 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Doris Rudko,
| When Horst died in 1964, Rudko took over his classes at the American Dance Festival, using his methodology, until 1967, then taught at the Festival again, but with her own syllabus, in 1974, 1981, and 1982. She was also on the dance faculty at New York University from 1972 to 1981. Her philosophy of teaching the art of making dances is a distillation of what she learned from H'Doubler at the University of Wisconsin, from Horst, and from professional study with Sybil Shearer, Hanya Holm, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Martha Graham, Jose Limon, and Merce Cunningham. Like Graham, who often quoted composer Edgar Varese's statement that "all of us are born with genius, but most people only keep it a few seconds," Rudko believes that everyone has the potential for creativity in varying degrees. But, she writes, in an article titled “Dance Composition: a Personal Vision,” "sometimes in dance one's creativity is blocked by years of technical training which placed too much emphasis on isolated steps and patterns or virtuosic feats simply for their own sake. Sometimes creativity can be blocked by the dancers themselves, by their own insecurities and self-consciousness. And sometimes one's creativity is checked by worrying about being right or wrong, good or bad."* Freeing students from these blocks is what her teaching is all about, whether she is in New York or Taiwan. In an article about teaching choreography in Taiwan, Rudko talks about her Asian students' movement vocabulary, mentioning the beautiful articulation of the hands and fingers.* "Somewhat conversely, the Taiwanese dancers do not gambol through space with their legs and feet...indeed I would often have to stretch their traveling vocabulary to include more than walking and running steps." Doing this through an interpreter wasn't easy, Rudko says. Nevertheless, she has managed to teach choreography in many countries where she did not know the verbal language. Mastering the medium of movement, the use of space, rhythm, energy, nuance, and coloring, and the development of a heightened kinesthetic sense—the sixth sense she calls it—are all part of what Rudko is about. What Rudko has practiced, and what she has taught and continues to teach, in non-ideological but nevertheless definite ways for half a century, is dance as universal language. "[To] master the medium of movement as a language," she says, "is a long, long journey." *Included in East Meets West in Dance: Voices in the Cross-Cultural Dialogue, edited by Ruth Solomon and John Solomon, Gordon & Breach Publishing Group, 1995. |