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Flamenco Lessons With a Difference

Ohanian Comment: I've long felt that the best "training" for practicing teachers might be to ask them to enroll in a course way outside their field. So English teachers would take physics and science teachers would take poetry. It's vital to see yourself as a learner of difficult things--and to reflect on what you see. Here is something that would enrich the life of every teacher: learning Flamenco.

Two women, best friends, fall in love with the same man; he seduces them, one after the other, and thinks he has gotten away with it. But when the women find out that they have been duped, they abandon the man and resume their friendship.
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Cristina Moguel and Antonio Hidalgo, of Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana, which performed for the teachers.

This was just one story evoked, without words, by the dancers of Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana this week at the Clark Studio Theater at Lincoln Center, where the troupe gave several energetic performances for teachers from schools in New York and around the country.

Later, in a classroom at Juilliard, the teachers approximated what they had seen onstage. Accompanied by flamenco music from a small boombox, one swiveled her hips and pointed accusingly at a taller woman, who circled her. A group of three teachers huddled in solidarity, then stomped the floor in unison before thrusting their arms in the air.

The purpose of these activities was not to learn how to dance flamenco; it was to explore how principles of its style could help teachers build the confidence of students learning to speak English as a second language. The workshop was one of many offered by the Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education, which ended its annual summer session yesterday.

If the connection between flamenco and English as a second language seems less than obvious, it may help to think about how people communicate when they do not speak the same tongue. They use gestures and facial expressions. As students learn, they memorize the rules of the new language, including intonations and transitions. Eventually, they let go and improvise. The same elements - nonverbal clues; shifts in rhythm, speed and phrasing; and the interplay of rules and inventions - are fundamental to flamenco.

True, these components are important in most performing arts. But flamenco, which evolved from the interaction of different ethnic groups in Andalusia, Spain - Gypsies, Moors and Jews - seems particularly relevant to the experience of a child immersed in a new culture and language.

To help teachers think about how it feels to learn a new language, Wendy S. Blum and La Tonya Borsay, teaching artists from the institute, had them make four shapes on the floor using masking tape. Each shape - a circle, a star, a square and an asymmetrical nine-sided creation - was labeled with an adjective: slow, fast, soft or loud. Ms. Blum told the teachers to move around the room without speaking, adjusting their behavior to match each shape as they passed over it. She purposely kept the instructions vague; the point was to reflect on the way one set of rules (slow, fast, soft and loud) could give rise to new rules, or to improvisation.

"What happens when you enter the space between two shapes and there are no rules?" Ms. Blum asked. One teacher said, "You could touch the arm of the person nearest to you." Relating this to language, another teacher called the gesture "a kind of punctuation, like a comma between phrases."

Eva Lund, who teaches English to new immigrants at Newcomers High School in Queens, said that body language was a major part of her work. "It can really take the pressure off when students are learning," she said.

Even seemingly small details like the difference between "uh-huh" and "uh-uh" must be learned, Ms. Lund added, along with the connotations of words like yes and no, which may seem simple but vary depending on speed, intensity and intonation.

Vivian Lipman, who teaches a prekindergarten class at P.S. 261 in Brooklyn, says it can take students months to open up and speak. In the meantime, she has them tell stories without words. Along those lines, the teachers created an index of pantomimed communications: reacting to the scent of an imaginary flower, for example, or silently conveying attitudes like sarcasm or disappointment.

Lest one worry that these language teachers will return to their classrooms dedicated to saying not a word, it should be noted that the Lincoln Center workshop was not a sample lesson plan. It was an opportunity for teachers to think about their work from a different perspective.

The creative approach was welcomed by Jacqueline Borruso, a self-described flamenco aficionado, who teaches at the Wheatley School in Old Westbury, N.Y. Ms. Borruso has attended Lincoln Center workshops before and finds them refreshing, compared with traditional professional-development programs that offer lectures or straightforward lesson plans. "The workshops here allow you to draw your own connections," she said.

Most teachers are required to take a certain number of professional-development courses throughout their careers. While it is common for arts institutions to offer special programs for schools, it may come as a surprise that an organization like Lincoln Center would offer enrichment for nonarts courses like English, history, mathematics, science and, in the case of the flamenco workshop, English as a second language. About 80 percent of the teachers attending the institute were not specialists in the arts.

Back at the workshop, the teachers gathered in a circle and invented a group flamenco dance of sorts, pairing movements with nonverbal sounds: an opening stomp came with a percussive "chah"; the ruffling of skirts drew a "swish"; hands twirling overhead elicited several seconds of "tika-tika-tika-tika"; and the final pose, arms up and out, was heralded with a cheerful "zoop."

To be sure, it was a little goofy. But aren't favorite teachers always the quirkiest ones?

The teachers here performed with enthusiasm, without a groan or a rolled eye among them. Perhaps this was the best lesson in language learning - and maybe in American culture - that a student of English as a second language could hope for: don't worry about looking like a clown; just go for it.

— Meline Toumani
New York Times
2005-07-16


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