teaching philosophy

The educational arm of the company connects with the community, and promotes personal wellness, health, and multi-disciplinary thinking. The bridge that connects the professional and educational branches is LCPD's mission statement, "Dancing Through Life." We work closely with the local dance community to provide mentorship, education and training, and opportunities for artist residencies and collaborations. Laughing Bodies, Dancing Minds (LBDM) underscores Artistic Director Li Chiao-Ping’s philosophy about body-mind connections and points to the many pathways to learning and knowing about ourselves, others, and the world around us. As connected to Harvard professor Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences and to John Dewey’s concept of experiential learning, our LBDM model embraces multi-dimensional teaching approaches to reach students’ intelligence affinities. Not limited by age, we believe in the positive value and need to live and learn through the dancing body and mind together.

One prong of "Dancing Through Life" is our summer dance workshop, newly re-titled “Summer Exploratory Experimental Dance (SEED) Festival” held at our studio in Oregon, Wisconsin during one week each summer. The intensive is broken into three categories, providing training for youth, pre-professional and professional dancers, and community members. "EnCore Performance", our second prong, provides opportunities for older adults to be physically active in creative and intellectually stimulating ways. LCPD has taught movement classes at area senior centers since 2001. These older adults participate in the creative process, taking part in the creation of making new dances, and have the opportunity to perform on stage along with LCPD's company of professional dancers. Under the program "Dance for Young Audiences," the third prong, we perform free dance concerts for elementary and middle school children. During the concert, Ms. Li introduces and later engages the students in ways to connect to the work and to be open and present, in order to see-feel-understand what they are seeing onstage. In what is always a lively discussion, the students ask questions in between pieces and at the end of the show. We also teach movement classes in area schools that position dance as creative expression, linking school curricula to movement ideas, and help them develop their appreciation for dance and the arts in general as well as to see what they're learning at school in a different light. This past season, over 700 K-12 students attended one of our performances.