The experience of staging Nijinsky's 'L'Apres-midi d'un Faune' in a higher education dance program.

摘要

This study documented the experiences of staging Vaslav Nijinsky's "L'Apres-midi d'un Faune" in a higher education dance program. The ballet was staged from Labanotation. Research questions focused on teaching and learning pedagogy, characterization of the process over time, experiences of the participants and teaching approaches.;The project narrative was constructed from the staging director's journals, interviews with the dancers and videos of rehearsals and performances. These data comprise the project archives housed in the university dance program collection. The research participants were eleven student dancers, one staging director and two artist coaches. The researcher was the staging director.;Thematic analysis revealed findings from the students' descriptions of their experiences that learning this dance was complicated and took time and that it was important to explore and take risks. Students emphasized that dancing was not only what they did, but also how they did it and that the dance became meaningful as they made it their own. In the end, the students voiced that they were part of a legacy. The staging director found that learning and teaching the dance was a recursive process of practice and layering and that learning the steps provided an entry point into the sensory experience and life of the ballet.;Ultimately essential to recreating the ballet was to provide experiences that supported the dancers to discover their potential and extend their artistic development.;All concerned became deeply involved in the collaborative nature of the enterprise as well as in thinking through interpretative approaches. Implications from the study invite dance educators in higher education to approach staging repertory as a multi-faceted creative process in which they continually construct and reconstruct an overarching philosophy of teaching and learning.