Welcome to The Holistic Dance Teacher Guest Blog Series
I am thrilled to introduce The Holistic Dance Teacher Guest Blog Series! In the course of my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work with and be inspired by incredible dance teachers, choreographers, and professionals working in different parts of the dance field. Through this blog series, I will be introducing many of them to you! The artists and educators in this series all align with The Holistic Dance Teacher Approach, and I think you’ll find their contributions interesting and helpful for your own teaching and creative practices.
Our first guest blog post author is Angela Sigley Grossman, a dance artist based in the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania and Associate Professor of Dance at our shared alma matter DeSales University. I think you will want to save this post for the next time you experience choreography block or feel like you are in a creative rut!
Oblique Strategies: Breaking Through Creative Blocks
As a dance artist and educator, the creative process has always fascinated me. There are few things I enjoy more than the conceptualizing and problem-solving that comes from creating a new piece, whether that’s in a process for my own work or when I’m mentoring student choreographers, and I have always loved to learn how other artists create work as well. Years ago, I found myself deep-diving into the creative process of my favorite musical artist, David Bowie, when I stumbled upon something that resonated with me. Oblique Strategies. I had to learn more, and what I discovered profoundly shifted the way I think about my choreographic work and has offered unique tools for my students as well.
What are the Oblique Strategies?
Oblique Strategies refers to a deck of cards that was developed in 1975 by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. Brian Eno is a musician, producer, and music theorist who has worked with musical artists like David Bowie, The Talking Heads, U2, and Coldplay. Peter Schmidt was a visual artist, a painter, and an art theoretician. What you’ll find when you turn over the cards in the deck are “over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas;” each card contains a suggestion, a prompt, a problem to solve.
Eno and Schmidt developed the Oblique Strategies as a way to promote creative thinking and problem-solving in their respective work. They found that their creativity often suffered when faced with the pressure of deadlines and tight budgets. When resources were limited, they grappled with creating what they felt was their best work, and the result was similar to what we know as “choreographer’s block.” The Strategies were a way for Eno and Schmidt to combat that issue and break through creative blocks, but the deck of cards was also a way for them to consider new ways of thinking about making work that challenge habit and encourage unexpected shifts in the creative process.
Oblique Strategies in Practice: Sabbatical Research
The cards were not originally intended to be physically embodied, but my curiosity as a dance artist was piqued, and I wondered whether the Oblique Strategies could be utilized in the choreographic process. I was fortunate to be granted a sabbatical, during which I spent a semester researching by creating physical responses to these cards. Whereas Brian Eno might turn over the card “Abandon normal instruments” and suggest to musicians that they switch instruments for the session, I would have to determine how to physically embody that prompt to generate choreography. During each solo rehearsal session, I shuffled the deck of cards and pulled three at random. I gave myself the task to generate a physical response to the cards, and this process looked a little different every day. Some cards inspired me right away, and I quickly generated a 30-60 second phrase in response. Sometimes, the three cards seemed to be in conversation with one another, so I considered that relationship in the physical response. However, there were days when the cards did not spark an immediate idea, and I would return to it another time after some thought. Once I created roughly 45-minutes worth of small phrases and chunks of material, I invited dancers into the process, and used the strategies once again to inform the way we developed and structured the chunks into one cohesive piece. The result was a 60-minute performance that utilized 62 Oblique Strategies and premiered in the Fall of 2022.
Creative Discoveries
In a podcast called The Lighthouse that Brian Eno began producing in 2021, Eno reflects on the Oblique Strategies and remarks, “The point of these cards was to slightly inconvenience you.” While there were certainly moments when I did feel inconvenienced by the cards (and several imaginary arguments with Brian Eno about his intentions with one prompt or another), the Oblique Strategies completely shifted and challenged my typical creative process. Prior to working with the Strategies, I would often begin a creative process with a theme or unifying concept, followed by movement generation. The Strategies encouraged me to develop work in reverse. By selecting cards at random, the prompts were a catalyst for movement invention first, and theme was developed (or not) after noticing what was emerging in the movement.
