“Let´s go!” : A qualitative study about the advantages and disadvantages with a traditional teaching in dance 

There is respect for the history of dance and my aim is to find out how the history affects the dancing youth today. The design of the dance lesson is often of a traditional stereotypical manner, both didactic and methodic, and it rarely appears to be questioned. I have danced for almost 20 years and I am a part of this tradition of movements, music, language and way of “being”. My ambition with this study is to go outside my own experience and offer insight and an overall picture of a, for the outsider, closed world. Earlier research points out that knowing what to expect brings a sense of security, and it gives a structure to work within. The structure becomes a stimulus that creates purpose and meaning in what we learn. It offers a sense of freedom and allows creativity to flourish. Few rules to follow produce a feeling of being lost, but too many rules generate the feeling of being trapped. One should strive to find balance between these two opposites. The traditional teaching in dance is associated with the connection between the master and the novice. The teacher has rules and demands that the student has to relate to and with that comes guidance through the learning process. This study includes empirical material from qualitative interviews with three teachers within three different dance genres, and an interview with four students in a group. The informants were given the possibility to reflect over their own part in the dance studio through three main questions that were open for personal interpretation. The results from the interviews were analyzed and compared to earlier studies, along with keywords from Michel Foucault´s perspective on power, and Urie Bronfenbrenner´s theory about the central point in our environment. The results indicate that dance carry a tradition that becomes part of the dancer. Every genre in dance has its own history, rules, and demands that defines it. From these defining aspects, the teacher gives the student tools that are personalized for his or her specific needs. It is up to each teacher to find his or her own way to reach out to the students this requires experience, reflection and a sense of dare.