Palomar College Ballet Instructor Dr. Molly Faulkner has had a bit of play in her dance career, performing as a Muppet in a traveling Sesame Street traveling show and as a Disney dancer in Japan, and she wants ballet teachers and students to have that same sense of play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Faulkner and her co-author, Julia K. Gleich, a ballet instructor in New York City, recently wrote an article, \u201cDancing in the Limen: Art and Play and Ballet Pedagogy\u201d that appears in the prestigious Oxford Handbook of Ballet Pedagogy <\/em>to be published in early 2025.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n She said the article addresses the question \u201cDoes play exist in the ballet studio?\u201d looking at its long history of training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBallet is traditionally top-down, and we are trying to get out of that mindset,\u201d Faulkner said. \u201cWe want to open it up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A goal of the article is to encourage ballet instructors to offer more freedom and creativity to their students, she said. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to give a list of musts to teachers,\u201d Faulkner said. \u201cAll we want to do is present a framework that perhaps they can operate in to be free with experimentation and play.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the third article Faulkner has written with Gleich and she said \u201cwe both enjoy gentle anarchy in our classes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Faulker said she has had a lifelong love of dance, taking lessons starting when she was eight and becoming a professional dancer with the Arizona Dance Theatre when she was 18. In the late 1980s, she spent 10 months as a dancing Grover, one of the Muppets in a Sesame Street Live tour. That was followed by seven months as a Disney dancer at Tokyo Disneyland, performing in five shows a day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After a year in Sweden, Faulkner returned home and earned a bachelor\u2019s degree in dance at the University of Arizona, a master\u2019s degree in choreography at the University of Iowa and a doctorate in dance and related arts at Texas Women\u2019s University. After working at the University of Northern Colorado, she came to Palomar College in 2002.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Faulkner said she loved seeing the diversity of students in her dance classes, from teenagers to senior citizens, and returning professional dancers to someone who wants to learn ballet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEvery goal is different. You just try to get them where they live,\u201d Faulkner said. \u201cThey may not be professional dancers by the end of my class, but I hope they are going to love ballet.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"