Immersed in Dance

“Dance can be so much more, there aren’t as many rules and boundaries as I thought growing up, it can be a lot messier,” Becca McNay describes as one of the first things she learned upon arriving at Ohio University to pursue her Bachelor in Fine Arts dance major. Although her mother put her in dances classes at the age of three, she did not begin to explore the world of modern dance until months before beginning her career at the university. Modern broke apart her expectations of dance and her reflection of herself in her own life.  Exploration defines Becca’s journey, by learning more about her own patterns and her craft she learns more about the world of dance. This year marks a new journey for the senior in a graduating class of five, as she assumes a new position, as a teacher. Now moving into a multifaceted role at Ohio University as a student, peer and a teacher, Becca worried at the beginning of the semester about teaching this class full of students of potentially the same age. She has previously taught younger classes but describes the experience of, “making a fool of yourself in front of ten-year-olds,” an easy one, but doing the same for a class full of college students would be a harder task. 

Dance majors are required to teach their own class before graduating from Ohio University. Becca had the good fortune of teaching her intro to modern class in a classroom adjacent to her good friend and peer Aysia Middlebrooks, a junior BFA dance major teaching intro to jazz technique. Becca and Aysia have grown alike in their dancing over the course of completing their majors, their similarities also show in their daily schedules and plans for their classes. However, Aysia describes Becca’s learning and teaching style as requiring more dialogue, whether she is asking many questions as a student before beginning new projects or taking the time to describe in full a dance combination for her own students. Becca understands her own learning style and explains, “It’s a habit I’m trying to break, asking questions too soon. Because growing up there always was a right way to do something, but now the style of dancing we are doing that’s not always the case. So I’m trying to get out of the habit and just going for it.” 

Aysia describes Becca’s learning and teaching style as requiring more dialogue, whether she is asking many questions as a student before beginning a new project or taking the time to describe in full a dance combination to her own students. Becca understands her own learning style and explains, “It’s a habit I’m trying to break, asking questions too soon. Because growing up there always was a right way to do something, but now with the style of dancing we are doing that’s not always the case. So I’m trying to get out of the habit and just going for it.” 

Aside from wanting to trust herself and take more chances, Becca feels the explanation can be necessary in certain situations when teaching non-major dance students. “I know most people, especially non-dancers, they don’t exactly understand how to just listen to their bodies. they have never been taught that their body is smarter than their mind sometimes.” When the situation is correct she feels the more she can say will help them begin to understand the complexities of dance. The breadth of knowledge her students have about dance runs the gamut from taking ballet as a young child to being a part of dance team or other dance related clubs in high school. However, she likes to work with many of these students because perhaps, “They saw dance as this thing that happened on the side line, so transferring that into a different classroom setting is interesting.” 

Mentors encouraged her by asking, “How can you set them up to perform better and find new ways to move?” Becca explained during the beginning of the semester that it was less about teaching the students how to do each move and more about providing a space  for others to feel comfortable to move in the new ways she could teach them. Exploration of their mind and body was her focus. As much knowledge as she has shared with her students, she has also learned how other people view and define dance, and how to adjust to their expectations or levels of understanding. 

Becca emphasizes that there is not just one way that someone can move their body and that, “Dancers sort of have an advantage in working through that, because our body is our instrument. Our body is how we do our job essentially, whereas other people don’t have that opportunity just around all the time to experiment with- my arm can do this, this, and this.” Becca made it her goal to help her students find their own confidence in the way they move, specifically the way they move individually. One manner of executing this goal was to teach her students, “to find the essence of the movement without mimicking exactly what is happening, finding their own way through it.” She found that many of her students struggled with this, caught up in comparisons of their own body to Becca’s, not realizing how, “the same energies can still be there,” and be presented slightly differently based on the make-up of each individual body. One of Becca’s students Annie Engel grew from these lessons about her own body. 

“I was struggling and still getting used to staring at my body in a full sized mirror for 55 minutes. Becca was very comforting and sympathetic when I spoke to her about my issues. She also gave me the tip to stare at the top of my head and focus on my body as a whole. She enlightened me to the idea that I am going to be in this body until I am 80 or 90 years old so I want to learn to love it.”

