Brainstorming

What is your motivation in this communication situation?

I want to help Mexico's lack of postmodern dance cultivation. I want to increase the interest for this art form by demonstrating everything that it has to offer to a child's development. I want to build a generation of people that support the arts in Mexico, therefore aiding and alleviating the economical need of artists.

What do you hope your audience will do or feel or think after they have experienced the communication you will produce?

I hope that they see how much I can and want to offer to the arts and the community. I hope they believe I'm worth investing in to keep studying dance. I hope they will want to support my project and actually come through with it.

What would be the best and worst possible outcome of the communication?

The best would be that I would use the exact appropriate words for a non artist to understand. The worst would be that what I write comes out like I'm lunatic, thinking I'm living in a utopia and my project is unrealistic.

How will your communication change the situation in which you make the communication?

I think the people that read it will realize how interested some people are in the arts and how it can be productive for an entire country to integrate them into education. I need to charge on nationalism and stay positive in the middle of a society that is tired of the problems and therefore has developed a fixed pessimism.

Audience characteristics

• They are interested in the arts and believe in the power the have.

• Don't necessarily know everything about dance, but are aware of the art form and have been exposed to diverse choreography.
• They are in their 40s
• They are willing to support and promote artists in other countries.
• They want to advance the development of the arts in Mexico.
• They are Mexican.
• They have diverse able-bodiedness.
• They grew up with the arts.
• All genders.

Why am I interviewing dance educators in Mexico? What am I hoping to gain from their perspective?

Why am I interviewing dance educators and performing companies in Mexico? What will I gain from their perspective?


I want to know how the bureaucratic education system affects and limits their expansion into all k-12 schools. I want to know what their experience has been with non-dance students, if they've had such an experience. I want to know if they think dance is important enough to make a requirement in all schools. These dance educators are living in Mexico; they know what's going on today better than I do. 


For the performing companies I want to know if they take into account dance education as part of their responsibilities to build audiences. I want to know what their thoughts about performing for a k-12 audience would accomplish. 


Dance Educators:

• How have the constraints in the education system affected your expansion of dance knowledge into k-12 schools in Mexico City?
• Have you been able to teach a dance class at a public school as part of their PE class?
• Have you had an experience (or more than one) where a non-dance student flourished into an individual highly interested in the arts?
• Have students been more generally interested in the arts after taking your dance class?
• What has been your most rewarding experience teaching dance?
• How do you think students would benefit from taking dance classes as part of their curriculum?
• What do you think about making dance an educational requirement for all public and private schools?

Performing Contemporary Dance Companies' Directors:

• How have you built your audiences over the years?
• Do you think that part of your responsibility as a choreographer/director is to teach your audience and the general public about contemporary dance?
• What events have you held to inform your audience about contemporary dance?
• Have you performed for k-12 students at their schools? What was your experience?
• Have you seen an increase in audience in your regular performances after performing for a public/private school?
• What would performing for k-12 students in their schools accomplish?
• How do you think students would benefit from taking dance classes as part of their curriculum?
• What do you think about making dance an educational requirement for all public and private schools?

3rd Annotated Bibliography... Multiple Intelligences.

Gardner, Howard. "In a Nutshell." Multiple Intelligences: the Theory in Practice. New York, NY: Basic, 1993. 5-12. Print.

Alfred Binet, a French psychologist, was asked to devise a measure that would predict the success of children in the primary grades of Parisian schools in 1900. His discovery came to be called the "intelligence test"; his measure, the "IQ". Soon it arrived to the United states and after WWI, the IQ was tested over one million American recruits. The nature of its success was that now intelligences seemed to be quantifiable.

Over the years, there have been suggestions to add reaction time as part of the assessment of someone's intelligence, or look directly at brain waves.

Another more sophisticated version of the IQ test has been the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) where a person's verbal and match scores are summed up to rate their intellect a long a single dimension. Gardner explains the along with this one-dimensional view of how to assess minds comes a corresponding school, which he calls the "uniform school". This type of school has a set of facts that everybody should know and few elective courses.

Gardner suggests another type of school which he calls "individual-centered school", in which the mind is seen through a pluralistic view, recognizing different and discrete facets of cognition and acknowledging people's strengths and contrasting cognitive styles. His suggestion is based on two studies: cognitive science and neuroscience. He approaches this through his "theory of multiple intelligences".

