Teresa Heiland

CLMA, PhD, RSMT/D/E, Associate Professor of Dance at University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Teresa works at the intersection of the performing arts, education, wellness, teaching-and-learning, movement education, and dance literacy. She seeks to produce pedagogical and research activities that inform disciplinary practices, provoke personal development, and deepen dancers’ understanding of their potential as artists, educators, and lifelong learners and leaders. She teaches Laban Movement Analysis, Motif notation using the Language of Dance® approach, dance pedagogy; somatics and dance wellness through Cortical Field Reeducation, Pilates, Franklin Method III, Gyrotonic, and Bartenieff Fundamentals; dance composition; and a broad array of dance analysis, research methods, and approaches to writing about dance. During summers, Dr. Heiland certifies dancers in the Language of Dance® Foundations and Master Practitioner courses through the Language of Dance® USA. Since 2006, she has serves on the Board of the Language of Dance Center promoting quality educational curriculum using Motif notation for creative praxis and community inclusivity, engagement, and dance education advocacy. She has restaged Nijinsky’s L’apres midi d’un Faune from Labanotation with a live symphony orchestra as well as Parson’s Parsons Etude and she has published articles about learning approaches within dance education, forms of dance literacy, teaching and learning, Laban Movement Analysis, Motif notation, imagery’s effects on dance technique, and body image in Journal of Dance Education, Research in Dance Education; Journal of Imagery Research in Sport and Physical Activity; Dance: Current Selected Research 7 & 9; and Geographies of Dance: Body, Movement, and Corporeal Negotiations. She is the founding and lead Editor of the international, peer-reviewed, academic Journal of Movement Arts Literacy (http://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/jmal/), which serves to promote the scholarly study of movement arts literacy. Her forthcoming book titled, Leaping into Dance Literacy with Language of Dance is under contract with Intellect Publishing in the United Kingdom. While her formative training was in Wigman/Holm, Limon, Hawkins, improvisation, ballet, jazz, musical theatre, ballroom and Lindy, she also studied Javanese dance intensively for two years with Valerie Vetter and one year at Institute Seni Indonesia and at nDalem Pujokusuman in Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia. Her performing career was with Christine Vilardo’s company, Moving Target, the New York New Music and Dance Ensemble, and Sai, a multidisciplinary pickup company in NYC. She completed her PhD in Dance in Higher Education and Administration and MA in Dance Education at New York University and holds a BFA in Studio Art. She taught in the dance department at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles for fifteen years before joining the faculty at UNCG.

