{"id":17109,"date":"2021-05-18T14:39:59","date_gmt":"2021-05-18T20:39:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/?p=17109"},"modified":"2021-08-10T12:01:19","modified_gmt":"2021-08-10T18:01:19","slug":"creating-a-container-teaching-and-learning-during-covid-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/2021\/05\/creating-a-container-teaching-and-learning-during-covid-19\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Creating a Container\u2019: Teaching and Learning During COVID-19"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rosy Simas\u2019 first scheduled campus performance through CC\u2019s Department of Theatre and Dance was a go for March 2020. She packed up, got on the road, and, as Simas puts it, \u201cfrom the time I left Minnesota and drove here, in that two-day timeframe, we started to enter the pandemic and that is when people started to think about restrictions.\u201d<\/p>\n

When she arrived in Colorado Springs, Simas, a transdisciplinary artist who historically has presented work as a choreographer, carried on. With partner and dancer Sam Aros Mitchell, she installed and performed a transitory piece in Cornerstone Arts Center on March 6, weaving together movement, film, and immersive music.<\/p>\n

Though the year to follow would throw everyone for a loop, including Simas, her visit had made an impact. She\u2019s back on campus for the 2021 Spring Semester, as the Department of Theatre and Dance\u2019s first artist-in-residence, thanks to the newly established Pamela Battey Mitchell Visiting Artist-in-Residence in Contemporary Dance in honor of Hanya Holm. (See \u201cGift Creates New Visiting Artist Position in Dance Department<\/a>\u201d).<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is impossible to overstate the importance of Rosy\u2019s contributions to the Department of Theatre and Dance \u2014 and above all, our work on the\u00a0antiracism initiative,\u201d says Associate Professor of Performance Studies\u00a0Ryan Platt, who also is chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance. \u201cRosy is a Native artist and activist who actively builds new Native audiences and combats the marginalization of Native artists,\u201d he says. \u201cHer teaching always involves astute attention to questions of identity, power, and cultural difference. These issues are particularly needed in dance, which many students regard as inherently neutral and a matter of technical skill.\u201d<\/p>\n

Platt notes that Simas also is contributing to the larger artistic and intellectual discourse on campus and that the Department of Theatre and Dance has been collaborating with the Native American Student Union, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, and faculty in anthropology, English, and race, ethnicity, and migration studies.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese interdisciplinary connections are essential to bringing new knowledge and critical perspectives on indigeneity, colonialism, and embodiment to both our department and the larger college,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

As a part of her residency this semester, Simas has been teaching and creating \u2014 and learning.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photo by Chidera Ikpeamarom \u201922<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

During Block 6, she taught a dance production lab class for both trained dancers and students new to the stage. In it, the students worked toward creating a culmination project of an online and socially distanced live performance. At the time, students could choose to take their classes either in-person or online, and Simas ended up working with four students in person and one virtually. The four students on campus met for class in Cutler Hall with Simas (and Mitchell, who came along again to assist). The one taking class long-distance happened to be living in Minneapolis, where Simas is from and where Rosy Simas Danse, the Native-led arts organization she founded is based, and so Simas pulled in colleagues there to offer support and provide the student with a bit of their own in-person experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile we could wish that we could have more hands on to every element of the work, the multi-disciplinary aspect of it, it\u2019s just hard to do that right now,\u201d Simas says. \u201cI\u2019m basically creating a container and we\u2019re creating performance to put within the container and the students have a lot of input into what that is and how that is executed, or, for lack of a better word, interpreted.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s challenging,\u201d Simas adds, \u201cbut I think that it\u2019s a challenge that is worthy of doing \u2026 . I don\u2019t think we\u2019re going back to all in-person anything. So whether we like it or not, we\u2019re gonna learn from this experience. And even if we learn we don\u2019t like it, we still have to participate in it, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond learning how to make the logistics of teaching during a pandemic work, Simas also learned how the pandemic would impact the content of her class conversations. She and the students spent a lot more time talking about what it is to perform, to share, and to communicate at a time like this, as well as more about presence and how personal space has changed. For instance, she says, when considering what is an individual\u2019s kinesphere \u2014 the notion created by dance artist and theorist Rudolf Laban to define the space around a person\u2019s body that can be reached by extended arms and legs \u2014 how has the dimension of that gotten bigger for most people because of the pandemic?<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is it to permeate that,\u201d she asks, \u201cand actually connect with audiences in a way that people have not been practicing for the last year?\u201d<\/p>\n

The class also talked a lot about grief.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe [talked] about grieving and condoling and caretaking. I talk in my own work about how we\u2019re all sort of in a state of shock. And as we exit that, we will begin to grieve, regardless of the fact that over \u2014 I don\u2019t know what it is today \u2014 550,000 people have died,\u201d she says. \u201cThere will be this, I think, decade-long impact in how we do things. I mean, people have not been able to grieve, so how does that change our rituals around grieving?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photo by Jennifer Coombes<\/p><\/div>\n

Grief is a topic long familiar to Simas\u2019 work, which she describes as weaving themes of personal and collective identity with family, matriarchy, sovereignty, equality, and healing, through movement. \u201cI think most of my work deals with movement in general, and by movement, I mean, either moving bodies through space, moving sound, moving objects, or moving image,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Her link to her ancestors \u2014 Simas is Haudenosaunee, enrolled Seneca, Heron Clan \u2014 is what calls her to create in the way that she does.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy work is really very simply about attention and building relationship to the natural world, building relationship to audiences and community, and bringing attention or bringing into focus issues or philosophy or ideas that are both related to my experiences culturally. But also my work really follows a genealogy because that\u2019s a huge part of my research. A huge part of what I\u2019ve spent the last 10 years doing is deeply discovering a very extended, wide family.\u201d<\/p>\n

And, she adds, a part of that for her now \u201cis about developing processes of grieving immense loss of my ancestors and of those of extended families.\u201d<\/p>\n

She explains: One of the ways Canada disenfranchised many people was to enforce a patrilineal system in which Native women who married and had children with a non-Native man lost their status. Both they and their children were deemed non-Native.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very significant,\u201d Simas says. \u201cThose are part of the losses that we both mourn and also try to investigate to understand more what it is that our families have historically gone through.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a process that takes many shapes. Which is why when Simas describes her work as an artist as transdisciplinary versus multidisciplinary, it makes sense.<\/p>\n

\u201cMultidisciplinary is, to me, bringing different disciplines together to create a whole, and transdisciplinary is working in different forms and with different materials and using different processes that the project requires, listening to what is needed,\u201d she says. \u201cI could end up doing a project that doesn\u2019t have any dance in it at all, if that\u2019s what the project requires. And I have done that, I have done just installations.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing in the messiness of not always knowing,\u201d she says, \u201cand working in a transdisciplinary way is more conducive for that for me.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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