The multiple intelligences that Gardner has unveiled through a series of sources have been Linguistic, Logical-mathematical, Spatial (think of engineers, sculptors, architects), Musical (Mozart), Bodily-kinesthetic (dancers, athletes, surgeons), Interpersonal (politicians, teachers) and Intrapersonal (understand oneself and operate effectively in life) intelligences. As a society we have come to place the Linguistic and Logical-mathematical intelligences as the most important. Therefore, we have devalued the rest or do not acknowledge them as intelligences.

The individual-centered school, assuming that people have diverse interests and abilities and that not one person can learn everything there is to lear, would seek to match individuals to curricular areas, particular ways of teaching, and after the first few grades to the various kinds of life and work options available in their culture. The risk of this school would be premature billeting an individual to a way of life. However, the early identifications of strengths can help children profit from experiences and the early identification of their weaknesses could be attended to before it was too late.

"If we can mobilize the spectrum of human abilities, not only will people feel better about themselves and more competent; it is even possible that they will also feel more engaged and better able to join the rest of the world community in working for the broader good."

I think this author is inclusive of all people and can help my research by supporting my argument that as a society we give more value to the left hemisphere of the brain and that the right hemisphere can help us solve more problems creatively. I think its a good source, but I worry when Gardner uses language, such as "the normal child". I don't like to have people "normalized". However, I think he tries to support all individuals, even when he falls into complicated relationships between language and social justice.

I want to read more about what he has to say about bodily-kinesthetic intelligence.

2nd Annotated Bibliography: Dance Audiences

Sussmann, Leila. “Dance Audiences: Answered and Unanswered Questions.” University of Illinois Press on behalf of Congress on Research in Dance. Dance Research Journal, Vol. 30, No. 1. Spring 1998, pp. 54-63. www.jstor.org/stable/1477894

In the U.S. there are four national surveys of arts audiences, three of which are sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA); they report the size and social profile of the ballet audience. In 1992 it was found that eigteen- to twenty –four-year-olds made up 37% of all ballet attendances, as opposed to 47% in 1982. In contrast to ballet, the modern dance audience has never been the subject of a nationwide, or even a large inclusive survey.

The arts are patronized disproportionately by people of high educational income and occupational status, and education is much the strongest determinant of arts attendance, stronger than income or occupation. After WWII the proportion of people graduating from college grew rapidly, having its epitome in the mid-sixties. However, even though education is the major determinant of arts patronage, the attendance rate has gone down, which helps conclude that colleges are not teaching students to participate in high culture as well as they used to. A part from not receiving enough encouragement to attend high culture events,due to the expansion of higher education, students that weren’t introduced to high culture at an early age are also attending college. Even in 1992, college graduates were still a larger proportion of ballet audiences than of the population.

Questionnaires from two modern dance companies were conducted, the Mark Morris’s audiences reveals that in 1990, 63% of the people attending three concerts had some education beyond the bachelor’s degree,  whilst the Paul Taylor audiences in 1994 reported 57%. Performers and choreographers are also highly educated; in 1990 57% of the retired modern dancers had at least a four-year degree as opposed to 10% of the retired ballet dancers. Also, in 1989 the NEA found that among five hundred choreographers (most of them doing modern dance), 77% had completed college. This “may be the highest college completion rate among professions for which there is no formal or informal licensing requirement.”

However, no study deals with the size of the modern dance audience nationwide in part because the interviewees interpret “modern dance” to mean musical-comedy dance, the latest fad in social dancing or something else other than what the artworld means by the term. A study of the dance subscribers in Boston (specifically Dance Umbrella and Boston Ballet) suggests that the modern dance audience is more educationally elite than the ballet audience since the small group of 1000 modern dance subscribers (8000 for Boston Ballet) accounted a disproportionately large number of arts attendances. “They were committed, not just to modern dance, but to the high culture arts in general.” Some differences between both modern and ballet audiences are that to some people modern dance is more engaging than ballet and exudes more emotion, to others it is hard to understand because there isn’t a storyline. Modern dance choreographers insist that the audience has a right to interpret the dance. “Frequent and wide exposure to the arts was the key difference we found between Boston’s ballet and modern dance subscribers.”

This article is a good source that expresses key differences and approaches to both modern dance and ballet. I think this last argument is important to my thesis because in Mexico there is no constant exposure to the arts in the k-12 system and it is possible to see the effect that this has caused to the art world not only in Mexico but the U.S. as well. It also demostrates how there is a very small group of people that participate in modern dance.

Learning about summarizing...

I understand better how to find a focus for my summary, it might take a draft of a summary and listing to find what the purpose of my writing is. I want to get better at it this weekend.

I want to challenge myself not to write exactly what the article says, but to process it in my mind or through writing and then create the summary.