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UNCG Professor Takes Teaching Expertise to Circus School

Larry Lavender is running off to join the circus. But it’s only to teach there. And he’ll be back after a couple of days.
The head of the Department of Dance at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro has been invited to teach at the National Circus School in Montreal, which supplies dancers and other artists to circuses across the world, including the famed Cirque du Soleil.

From March 13 to 15, Lavender will work with students and instructors at the school using his “Creative Process Mentoring” methods to teach and develop students’ overall creative skills rather than just ways to improve a particular piece. “There are ways to stimulate creative thinking,” he said. “And that’s what the process mentoring methods are designed for. The idea is to stand beside and help students without breaking their flow. I think it’s better to do this than to just tell someone that their piece is or is not good.

People may ask, ‘What did you think of the piece,’ and if they do, OK, that’s an invitation to be a critic. But there are a lot of teaching tools more powerful than that.” Lavender and the other instructors at the school will help coach circus school students – not in a final project, but in the process of developing a conceptually complete artistic piece.

Traditionally, students at the circus school have been taught the skills of circus performers, but not the creative and artistic skills to create narrative or thematically-driven dances or pieces. “The field is moving toward a more theme-based, theatrical style, and they want new ideas about that,” Lavender said. “At the school, they are trained to do things like rings or juggling or wire skills. They aren’t trained in the theatre, as we are, so they are looking for people – like me – from other arts to come in.”

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