We were lucky to catch up with Daniella Parisot recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Daniella thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
When first applying to college, I only looked at conservatory-style dance programs that would help further my goal of dancing professionally. At the time, the goal was to dance in a professional contemporary or contemporary ballet company. And though I did succeed with that goal, it is due partially to the fact that I chose a school that would give me the most options post-graduation. Versatility ended up being my greatest asset. Learning how to teach changed the way I danced. I decided on a university, The Hartt School, that would allow me to pursue a BFA in dance performance and ballet pedagogy. Little did I know that this choice would change the direction of what I wanted my career to look like.
When studying how to teach ballet, one must re-learn the basics, not just the basics of technique, but dance’s pedagogical history and its influences. In school, we investigated the deep history of master teachers such as Checchetti, Blasis, the French School masters, Vaganova, Vestris, Bournonville, the Cuban masters, Glasstone, etc., and how their pedagogical study helped shape the way my peers and I learned to dance. From history, our studies transitioned into body anatomy, step and timing progression, terminology, how to plan a class, speak with an accompanist, music theory, spelling ballet vocabulary properly, etc. Throughout my education and studying under excellent teachers and mentors, I discovered an expansive array of ideas. Now, as a teacher, I get to choose what would be most beneficial for my students—through much trial and error, of course! After all, teachers are forever students at the end of the day.
My favorite aspect of ballet pedagogy has to be timing and step progression, i.e., the step (and how we teach that step) that comes before another. Step progression also includes the timing of that step when first taught and how it progresses in duration over time. For example, teaching a tendu to the side (a stretch of the leg in one direction from an initial position with a pointed foot to the side of the body) would be taught at first in 8 counts, then 4, then 2, then on the upbeat to close to the initial position by count 1. I thoroughly enjoy researching which step I should teach next. For those who know ballet, it is relatively simple; we can’t teach a battement tendu jeté until battement tendu is mastered. But others are far less simple, and those questions are my favorite.
I realized that my love for the concepts of progression arose from the holes in my early ballet training. In the dance world, it is common practice to teach students more vocabulary than they are ready for, physically and emotionally, in hopes that they stick with ballet and not grow bored. An alternative to this, and in my case, a teacher sees a student with “ballet facility or aesthetic” and puts them in a class with older, more advanced students because the steps, due to “their aesthetics,” look nice. From age ten to twelve, I danced with fifteen to eighteen-year-olds multiple times weekly. This may seem like a good thing to many, but I missed out on the unhurried, progressional movement vital for a career’s longevity. And by career, I don’t necessarily mean a professional dancer, but also someone just wanting to take ballet for fun. Robust and safe technique comes from slow, progressional movement that grows with speed and difficulty over time. There is a difference that I now understand as a teacher between something looking pleasant and something being executed correctly and with efficiency. Chronic injuries hindered my late teens and early twenties from years of doing things incorrectly because I was doing the vocabulary of a teenager at ten. Those years between ages 9 to 13 are of the utmost importance. Changes are happening quickly, growth spurts at an astronomical rate, and coming to this realization within my training and studying how to teach it differently has developed how I teach now.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Like many, I began dancing when my mother placed me in a ballet class at age three so that she could work out at the gym simultaneously. It was the late 90s, and it was widespread for YMCAs and other businesses to offer creative movement, tap, or ballet classes at the same time as the parent’s fitness classes. Music was already a massive part of my familial upbringing. My grandfather was a cellist and teacher, so I naturally grew up going to concerts, listening to old recordings, learning the names of every classical composer, and just learning to enjoy the nature of music. Although I was three, I can still remember, to this day, feeling so content when I finally understood what it meant to move my body to the music I was already listening to. From then on, I never stopped.
Even as a child, I wanted to be a professional dancer. The desire to perform, whether in classical ballet, contemporary ballet, or contemporary ballet, never altered and inherently adjusted my childhood. I left the small fitness center classes to pursue a more rigorous study of dance where I could train 15-18 hours a week outside of regular school. Although it is widespread for dancers to audition for companies right outside of high school, I needed more time to feel ready. I decided to go to a college to further my training instead and attended The Hartt School at The University of Hartford. There, I learned the many different options that the dance world offered and furthered not just my passion for dancing but my passion for teaching and choreography as well.
After graduation, I taught and danced as a freelancer in Hartford and was a company artist with the Ballet Hartford. Before this and my college graduation, I endured a significant spinal injury that left my body and brain in a problematic place; although I was dancing professionally and in a company, the hours were taking a toll on my body. Deciding on a fresh start, I moved to Nashville, TN, to find a community in what I learned was an up-and-coming dance scene. Unfortunately, this move was right before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and with only a few months in the area, I found myself right in the middle of lockdown. Fortunately, I had made enough connections in the Nashville dance community before the pandemic to keep up that part of my life through Zoom. But trying to dance professionally and performing were now extremely limited. Auditions in other cities stopped, and I could only take daily classes in my kitchen, which I could only do for so long before I burnt out. So, with the first real break from dancing in a long time, I became acutely aware that my body wasn’t in as much pain anymore.
From there my passions changed from dancing more professionally to teaching and choreographing. I am on The Centennial Youth Ballet’s faculty at the Metro Parks Dance Division. The program is fantastic in that it has found a way, through the Parks and Recreation program of Metro Nashville, to provide strong classical ballet training to students at an affordable cost for anyone desiring to dance. I currently teach, coach, and choreograph in the program for students ages 8 to 18.