There are 18 included publications by Teresa Heiland :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Africanist Aesthetics, Jazz Dance, and Notation Walk into a Barre 2018 813 researchers hypothesized how motif notation concepts from Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) and Language of Dance® (LOD) could be used to help learners understand how the roots and branches of jazz dance styles are related. We began by investigating the ...
Body image of dancers in Los Angeles: The cult of slenderness and media influence among dance students 2008 790 Body image and self-esteem are examined through personal stories among Los Angeles college dancers who grew up in the Hollywood culture of the cult of slenderness. The study incorporates a body image survey, eating disorder screen, and an interview p...
Dance Dialogues 2020 128 This article focuses on the development of a theoretical framework for jazz dance in which researchers hypothesized how motif notation concepts from Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) and Language of Dance® (LOD) could be used to help learners understand ...
Dancers’ Scholarly Writing Skills Amid a Climate of Virtual Gratification 2010 115 For the past twenty years, reflective writing has been emphasized over expository writing in education. This tactic has encouraged more involvement in writing, due to reflective writing’s emphasis on understanding of self in relation to the world. Wh...
Dancing Calgon: Embodied Research through Motif Notation 2023 514 This embodiment study is presented in video from the qualitative analysis of two dancers’ experiences with dancing and writing using Motif Notation as they engaged in the practice of learning a dance from video. They interpreted their scores, revised...
Effects of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic imagery interventions on dancers' plié arabesques 2012 654 The goal of this study was to examine the influence of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic delivery modes of Frank Method images (anatomical bone rhythms, metaphorical image, and tactile aid, respectively) on the performance of college dancers’ plié ar...
Examining effects of Franklin Method metaphorical and anatomical mental images on college dancers’ jumping height 2012 614 A quasi-experimental design was used to assess effects of Franklin Method images on dancers’ jump height. Thirteen dancers applied four image interventions while performing first position jumps for vertical height analysis. Mean heights and within-tr...
Exploring the Movement and Cultural Literacy of Jazz 2013 122 Are there identifiable elements of body action, use of space, movement quality, and relationship that arecharacteristic of the genre of jazz dance? If so, where are these elements found within the diverse styles ofjazz? How do these core elements rev...
Forging Mutual Paths: Defining Dance Literacy in the 21st Century 2011 229 Conference proceedings from the 2011 National Dance Education Organization annual conference, hosted in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
How is Dance Literacy So Important? Teaching Dance Composition and Motif Writing using Krashen’s Second-Language Acquisition = Pure Smart Play 2006 200 Structure: In my session, I will share my research of students’ stories about making dances usingmotif symbols. I will share Steven Krashen’s educational theory used to instruct the non-majorintroduction to choreography classes. I will show dances an...
Kolb Learning Styles of Dancers Who Do and Don’t Use Dance Notation Compared to Other Fields 2019 597 This statistical study of 272 dancers, ages 18–96, using Kolb Learning Styles Inventory 4.0, identifies dominant learning cycles, learning styles, and learning style flexibility of the dance participants, and subgroups of notation users, and then com...
Notation and Creative Practice: Introduction to the Special Issue 2021 130 In this Special Issue, authors present studies and essays that use variations on the Triple CodeImage Somatic response Meaning Model using dance notation to create new knowledge andunderstanding. János Fügedi uses notation in unconventional ways to t...
A Path to Literacy: Action Research of Dancers Working with American Dance Legacy Initiative Etude to Use Literacy to learn and Master a Dance 2013 127 This case study reveals the development, application, experiences, and outcomes of a model ofdance literacy pedagogy in which notation-illiterate students use Stephen Krashen’s “naturalapproach” to literacy, thus framing a model for life-long learnin...
Pedagogy of notation: Learning styles using a constructivist, second-language acquisition approach to dance notation pedagogy 2015 571 Four undergraduate dance majors learned Motif Notation and Labanotation using a second-language acquisition, playful, constructivist approach to learning notation literacy in order to learn and dance the Parsons Etude. Qualitative outcomes were gathe...
Special Issue: Pedagogy in Theory and Practice in Laban Studies 2016 118 This article, by the editor, introduces a Special Issue on pedagogy using Laban Movement Analysis(LMA) and notation. The author parallels Rudolf Laban’s approach to artistic inquiry, which hecalled a “thought round,” to critical pedagogy, which emerg...
Taxonomies of Learning Outcomes When Using Dance Notation: Cognitive, Affective, Conative, and Psychomotor 2018 232 This article provides innovative learning taxonomies that extend Bloom’s taxonomies, and those of other educational theorists, to dance education outcomes, particularly regarding dance notation pedagogy. These dance notation-based learning taxonomies...
Tethered Across Distance: Choreographing with Motif Notation 2017 229 Motif notation is a powerful tool for creativity and community building, even across longdistances. Heiland and Riggs Leyva’s project called Tethered is a collaborative trans-nationalchoreograph work created through motif notation, inspired by geogra...
Voices of Notators: Approaches to Writing a Score: Special Issue 2018 76 In this special issue of Voices of Notators: Approaches to Writing a Score, eight authors sharetheir unique process of creating and implementing their approach to notating movement, and theydescribe how that process transforms them as researchers, an...

Odum Institute Dataverse Network :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Dancing Calgon: Embodied Research through Motif Notation 2023 514 This embodiment study is presented in video from the qualitative analysis of two dancers’ experiences with dancing and writing using Motif Notation as they engaged in the practice of learning a dance from video. They interpreted their scores, revised...