3 University Professors on a Broader Vision of Teaching Choreography
What does it mean to teach choreography in a university setting? The answer has always been complex and multifaceted, but it’s shifting in new ways. While composition courses used to focus on the craft of designing movement, today’s professors are expanding the conversation, not only about how it’s taught and what is prioritized, but even what the term itself encompasses.
Composition courses tend to reveal aesthetic preferences and value systems, and the way students and faculty create and evaluate choreography can reflect deeper beliefs about what dance should be and how it should be made. In courses that emphasize communication, collaboration, and creativity, professors are reconsidering long-held ideas about both authorship and artistic decision-making. As the resulting coursework can be as individual as the teaching artist, three college professors share their perspectives and priorities in 2025.
Dr. Elisabeth Motley – Marymount Manhattan College
For Dr. Elisabeth Motley at Marymount Manhattan College, teaching choreography is about asking questions: “How can I make space for a variety of practices and forms, and how do I understand that each practice has a different set of values?” When Motley was a student, her college curriculum didn’t explore the distinct social, political, and historical contexts that support dancemaking. Because of this, she views current students as lucky to have access to questions about context. She says her courses prioritize “decentering the idea of the ‘master choreographer’ and the ‘master teacher.’ ”
For Motley, the focus on learning choreographic skills extends beyond a final product presented onstage to encompass how students lead. She emphasizes the benefits of collaboration throughout the creative process. “This can be started in the first semester,” she says. “Collaboration is something that should be reinforced, along with consent processes and ideas of body sovereignty in dancemaking and rehearsals.” Motley says she is hopeful students will take these ideas with them into studios beyond the university setting.
As students move through the curriculum, they develop identities as artists and the ability to “locate themselves” within both long lineages of dancemaking and the context of their own work. As a result, they can identify social, political, and historical references within other choreographic works, as well as the appropriation of embodied practices.
As a Disabled choreographer, Motley poses questions specific to her own lived experience when creating work. “Choreography, for me, is a separate kind of practice from teaching,” she says. “In the classroom, I engage a community practice: It becomes about the ways that we’re co-learning about choreography. I can’t think about my choreographic practice in the choreography classroom, because I don’t have the same values and aesthetic interests that students have. Each student is unique, so I can’t bring my same methods and methodologies of choreography. I can offer them as options, but my job is to be a community arts worker in the space, to figure out what each student requires and how I can meet them where they are.”
This differentiation is most apparent when it comes to assessment. Motley makes it very clear how students’ work will be evaluated: “Part of my syllabus says creativity is subjective, and you will not be assessed based on your professor’s aesthetic preferences or tendencies, but rather through a rubric which measures your work and the quality of your approach and growth.”
Dr. E. Macias – University of California, Irvine
Dr. E. Macias, a dancemaker and scholar who recently joined the dance department at the University of California, Irvine, taught at Brandeis University as a postdoctoral fellow. Her lived experiences bring together Amskapi Piikani, A’aninin, African American, and Mexican American lineages.
For Macias, Blackfoot worldviews of dance are embedded in niitsi’powahsinni, meaning “language.” “ ‘Apshkaukshin’ and ‘passkaan’ can refer to dancing that happens in sacred and social settings,” she says. “It’s a way of knowing dance as ‘making motions’ for a purpose, whether dancing for healing, strength, identity, connections with humans and more-than-humans. Dance in this way is about motion that carries life, knowledge, protocols, responsibilities, and futures in and through the body.”
As a result, Macias questions the word “choreography” in its common use of placing bodies in space and structuring time. “For me the more pertinent questions are: What’s the intention of the dance? What is the motion doing for the dancer, the space around the dancer, and those witnessing the dance? I invite students to think through these questions as they move through facilitated experiences. This helps students access their ways of making dance.”
At Brandeis, Macias created and taught a course called Story Weaving: Movement and Creative Process through Dance. Students came from a wide range of dance experience; the class culminated in an informal show where students shared their solos, duets, or group dances. Macias says she encouraged students to “tap into their own embodied experiences and to build from them,” an invitation that made the course intentionally inclusive. As Macias says, “It was my way of recognizing that everybody can participate here.”
As an undergraduate, Macias had to navigate her way through a university that had little experience with Indigenous knowledge and approaches to dancemaking. “I remember one professor, who was a major support to me, ultimately decided that they didn’t know how to gauge or assess my ‘choreography,’ and so they weren’t going to—meaning they weren’t going to let the structures in place stop me from creating and sharing work,” she says. “It was an eye-opening experience that in some ways revealed what I would face in dance as a Native person in the years to come.”
Today, as an assistant professor, she’s keenly aware of the labor, “circumnavigation,” and responsibilities involved in bringing ideas from her community into university settings, “where there’s a dominant way of understanding how dance is made or known. It might be contentious to bring in a particular dance work or practice that doesn’t necessarily reflect what a university recognizes as dance. But this work is happening all around. There are many of us advocating, building, supporting, and change-making on small and large scales.”
Macias’ recent work focuses on solo performance presented in community settings. “The knowledge and histories I carry are ancestrally informed, and I am often thinking about what’s being activated through my dancing and who I am dancing with. For example, my last work engaged with soil, knowing ksááhko to be a living relative with a life force. This kind of collaboration and creative process extends beyond the movement, aesthetic, or performance outcome.”
Christal Brown – Middlebury College
Christal Brown, associate professor of dance at Middlebury College, brings in guests to expand students’ knowledge of the ways choreographers work. “I have established a rotating artist-in-residence position where we hire three people at a time for three subsequent years,” she says. “My vision was to hire an actual artist, not another academic, someone who knows what’s going on outside of universities. I’m not an expert on how to be an artist these days. And for the artist in residence, the position can be a stepping-stone to deciding if higher education is the setting for their work.”
This kind of reciprocity is important to Brown, who says she became a professor due to a love of teaching. “In my generation of dance training, whether faculty said it or not, we were taught a subliminal ladder of success: ‘Train. Create. Dance for a company. Go into higher ed.’ A lot of people got on that train without an actual desire to teach. For me, my current position is a reclamation of an original dream.”
Brown says that it is important for artists to understand the realities of a university position before stepping into a full-time job. “As an artist and educator, I feel grateful to have landed in an institution that is built on the principals of liberal arts, which means making sense of the human experience. Teaching students to structure their ideas through choreography, creating movement, and embodying original scholarship as new forms of research reminds us all that our learning did not begin with textbooks.”
Brown, who was granted tenure at Middlebury College in 2018, has built a distinct approach to teaching choreography. “We don’t separate choreography and technique,” she says. “If you’re in a class with me, we will meet four days a week: two days for lecture, two days for lab. We discuss movement in context, noticing places where the body becomes a synonym for culture, practicing technique as the technology of the body that brings the imagination to life. In this liberal arts context, I want to see everything my students are learning in the way they move, from theories of their feminist-studies class or the intonations of Japanese 101. I want students to create a language that speaks the dialect of the concept they’re building, not that illustrates their proficiency at dance.”
Brown encourages students to “trust themselves, their own intuition, and their ability to communicate their ideas to others,” she says. “In my teaching and my choreographic practice, my desire is to give artists as much information, time, and space to do what’s right for the work. I’m trying to build people who remain curious and show up to challenges with new solutions.”
Remaining curious and embracing uncertainty are traits of successful dancemakers—and throughlines of Brown’s career. “When I was an undergraduate at UNC Greensboro, I was not one of the favorite dancers who got cast in all the pieces. But I was the recipient of the first Distinguished Alumni in Dance award by the university. A life in dance is full of surprises.”
