Seet Dance

“…we must teach our students 

dance skills as though they're life skills,

so all those who won't get a job in dance might get a job somewhere,

using all the stuff dance does well:

like collaborating with each other to make something more than the sum of its parts,

or motivating people, 

or managing conflicts, 

or finding the political in the body;

or organising time and space in a pragmatically luminous way,

or being individual enough to to be individual

and at the same time being able to join in selflessly when necessary;

or like knowing when to follow the rules and when to abandon the rules,

and when to follow our intuition 

and when to know that intuition is just another construct we might ignore

or bypass, or subvert, or dance joyously over;

or above all our skill at being generous, 

because we're raised in an art form whose value is not financial

and that gives us a unique perspective on the world and we should celebrate that,

which is also an act of resistance and never more than now,

in our financially obsessed and quantified world.

Let us be proud that we deal in a currency of togetherness, 

which is never reductive

and rarely cut throat.”

from Jonathan Burrows’ Keynote speech at the Conference for Dance in Higher Education in the UK 2015.

listen to Steve on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDBbyypWLJM

In 2015 Steve Paxton received a Bessie Award for Lifetime Achievement in Dance. Here he speaks eloquently about the value of dance education to human development.