Memphis, TN Blues Retreat
Mihai hired me to be the organizer of his blues retreat in Memphis, TN. This was one hell of an inspiring weekend. The blues retreat is based on my get-together teacher's retreat that I run each year at my home in Sacramento. The idea of these retreats is to bring together about 10-12 full-time teachers and dancers aspiring to be full-time teachers to teach each other and have lots of self-discovery thru out the weekend. I was a little hesitant on the outcome because of how quickly the whole thing was being put together and because the level of the dancers was so strongly varied. We had everything from full-time international instructors to dancers who had only been dancing for 6 months and they were all supposed to teach each other something about blues dancing that would keep each other's interest. It has always been my belief that someone with only 6 months of dance experience or less could teach someone with 10 or more years of experience if the correct subject were chosen and presented in an appropriate method. However, I have not personally tested it to this extreme of a degree. I have had people with as little as 3 or 4 years of experience in my retreat teaching with people with 10 or more years of experience but never only 6 months. Also, could someone with only 6 months experience keep up in the same class with someone with 8+ years experience? The answer was YES and it was totally inspiring to see it happen! It is so rare to see such an amazing rate of progress both by someone who had only been dancing 6 months and by myself who had been dancing 8+ years!
Labels: get-together, mihai, retreat
An New Style of Workshop with Mihai, Laura Glaess and myself
Mihai, Laura and I decided to do a workshop together. We spent 3 full days before the event preparing it in a new format that was exponentially better than anything I have done before. We started by stating the values and concepts that we wanted to get across during our workshop, i.e. Musicality, Communication, Personal Power, Creating a Community, etc... Then we each went over all of our favorite methods of teaching people the above concepts. By the end of the brainstorming we had enough material for probably 100 hours of classes and we were looking at it and saying that it was very obvious that we would have to cut out a serious amount of the concepts and drills we wanted to teach. However, instead of cutting them out right away we decided to try to create the workshop assuming that we had an infinite amount of time to teach and then we would cut things later. Thru the use of a brilliant organizational system from some business book I read and can't remember the name of we cut out little strips of paper with all the concepts on a separate piece and then kept moving them around and rearranging them in a way that best fit everything we wanted to teach. After many hours of rearranging and discussing we finally came across a final scenerio in which we didn't have to cut out a single concept or drill from the entire brainstorming process. That's right, what normally would have been 100+ hours of material taught in 10 hours! I have taught and taken hundreds upon hundreds of workshops around the world, and this was the best one that I have ever taught or taken! I am taking many of the ideas from this into my regular teaching methods and I hope to continue doing these 3 person integrated workshops in the future. Of course, my fear is that this was some fluke accident and we won't be able to recreate the same amazing workshop again but my heart and mind both know that it will only get better from here! Now if I could only think of a name for this type of workshop... Any ideas?
Labels: laura, mihai, workshop
