About Rosemary

Rosemary is a qualified practical choreologist. She acquired her skills through years of experience as a professional dancer and teacher of dance and through study for a Masters degree at the Laban Centre, London, in 1986. After lecturing at the Laban Centre for several years, where she developed her unique approach to choreology, Rosemary responded to invitations from other London-based institutions and dance centres abroad.



Since 1992 her work has made a distinct contribution to dance education. Her work involves lecturing, teaching, and contributing to dance study programmes, choreology workshops for dance professionals, students of dance and for teachers of dance. While her initial and particular research has been directed towards classical dance, her work is not style-bound. Currently she is in demand in both classical and contemporary dance spheres and is recognised in the field as being an outstanding educator. As a leader in her particular field, Rosemary is highly regarded in Europe and has gained a considerable reputation internationally.

In 2006 Rosemary returned to Laban as the Undergraduate Studies Year One Programme Co-ordinator and is Senior lecturer in Choreological Studies.

Rosemary Brandt is a classically trained dancer and also works in contemporary dance. She completed an MA in Dance Studies at the Laban Centre after which she was appointed lecturer in choreological studies. During her lectureship, she developed her unique approach to dance teaching. She is currently lecturer in Choreology at London Contemporary Dance School and at Birkbeck College, University of London and teachers on CandoCo's first foundation course.

In addition, she has taught at:

• School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam;
  
• State School of Dance, Athens, Greece;
  
• Roehampton Institute, University of Surrey;
  
• Chichester Institute for Higher Education, University of Southampton;
  
• Centre National de Danse Contemporaine d'Angers, France;
  
• College of the Royal Academy of Dancing, London;
  
• Skolen for Moderne Dans I Danmark, Copenhagen;
  
• Universitat Mainz, Germany;
  
• Universidad Miguel Hernandez, Altea, Spain.
  
• Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, Amsterdam

She gives workshops for dance companies in England and France. She has been guest teacher for Anne-Teresa de Keersmaeker's company, Rosas, and Phoenix Dance Company. She also gives workshops for students in academic study and dance research in France, Belgium, Germany and Holland.

Quotes

Click here to use Rosemary's feedback form.



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"Rosemary is really inspiring and excellent workshop provider. I have never had a teacher with quite so much depth of understanding about the body and the way it moves and the way we can be articulate and intelligent as dancers and teachers of such an art form. I attended all three workshops. Not only did I learn about the importance of the language used when teaching and the vocabulary of dance, but also I gained some great tips on choreographic possibilities and how I can make dance more inclusive by being more clear with my intentions."

Philip Channells, Australian independent dance practitioner.



"The demand for her personal and specific work has grown over the last years. She is now being sought all over Europe by the most important institutions as a catalyst for change in the teaching of classical ballet and movement based studies."

David Steele, Rektor, National School for Contemporary Dance in Denmark.



"The dialogue that has developed amongst the teachers through their exchange of her ideas has led to the evolution of an articulate, vibrant dance teaching community."

Claudine Swann, Inspector of Dance Education for the French Community of Belgium.



"She has deep knowledge of the subject and teaches with great expertise, passion and clarity ... she has made a distinct contribution to dance education and her approach to choreology is quite unique. She is recognised in this field as being an outstanding educator."

Marion Gough, Dance Education Consultant.




"Her popularity and success with students has increased the demand of her subject area beyond course contact time and has enriched the curriculum as a whole."

Maria Koripas, Director of Performance Studies in Dance programme, Birkbeck College, University of London.

Movement and Music

The nature of the relationship between Movement and Music in the classroom

My interest lies in examining the relationship between the structure of music and dance with a view to identifying relationships between sound and motion that might inform and enrich the explicit and implicit dialogue between dancers, accompanists and teachers in classroom practice.

Musicality, an essential quality for the dancer, is often considered to be the gift of the talented few, and not something which must and can be explicitly addressed and taught in terms of dance technique. The role of the musical accompanist in the classroom is all too often reduced to that of pulse keeper who gives tempo information. Steps or movements are demonstrated often to the accompaniment of counted metric beat. The common result is unitised movement, positions and stepping corresponding with musical beats, so that the movement is organised in the same way as the music. But human movement is not metrically structured and neither is dance.

Rhythm is an intrinsic principle of movement function. Speed, duration, acceleration and deceleration are the results of this function. In the functional form, we learn to control the relationship between our weight and the force of gravity through appropriate fluctuations in energy.