Using the Strategies in this way felt a lot like using chance methods in choreography, and it’s no surprise that Brian Eno was inspired by John Cage’s experiments in chance. While Merce Cunningham would imply that creating with chance methods freed him from his own biases, I found that this method of working gave me more freedom in my choice-making, removed the tendency to hold precious what I was making, and allowed me to quite easily rework, edit, or chop apart whole sections of the choreography without remorse or judgement.
Oblique Strategies in the Dance Classroom
After spending a few years with this research, I’ve had the opportunity to introduce the Strategies to other dance artists and educators, as well as my college students, who have experimented with them in a number of ways. One of the most exciting things about using the cards with students is that there are unlimited ways to interpret each prompt. The variety of ways a prompt can be interpreted paves the way for creative thinking and problem-solving as well as embracing new perspectives that their peers authentically bring to the space. For example, the Oblique Strategy “use an unacceptable colour” generates wide-ranging responses about what “unacceptable” could mean in dance.
How I’ve used the Strategies with my students
Oblique Strategies Choreographic Workshops
In Oblique Strategies choreographic workshops that I’ve designed, each student selects a card and generates a movement response. Students then form pairs or small groups, where they determine how their prompts and movement responses act in conversation with each other to create something to show at the end of the workshop. During these workshops, students can choose to select an additional card to shake up what they already have or to inspire additional movement. This workshop fosters a sense of collaboration among the group, and participants have remarked, “I enjoyed collaborating with my partners by putting our cards together. We experimented with how the prompts could relate to one another. We decided to face each other as we danced and explored how our movements could affect one another.”
Dance Composition Class Projects
When struggling to devise a concept for a project, a student can select a strategy and devote their project to examining that strategy in movement. For example, a card pulled by one student offered “Emphasize the flaws,” and they decided to focus on character flaws and create a humorous piece exaggerating various character traits. Another student pulled “Once the search is in progress, something will be found,” and they visualized that they were trapped in a small space before discovering that there was an entire world outside of it.
Improvisational Exploration
Cards can be turned over to spark improvisational prompts for use in technique, improvisation, and composition classes. While cards suggesting “Breathe more deeply” or “Water” might inspire more obvious movement-related reactions, others that indicate “Ask your body,” “Do something boring,” or “What wouldn’t you do?” elicit a multitude of unique responses.
Dancers can approach the prompts in divergent ways regardless of background or ability, and the prompts are not limited to one type of body or movement practice. Students can enter into using the strategies through a variety of lenses and there is no prescriptive result. The cards also promote discussion about movement invention, choreographic meaning, and teamwork, and there is great potential for using the Oblique Strategies in cross-disciplinary projects among artists in different fields.
Give Oblique Strategies a Try!
If interested in obtaining an actual deck of the Oblique Strategies, they can be found here.
However, you can also find websites that offer a new strategy when the page is refreshed as a budget-friendly option. Lists of the Strategies are available online for those who want to make their own decks, but I highly recommend that the process remain one in which you can select a prompt at random, rather than scanning a list for the prompt that appeals the most. You might also be inspired to create your own prompts for your students to explore!
The Oblique Strategies encourage me to ask many questions of my work, and I love fostering that same inquisitiveness in my students as they embark on their own creative processes. The chance element allows for what Brian Eno describes as a balance between control and surrender, and provides space for a multitude of possibilities for interpretation. By introducing students to new ways of thinking about their work and encouraging them to break free from their own biases, we help to foster the next generation of creative thinkers and dance-makers.
About the Guest Author
Angela Sigley Grossman is a dance artist based in the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. She holds an MFA degree in Dance Performance and Choreography from Temple University and earned a BA degree in Dance from DeSales University. She has presented choreographic work at various universities and conferences, and has shared her research at National Dance Education Organization national conferences. Angela joined the faculty at DeSales University in 2011 where she is an Associate Professor of Dance. In 2021 she was granted sabbatical leave to conduct embodied research using Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies as a choreographic process. She is currently investigating the intersection of generative Artificial Intelligence and dance-making. Learn more at www.angelasigleygrossman.com
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