the world. I believe that artists achieve their goals when they present persuasive alternatives to convention. Students must be shown tools, methods, and concepts that will enable them to transform their ideas into influential performances in any sector. I support students to both embrace and create a diverse society by highlighting the creative splendor and cultural significance that are born from our differences. Even as my approach is rooted in specific somatic and postmodern traditions, I recognize that studying an array of theories and practices is essential to a balanced education. Dance training conventions teach dancers to move in uniform ways. I am constantly resisting this in my teaching practice. Yet, under the pressure from traditional aesthetics, students often produce repetitions of ideas, overlooking their differences. My philosophy upends this notion; I provide guidance that emphasizes methods of learning so my students may galvanize and radicalize their differences. The technical and conceptual processes I employ in my classes are designed to help students embrace their individuality as they pursue mastery and innovation. I believe artists’ idiosyncrasies endow their technique with individual distinction and allow the dance student to venture beyond homogenized body practices and into the terrain of gaining poeticism born from the unknown. Ultimately my mentorship should invigorate a unique artistic experience in conversation with other disciplines and perspectives.

As a dancemaker, I know first-hand the paradox that arises as our academic and professional fields often create a bifurcation between dance practice and intellectual discourse. Through curriculum and mentorship, I encourage students to see their dance practice as a deeply connected experience of intellectual discourse. My perspective as a dance educator is based on knowing that the thinking body and the moving mind are in constant dialogue of design; creating a terrain upon which cultural and artistic impacts are made. Physically, a dance artist must engage in a rigorous movement practice to claim their idiosyncrasies (physical and conceptual) and claim their difference; then those idiosyncrasies can be utilized to deepen expressive potential. Because artistic caliber is equivalent to and dependent upon conceptual clarity, I believe my job is to help students excel at understanding the body from both a kinetic and philosophical standpoint.

Knowing that education must be diverse and interdisciplinary, I introduce my students to a variety of approaches. My Applied Anatomy and Kinesiology class introduces architectural concepts such as tensegrity so have students explore the reciprocal relationship between function to expression in their body connectivities. Interdisciplinary approaches are the framework for composition classes as I ask students to collaborate with artists from other disciplines.  Ethnography, gender studies, feminism, dance studies, performance studies, cinematography, and movement analysis inform composition methods of choreography. Technical and aesthetic training are but two facets that define an artist and must be in conversation with other courses of study. I approach dance training as the method for students to experience and design their embodied intelligence and individuation, as they deepen their expressive abilities. I specialize in providing students with experiences that priorities kinesthetic awareness and intelligence. In my technique class, I will often utilize partnered bodywork to explore hands-on cuing or tactile experiences so students may differently perceive movement patterns. Other times, I will drastically change the structure of dance class to challenge assumptions and reorient patterns of connectivity. My excitement in teaching contemporary postmodern dance springs from knowing that the dancing body is not separate from the intellect or psyche and within each of these experiences lies the opportunity to know the body on a new level. My mission is continually renewed as I share with students the complex, unruly, and expressively profound nature of an integrated body and mind. I offer a comprehensive dance practice that prepares students for a thoughtful career, whether their focus is education, choreography, performance, movement therapy, somatic arts, dance scholarship, or arts administration.

 In each of my classes, I model affirmatively that practice is research. My current research methods are references for classroom methodologies. This way I ensure students are exposed to contemporary topics and approaches. My interdisciplinary research explores topics such as the movement and language as auto-ethnographic archives, body and social-self, desire and spectatorship, memory and embodiment, gesture and new media, poetics of movement analysis and technology, and mapping of kinesthesia into artifacts of embodied knowledge.

 At the heart of dance creation and performance is the social ritual of human interaction; I view contemporary dance practice and discourse to be the site for investigation of our social selves as it provides the opportunity for insight and critique of human interactions. My teaching, in both creative and academic courses, prioritizes an interdisciplinary mission inclusive of and beyond artistic collaboration. Canonical texts, performances, and practices must be situated alongside their contemporary counterparts to welcome hybridity, challenge the past (even as it is celebrated), and invent the future. From my composition class to my anatomy class, eclecticism allows students to examine contemporaneity: tendus meet marital arts, Bartenieff meets the clave, and empirical anatomy meets embodied anatomy. An interdisciplinary approach is at the heart of my teaching and ensures that I maintain plasticity between tradition & experimentation, subjectivity & objectivity, and embrace local and global perspectives.

Technical training alone cannot singularly manifest artistic ideas- it facilitates them.

I am keenly aware that students must development critical thinking skills to successfully communicate their ideas. I hope to model ways that my students can contribute to their communities and to impress upon them the value of a movement practice founded on belonging, experimentation, and conceptual rigor. I am excited to lead by learning alongside my students, my collaborators, and my fellow faculty. I continue learning myself as I contribute to a forum where dance is at once aesthetic expression, cultural practice, and a vital part of critical discourse. By exploring these facets with my students, I hope to empower them as they engage their mind and their body to design their social self. -Gillespie, Teaching Philosophy 2024