These interacting forces result in changes of speed, which punctuate our movement flow, making rhythm visible. This rhythm is related to our efficient function. In dance however, efficiency is not the primary objective. We follow different requirements, which may be described as technical or choreographic. As a result, the interaction between the two forces, gravity and our energy has to be deliberately controlled to create specific qualitative results. These can be identified, physically sensed, understood and perceived. Only when the rhythm of the movement is known and controlled can we attempt to relate the visible rhythm to the aural rhythm in a multitude of creative ways.

Musical accompaniment in the classroom has a very different function from music which functions as a component of a choreographed work. The musician needs to know what to accompany, how to support the required motion, and what that required motion is, so that dancer, musician and teacher all share the same objective. If sound is to support a particular motion, the nature and structure of the motion must be clearly articulated.

This interest has been stimulated by work with musicians who have been introduced to movement theory and analysis. The have commented on the value of this understanding of movement when it is articulated in the dance class.

Developing a vocabulary for collaborative creativity and learning

“I was left with a sense of not really having worked cross-arts collaboratively. Failures in communication were probably partly due to a general feeling of not knowing where to start, and also the fact that dancers and musicians tend to express themselves differently when describing music’

This quote – from a TCM student evaluation of a Professional Skills Project – is typical of feedback from music students about the experience of collaborative projects. It illustrates 4 key issues relating to the vocabulary of collaborative practice.

1. Young artists have a hunger for ‘collaboration’ but can be disappointed with differences between their concept of it, and reality.

2. Enthusiasm to collaborate is generally not matched by skills or vocabulary with which to plan collaborative processes

3. Within creative processes, artists from different disciplines encounter communication difficulties due to lack of shared vocabulary, or the use of similar vocabulary which has different meaning or connotations within each discipline.

4. Artists bring inherited expectations of hierarchical relationships between disciplines to collaborative relationships (in this instance that music is created for the dancers to dance to, and as such dancers need language with which to articulate what they want of the musicians). Appropriate language is needed with which to discuss the nature of collaborative creative relationships and processes, in order to identify pre-conceptions and devise new/appropriate approaches to interdisciplinary projects.

The issues identified in student feedback my experience of collaborative arts projects in professional life, and the early separation of artistic disciplines in the way the arts are taught in schools.

Context

In a cultural landscape in which traditional boundaries between art forms are being questioned and rejected, the term collaboration is in liberal use. The connotations of this term are widely understood to be that innovation, equality and interaction are inherent in collaborative creative processes.

In reality however, ‘collaboration’ is used in reference to a wide range of interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary or multi-artist projects, both traditional and innovative. Creative processes termed as ‘collaborative’ vary enormously in the level of interactivity between artists and art forms, from those that involve intensely shared experiences by artists in the same time and space, to others in which collaborators create their contributions separately, sometimes across years and/or continents.

The wide range of potential interpretations of the term ‘collaboration’ can lead to differences of expectation of – and sometimes disappointment or disenchantment in – collaborative artistic processes amongst arts practitioners and audiences. The arts face difficulties in articulating the nature of collaborative work, and in establishing working methods

Individual artistic disciplines have highly evolved vocabularies with which to communicate about, interpret and understand their art form and to plan and manage creative processes. If artists from differing disciplines are to create work together with equal levels of sophistication, then either a shared vocabulary – or some understanding of each others’ vocabulary - is needed. While many terms or concepts are shared across art forms (e.g. rhythm, dynamic, texture, harmony), similar terms may have evolved to have different applications or connotations. As such, these terms provide fertile ground on which to explore the fundamentals of human expression that ‘collaborators’ from differing disciplines have in common, while deepening understanding of each others’ art forms through examining differences in interpretation and application.

Relevance to Trinity Laban

Exploring vocabulary feels important at this early stage in the institution’s merger. Specialist language and terminology can be mystifying and divisive, while a focus on shared concepts, and how we relate to them, provides a means of identifying potential approaches to collaborative teaching or creative work.

As well as improving our ability to work together, in a conservatoire setting where highly specialist approaches and technical prowess predominate, I believe there is value in students and staff stepping outside of the technicalities of their discipline to reflect upon the nature of what we do, how we do it and why.

