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Courses that I have taught and can teach:​

• Modern/Contemporary Technique - All levels

• Ballet Technique - Beginning & Intermediate (ABT Certified)

• Pilates/Dance Conditioning/Dance Alignment (Mat certified from Shepperd Technique)

• Jazz Dance

• Dance Film- LIVE or ONLINE training!

• Dance History/Appreciation

• Choreography/Composition

• Dance Production

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Beyond training dancers to become professionals, I believe that dance provides one of the most dynamic and well-rounded educations:  mind-body presence, personal poise and discipline, spatial awareness, collaboration, design, composition, system design, theme and variation, poetics, rhythm, musicality, non-verbal communication, awareness and articulation of a voice/identity/values, poetics, ceremony, pure action...    

 

Teaching is a creative endeavor that feeds my artistic practice.  The range of my interests in dancing, dance-making, filming, film editing, and the larger field of art and art history inform one another, and teaching each of these adds a new layer of feedback and perspective.  I have been lucky to have had teaching jobs that allow me to work across this wide range of interests, often going from a sweaty dance class right into the editing lab.  

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I have  been a dance teacher drawing from a broad-based background for over twenty years.  My dance style incorporates my favorite forms of moving and training, including Cunningham, Release, Balanchine, Limon, West African, Alexander Technique, and Yoga.  I teach with an emphasis upon resiliency, grounding, range and expression.  Over the course of my teaching career, I have enjoyed teaching shear beginners and advanced level dancers, and find the important challenge for all to be about getting the dancer to move with an appetite; once I get my students to get-into their dancing, the technique usually follows.

 

At  Pasadena City College, I have had the unique opportunity to choreograph pieces with dancers from a wide variety of styles, and together we have relished-in this chance to connect disparate movement based-on motif, flow, and symbol.  I work with many students who are hip hop, folkloric, and salsa dancers that want to increase their range with ballet and modern dance; I believe in the universality of the principles of modern dance, finding that many of the dancers I work with quickly embrace the expressive power and versatility of contraction and release, fall and recovery, primary control (Alexander), and defining movement through temporal and spatial terms rather than known steps. 

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I feel that I am most successful as an instructor when students take the craft-driven tools that I provide and make them sing and dance in their own unique way.  Particularly in my composition classes (choreography and dancefilm), I strive to provide approaches that my artist students can exploit according to their given poetic objectives.

 

My niche has been teaching dancefilm and dance and new media classes that I have built-up over fifteen years.  The classes provide dancers with craft-driven experiences in shooting and editing dance which emphasize the body’s relationship to gravity, time and space, and the translation of choreographic poetics into the cinematic. My professional background as a video editor provides me with advanced technical knowledge that has allowed me to successfully teach softwares including AVID, Final Cut Pro, Premiere, Photoshop and After Effects to dance and television students, at schools including CalARTS, The Ohio State University, UCLA, UC Irvine, Pasadena City College, LaSalle College of the Arts in Singapore, and San Francisco Academy of Art College.  No matter what software and equipment my students are using to make films, the emphasis in my media classes remains grounded in the physical endeavor, thinking about new ways to traverse and present the body in time and space. I believe that this exposure to filmmaking and working with dance in the cinematic paradigm opens up these future dance-artists to different choreographic possibilities, while also preparing them to represent themselves and self-produce, with reels, sound editing, projections designs and more. 

I am able to offer ONLINE COURSES for your students in DANCEFILM, either as a guest instructor or for a full semester or ongoing post.  I am also available to create original dance films for your students. Please contact me at robbieshawmail@yahoo.com for more information!

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