Luis Rincón Alba
Faculty: Luis Rincón Alba, Art & Public Policy
Collaborator: Shamar Watt ('24 Grad Dance)
Supported by the Collaborative Impact Grant 2024-2025
Luis Rincón Alba, in collaboration with alum Shamar Watt, is researching a teaching methodology grounded in Nhaka, a movement technique developed by dancer nora chipaumire. Nhaka borrows from ancestral dance techniques from Zimbabwe and it expands limited understandings of the brain as the thinking organ to incorporate the whole body and its capacity to connect with the soil. They consider this a global issue because unless humanity develops/recovers an active corporeal connection with the soil, the climate crisis will be addressed only with our isolated brains. Nhaka breaks useless divisions of theory and practice while it invites students to become active thinkers and to incorporate readings and study materials into their corporealities through a series of rigorous and precise exercises with which they start every class.
While Tisch inherently recognizes the value of practice, they feel that the curricular distinction between theoretical and practical classes needs to be imaginatively reevaluated. Instead of a sitting relax/passive body, these series of exercises incorporate the knowledge/practice of people of color from the Global South not merely as information and data to be absorbed but as a corporeal disposition that activates how we think with and through our bodies.
This project started in the Fall 2024. Rincón Alba and Watt are currently developing their pedagogy in one of Rincón Alba’s classes, and with continued support, they hope to systematize the pedagogy to be easily implemented in all the courses Rincón Alba teaches at Art & Public Policy and how Watt approaches teaching in the field of dance.