In addition, I feel there are particular communication issues facing music and dance practitioners, as opposed to collaborators from other art forms. This appears to stem from significant differences between our expectations and inherited experiences of relationships between music and dance.

Dance artists are experience in rehearsing with musical accompanists and creating works that incorporate music. Thus many have established individual methodologies or expectations that they bring to working with musicians. Their work is largely initiated and funded by dancers/dance companies, and thus musicians are often in their employ, or act as service providers to them, with dancers take the lead in dictating the nature of collaborative processes.

Most musicians, however, are trained with the expectation that their music is created and performed in the abstract – rather than having another discipline incorporated in its presentation. At the same time, musicians are quite used to people ‘dancing to’ (rather than as part of) their performance.

As such dancers and musicians appear to often have quite different expectations of what it is to ‘collaborate’. Dance artists might be rather surprised (and perhaps patronised) by the sense of pioneering excitement amongst musicians faced with the opportunity to create ‘with’ dancers, when it is an everyday occurrence for them. It would be easy for the focus of Trinity Laban’s collaborative activity to be on musicians playing ‘catch up’ by learning to meet the needs of the dance world.

To some extent, this may be highly appropriate, but also misses an opportunity to explore more innovative territory. Additionally, musicians can be disappointed to find themselves not feeling like an artistic equal in the creation of collaborative work, falling into a ‘service provider’ role, required to create material that conforms to the rhythmic, structural or stylistic constructs of the choreography.

What comes first – the music or the dance? Can collaborative relationships ever be truly equal? As artists address these questions a detailed vocabulary for the negotiation and development of collaborative approaches seems vital. Perhaps it exists and could form the basis of collaborative teaching at Trinity Laban? Perhaps it is lacking and is something we could seek to develop.

Applications beyond the Conservatoire

The division of music and dance in the education and learning of young people is a Western phenomonen, based on historical educative approaches to the acquisition of ‘knowledge’ rather than attitudes or skills. Increasingly, modern arts education emphasises cross-curricular working, recognising arts and culture as an expression of the human condition and entitling young people to cultural experience. In light of this, and with time and resources for arts education limited, there is an argument for removing divisions between art forms in education. For example, this might involve focusing learning on transferable aspects of self expression and creativity like rhythm, dynamics, tempo rather than discipline specific curriculum.

While cross-disciplinary approaches are common in workshop practice, it appears yet to be extended to the wider curriculum. The potential of this approach has been initially explored to some extent in the TCM 6-week skills-building project ‘The Visceral Arts’, led by John Sharp. Students are challenged to express themselves through a range of physical and artistic mediums and then channel this into their playing as musicians. The project is widely acknowledged by students as a transformative experience.

Since 2004 Trinity Laban has run a music and dance project in Marvels Lane Primary School funded by Creative Partnerships as a Cultural Entitlement research initiative. This involves a 10 week music and dance curriculum leading to the creation of music and dance performances by pupils. At present, the two disciplines remain relatively separate in both process and outcome – although the relationship between the two is explored. There is much potential here for the application of an innovative approach with far less distinction between disciplines, focusing on shared concepts or vocabulary.

My interest lies in examining the relationship between the structure of music and dance with a view to identifying relationships between sound and motion that might inform and enrich the explicit and implicit dialogue between dancers, accompanists and teachers in classroom practice.

Musicality, an essential quality for the dancer, is often considered to be the gift of the talented few, and not something which must and can be explicitly addressed and taught in terms of dance technique. The role of the musical accompanist in the classroom is all too often reduced to that of pulse keeper who gives tempo information. Steps or movements are demonstrated often to the accompaniment of counted metric beat. The common result is unitised movement, positions and stepping corresponding with musical beats, so that the movement is organised in the same way as the music. But human movement is not metrically structured and neither is dance.

Rhythm is an intrinsic principle of movement function. Speed, duration, acceleration and deceleration are the results of this function. In the functional form, we learn to control the relationship between our weight and the force of gravity through appropriate fluctuations in energy.

These interacting forces result in changes of speed, which punctuate our movement flow, making rhythm visible. This rhythm is related to our efficient function. In dance however, efficiency is not the primary objective. We follow different requirements, which may be described as technical or choreographic. As a result, the interaction between the two forces, gravity and our energy has to be deliberately controlled to create specific qualitative results. These can be identified, physically sensed, understood and perceived. Only when the rhythm of the movement is known and controlled can we attempt to relate the visible rhythm to the aural rhythm in a multitude of creative ways.