All classes that I teach require consistent and diligent planning. When explaining ballet pedagogy to individuals unfamiliar with its content, I like to relate it to that of a school teacher. Dance is another form of communication that, like mathematics and grammar, has been learned with lots of repetition and extreme detail. It requires hours of planning, even just for a two-hour class that meets twice a week. Dance teachers have to think about the development of each child as an individual but have to teach the entire class equally. You create lesson plans, problem-solve, and help each student develop their technique over lots of repetition. Although dancing is a physical activity, it is also an art form where one is required to express themselves. This vulnerability can be challenging for some students; therefore, asking one to be open and to trust requires careful instruction and extreme responsibility.
My teaching style has been heavily influenced by the wonderful and talented mentors under whom I trained. It has also been very inspired by the famous Russian pedagogue Agrippina Vaganova. One of my strengths as a teacher stems from my relentless and almost obsessive study of step progression and timing. What is the best way to teach this step, or how can I make this step easier to learn? As a teacher, I’m always trying to find ways to make things easier—not harder because ballet in nature is already so complex. How can one be vulnerable and confident in their artistry onstage if their technique doesn’t help them? One of my other strengths as a teacher is also very inspired by Vaganova’s core beliefs: the set class. A ballet class is composed of a fundamental structure that includes “sections,” which are exercises executed at the barre and repeated in the center at adagio and allegro tempos. These exercises in the center are then performed stationary and en tournant (turning in space) before moving on to allegro practices (jumping). In her classes, the exercises in each section executed by the students would be repeated for weeks, sometimes months at a time. This allowed her students’ bodies to dissect each movement so that they could grasp its essence. Consistency is essential, and repetition creates mastery. In repeating the exercises from week to week, the students got past the point of learning the actual series of movements and into what the actual action is doing to help them. The movements literally and figuratively become their support system.
This idea leads me to the most crucial element of teaching, which I firmly believe in. It is often neglected by the dance world and, more specifically, the ballet world: mental health. As mentioned, dance is inherently vulnerable. We are teaching students how to communicate with an audience using their bodies through movement. Dancers are also standing in front of a mirror for multiple hours a week, analyzing themselves, which, if taught in a certain way, can be incredibly toxic and unhealthy. I try my hardest to teach my students to view themselves and have an internal monologue filled with neutrality and kindness. We are correcting their technique based on what will help make their movement more efficient so that they can confidently rely on their bodies. Confidence is a practice of repetition, which brings me back to the idea of a set class and how it also benefits mental health. In a world with so much unpredictability, coming into a class where you already know the outlook or what you will be practicing is calming. It helps to eliminate the anxiety of “the what.” Instead, we can focus on confidently practicing “the how.” Through years of observing how this affects each student, I have seen an increase in learning adaptability. Very often, and with validity, many teachers believe that for students to memorize things quickly, one must keep teaching them new material to learn. However, for many individuals, especially those without a very type A learning style, this can be incredibly anxiety-inducing. I have found that when students know they will get to practice something until they are comfortable, their brain is faster at picking up something new. The fear that comes with the idea of “you only get one chance” goes away over time, so if they only get one chance at that specific thing, there will always be something else.
So, as described before, teaching dance and ballet is like being a school teacher. We teach the students techniques and tools, but at the core, we teach skills to use in their daily lives, not just in the studio or on the stage. It is a huge responsibility I do not take for granted.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
My students for one. Nothing in this world gives me greater pleasure than seeing the look on one of my student’s faces when they finally accomplish that thing they’ve been trying to grasp for weeks, months, or even years. Another goal of mine is change. There are so many tactics in the dance world that are damaging, most of them regarding mental health. As someone who has felt that impact, I hope to offer my students a place of solace in my classroom that, should they decide to further a dance or teaching career, will help them adapt and help change the dance community over time.
Similarly, with choreographing, my favorite moment is watching the little puzzle pieces inside my head come together for a long time and form something cohesive. It’s a very satisfying moment watching a dancer take a movement you created on your body and adapt it to fit their own. The ever-evolving process of choreographing is so fascinating but, therefore, difficult to feel as if anything is truly finished. But when being comfortable with something enough to put it on stage, there is a sense of accomplishment that through all of these changes, something was able to remain.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
Sometimes, it feels as though I am unlearning more than I have learned, but I believe that is an innate part of teaching—you are constantly a student re-learning the ideas you once thought worked. But I think the thing I had to unlearn the most happened after the start of the pandemic. It wasn’t until the pandemic that I began to fully admit that teaching and studying how to teach gave me more joy than performing. For so long, this career choice felt like a second option. Unfortunately, this “plan b” mentality came from a phrase often said to dancers who aspire to be professionals, “well, if you don’t have a long career, you can always teach,” or the phrase as old as time “those who can’t do, teach.” Everywhere I looked, it was as if it were some failure to change my path. I even initially found a college that would offer me a teaching degree as a backup plan because I was told that I had to have one because every dancer is replaceable. Even when I had many teaching mentors tell me in school that I would make an excellent teacher, I didn’t want to believe them because of this deep internal fear that it meant they didn’t believe in me as a performer. I realize now that those teachers weren’t trying to say I wouldn’t perform. They knew that not everyone who can “do” can, in fact, teach. Over the years, I have had plenty of teachers with incredible performing careers and yet no awareness of the harm they were doing to their students physically and mentally. It has taken years of reminding myself that the entire stereotype of it all is entirely ridiculous. However, there is a difference between knowing something and understanding something with feeling. That fear of this love being a “plan b” creeps in from time to time in my head, maybe not daily, but often enough that I have to check back in. Sometimes, paths change, and we must repeatedly learn it is okay.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.daniellaparisot.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/daniella.parisot/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniella-parisot/
Image Credits
Photos by Erica Marie, Ty Lyons Graynor, and Jelle IJNtema