Teaching
My mission as an artist is inextricable from my career as a leading educator, converging in the creation of a unique pedagogy that synthesizes Classical Modern Techniques and styles (Graham, Taylor, Nikolais-Louis, elements of Limón, etc.) with a variety of somatic forms including the Bartenieff Fundamentals, Alexander Technique, Pilates, and Gyrotonics.
The class encourages expertise in sensual, detailed understanding of the underpinnings of shape and gesture, energetic torso involvement with port de bras, and the strategic use of varying degrees of épaulement. The practice involves extensive floor work, innovative partnering, consistent repetition, and fosters agency in the individual response and utilization of its principles. This results in unusual, autonomous, expressive dancing and is, therefore, not merely a parallel research strand to my choreographic output but absolutely essential to its rendering. My former students have propagated and built on this work in both academic and professional settings in Chicago, New York, Milwaukee, St. Louis and numerous other national venues – evidence of its uniqueness and impact.
Sara Hook teaches for the Academy for Teachers at Gibney
Sara Hook teaches for the Academy for Teachers at Gibney
My research in training methodology and choreography are constantly intertwined. I actively conflate function and expression, training and aesthetic, rather than seeing them as separate. Dramaturge Betsy Brandt who worked with me on Bored House Guests and other projects, and who also is a former student trained in the teaching of this pedagogy, has urged me to archive it. Currently, we are working on a dance for camera which will be part archive and part poetic translation of this pedagogical work. We are attempting to use this medium to evocatively portray the inner imagination necessary to fully inhabit technical tasks and to encourage a flamboyant and erotic corporeality. The work also will make historical reference, especially to old filmography of the diva figure.