Musical accompaniment in the classroom has a very different function from music which functions as a component of a choreographed work. The musician needs to know what to accompany, how to support the required motion, and what that required motion is, so that dancer, musician and teacher all share the same objective. If sound is to support a particular motion, the nature and structure of the motion must be clearly articulated.

This interest has been stimulated by work with musicians who have been introduced to movement theory and analysis. The have commented on the value of this understanding of movement when it is articulated in the dance class.

Choreological Studies

Choreology studies human movement as the raw material of dance. It endorses the widespread opinion that movement used in dance is based directly upon the movement of everyday life and that therefore knowledge of this is crucial to the understanding of dance.

1.The Structural Model.

The structural model views the human body from a structural perspective, not an anatomical, physiological, psychological, or sociological perspective. What is revealed by the model is that the structure of the body's movement is inextricably linked to the structure of the body with its torso, limbs, head, joints and surfaces organised and arranged in their particular way, thus creating further action, spatial, dynamic and relationship structures. Hence the model identifies human movement as having five intrinsic structures, namely body action, space, dynamics and relationships, all of which are examined and explored separately but inform an understanding of the complexity of movement and dance. The affinity between these structures gives a human movement its unique identity. This uniqueness is further understood as the relationship between the structural and qualitative levels of a movement or the physical and perceptual properties of a danced movement.

2. Non-verbal communication Model.

Aspects of non-verbal communication are studied as a model for understanding body movement as social behaviour. Most behavioural scientists are prepared to agree that social life or society is absolutely an adaptive necessity for human existence. Communication, in this sense, is that system of co-adaptation by which society is sustained and which in turn makes human life possible. Viewed from this perspective, communication is that system through which human beings establish a predictable continuity in life. Only by participating in this patterned way are we able to incorporate our society's way of viewing and testing the world. Examination of kinesics (communicative body motion) and proxemics (spatial manoeuvres) in this context of communication and social order reveals that:

• A system of expression is already in place and patterned by our spontaneous reactions to our lived environment and that it is not dance that invents this expression.
• That a choreographer's dance vocabulary or the vocabulary of an established dance style or technique is a selection, an organised elaboration, repetition and intensification of everyday movement patterns. A choreographers' deliberate response to their content/subject matter is a result of the degree of transformation of elements of this pattern, which ultimately establishes the aesthetic expressive form.

3. Choreological Order.

Movement structures affine with one another in a unique, but systematic way. Choreological order is the term given to the syntax of human movement. Knowledge and understanding of this syntactical occurrence allows for the identification of those principles of movement, which hold movement structures together, both sequentially and simultaneously.

4.Choreutics.

This is a considerable and highly developed investigation into, and of, space. Rudolf Laban presents a theory of spatial harmony; a unity of movement and space based on the fundamental idea that space is a hidden feature of movement and movement a visible aspect of space. Selected aspects of this theory are studied especially as a creative tool for dance making and as a model for analysing existing dance works.

5. The Strands of the Dance Medium.

A dance work is not simply its movement vocabulary but the nexus of the dancers, (gender, age, appearance, costumes, props, etc.), their particular movement vocabulary, the score (sound, music, voice, silence etc.) and the place (set, decor, lighting, theatre, etc.). All these actualities contribute to the virtual expression of the dance work. This model examines and explores this particular contribution in relation to the expression or meaning of the work.

6.Model for interpretation and evaluation.

Students can systematically through consideration of 1 - 5 above, gain access to the meaning and significance of a dance work by remaining rooted in the conceptual structures and modes of thought that make close and discriminating attention possible, namely the socio-cultural background, the context, the style/genre and subject matter of a particular work. Similarly students are introduced to what constitutes an evaluation through the consideration of aspects such as assumed values, judgements related to these values and the reasons for the judgements, which are found in the dance itself. These models are put forward in Dance Analysis: Theory and practice (ed. Janet Adshead).



Collectively the models for analysis outlined above, explicate and provide a language, which allows dance to be discussed on its own terms, without reference to things outside of itself. Choreological practice is concerned to demonstrate the necessity of looking at dance from within itself instead of borrowing terminology from another discipline and using it analogously. Analysis using the above models reveals that body movement, which includes dance, has its own set of laws which require its own set of terms for description, for practice and for research.

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