It almost came because I needed something to do with my students because I was going to be away
with another class in the southwest.
And so I had a kind of dilemma, teaching dilemma; what to do with students while I was gone.
That would be meaningful, that would be a part of the course.
So I ran many ideas through my mind.
I have always been interested in performance but I'd never really be trained to teach performance.
I thought it would be intriguing to give students the freedom to take these stories
and translate them into some other kind of artistic medium.
That's in the humanities.
And use music, use theater, use dance; all the kinds of things that they might do.
So, initially it came from that but as I saw the results of that project and how students felt about it
and for some, it was a very powerful experience to even do something like that,
for others it was frustrating because it wasn't enough time or and the groups were too large,
it was two groups of ten students each.
And they each chose a different novel.
"The River Why," and "River Song."
And so some other things happened.
Since the students had each read the one novel and not the other,
as an audience they didn't necessarily know the other story, even though that was conveyed through the performance,
there was a lot that was missing in terms of the audience connection to what was going on.
So I realized that it would be better if we all read something together
so that the audience had the sense of already knowing the stories.
and so that would improve performances or the reaction of the students to the connections there.
The next time, a year later, when I taught the humanities expressive arts, again, I focused on a connection to animals,
our animal selves.
Which is an interest of mine.
How we think about animals, what our relationships as humans are to them, how we think of ourselves as animals,
if we do, and what that means.
But using literature and the arts to explore that.
And one of the things that struck me was a number of experiences I've had,
one when I was in the southwest a number of years ago,
teaching a course on southwest American Indian literature and culture.
This was from another college, took students to Hamas Pueblo and we went for one of the King's Day dances,
it was on January 6th.
And we were there before the sun came up and as we watched, the dancers came off the mountain,
they came down and they were deer.
There were these deer dancers.
And then there was buffalo dancers, also some eagle,
and another animal, I think like antelope or something, there were some young ones.
What was amazing was that they moved, the dancers moved down the mountain the way those animals would move,
so that from a distance, it looked like a group of deer coming down.
And when they came closer, you realized of course, they were humans and
wearing certain things but also imitating the kind of movement.
So I had those kind of images in the back of my mind about animals and the humans' ability to
shape our movements the way animals do.
So in this class, the very first day we did kind of like, animal charades.
In a way, it was a kind of game version of, the very first day of class let's break the ice and embarrass ourselves,
laugh at each other, but also show each other that, in fact, we already know a lot about animals and about how they move.
And we can convey that, not just by what we say, but through our bodies and through our movements,
through our recognition.
So that was really challenging because there were some students, right away,
who did not want to perform in front of others or felt very self-conscious.
But when everyone is forced to do it in a certain way, they did it and I tried to be supportive of them but
also push them to actually do that.
So that kind of set a tone.
And so we did various exercises in that class.
When we read the play, "Equas"
we did a one-day, which I didn't announce ahead of time,
partly I didn't want them to worry too much about performance but just to
do what they could do in the moment, in a more spontaneous way.
But they had read the play, they chose a scene as a small group and they discussed it.
And then I said, "Okay, now your group needs to plan a performance of that."
And they could use the books to read and so forth.
"Because you're going to do it at the end of class, basically."
So I gave them about 45 minutes and they're off planning, and of course some of them were frantic and nervous.
It was wonderful, what they did, though.
Because everyone, again, knew the play, so we all kind of knew what was going on.
And they knew they weren't necessarily being actors in a sense that this was professional,
that they were just doing it very quickly.
But a lot of great things came out of that in terms of their dialogue,
in terms of taking the play and internalizing it in some ways,
actually becoming some of the characters rather than just talking about the characters.
In all my classes, I'm always trying to create a variety of assignments to meet different student's strengths.
And so, some students are very good writers, or very good at discussing in class,
but others have gifts in terms of artistic expression, in terms of performance.
So you open up that in a class and all the sudden, other students who seem quiet, who don't really share,
they can shine in a different way.
And that was very exciting.
So, in a sense, I think it surprised other students
because some students who seem quiet and not so much part of the intellectual discussion,
shined in terms of the artistic expression.