Through this effort to effectively relay this knowledge to her students, she found a variety of ways to communicate and teach, rather than the one she felt she initially had to follow. Becca began the semester relying on the notion that as a teacher she must maintain an unrealistic level of energy for her students. Through this small misstep of her own she found herself learning from them. She began to trust her students and understand the importance of, “trusting the class that I was teaching to want to dance and want to move, just trusting that they took the class for a reason and do want to dance.”

From taking her spot as the lead voice in the classroom, a natural translation of information has gone into Becca’s own work as a student, reevaluating the way she views the world of dance. She began the program at Ohio University wanting to embrace the mess of dance, realizing she is not as organized as she thought she was. She began to open her world more to imperfections. Becca’s favorite teacher Ani Javin instilled in her the idea of exploration and utilizing one’s time in the university to their full advantage, emphasizing this to be the time to take risks. Becca described her transition to senior year with the realization that she did not want her next piece to be as pretty as her previous ones. Furthermore, her experience as a teacher has broken down the standards for dance, allowing her to return to the basics. “Teaching has made me appreciate the simpler dance moves more. You get so caught up in how creative is it? how unique is it? But something as simple as shifting your weight from the ball of your foot to the heel of your foot can be equally as compelling.”

The senior BFA dance capstone class lasts the whole year at Ohio University. Becca partnered with her college-long friend Adam Jones to produce her fall senior capstone piece, being the first and last moment of their college career to collaborate on a project. Adam, a classically trained musician in his senior year studying music education, composed a music piece in collaboration with Becca’s senior capstone piece. Fast friends as freshmen, Adam has seen Becca’s progression as a dancer and recalls the first time he saw her dance, 

“Her intentionality and maturity stuck out with the way she approaches movement. Especially with modern dance, I’m learning it’s not necessarily used to tell a story, like a ballet would. It’s rather used to portray a concept or an idea. Those are really big shoes to step into, to use the gift of your body in that way. Each time she kept getting better, and by better, I kept seeing more and more clarity in the movement and what she was trying to portray.”

Becca and Adam spent their 15 meetings throughout the semester exploring how movement relates to stress and vulnerability. Becca already believed that, “the best way to connect with people is to share something inside of you,” and she uses dance to achieve that sharing in her life. The elaborate process of combining Becca’s college experience with Adam’s musical perception of her emotions into one piece, rested greatly on their ability communicate and their strong relationship. Becca would demonstrate her feelings of the dance through movement and very particular words such as sunrise, huzzuk!, slinky, and awakening. Through their mutual understanding Adam was able to respond with his creation of a sound for that emotion she was describing. 

This process helped them produce a piece full of tension and intentionality. With Adam as her atmosphere they portrayed the three sections of her dance. The first section begins with the sunrise full of hope and vulnerability as one comes to college ready to learn. The second section provides a harsh transition as she struggles to find a grip and snapping with all of the bottled up emotions she has accrued through the years. Becca used this section to play with the construction of time and how one may experience it as radically different at various points in their life. The third and final section, titled Toe Dip, represents the, “huge range of opportunities after college,” that both Becca and Adam have before them.

The week of Becca’s capstone performance she woke up with a cyst on her ankle, one that has caused her recurring pain in the past. The experience of how Becca was able to manage her pain and dance through each and every performance was testament to Adam about her resolve as a dancer. “She’s a mature dancer. She really could have let the entire piece go to crap with that pain. But she really did embrace it and make something beautiful out of it… maturity just in the sense of she knows that the piece is bigger than just the execution of it.”

Becca understands the imperfection that dance will provide to her life and that, “dance is how I become a better person each day and dance is one of those things that I know I will always move forward every day.” There will be sacrifice in all aspects of life, but the great commitment that dance requires, she believes, is what deters large groups of dancers from continuing through the program to senior year, as she will be graduating in class of five who will go on to a career in dance. She has danced her whole life, but she did not simply pick this program because of the rigorous standards or even the chance to be turned into the best dancer that her teachers want her to be. She chose the program at Ohio University because, 

“of the people I met here. They weren’t trying to make me into a product of a dance genre. It was very much they were like, do what you want to do and what are you interested in, also how can we make this the best we can with what we have to offer type of thing. I felt like I could talk to the professors here.” 

The community and the ability to connect with others was the deciding factor when choosing the program at Ohio University- a community in which she could share her dance and vulnerability with. It was important that it wasn’t a community that would just give her a trophy or award,  she wanted to “dance for a bigger reason than to win something at the end of it.”

SEE THE gallery below for more scenes from Becca’s story.