ALISON DIETTERLEÂ SMITH
DANCE ANDÂ MOVEMENT EDUCATION
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Alison Dietterle Smith is a movement alchemist who integrates her love for eco-somatic practices with embodied myth-making and collective rituals. She is a lecturer and magic-maker in the Theatre and Dance Department at the University of California, San Diego, where she has been teaching since 2003. Alison holds a BA in Anthropology from UCSD, and an MFA in Dance from UCI. Her teaching and artistic work is influenced by a merging of her early conservatory classical ballet training at the San Francisco and Pacific Northwest Ballet schools, contemporary dance, and her present movement investigations as a Feldenkrais Practitioner® and ritual-space facilitator. Through Alison’s interdisciplinary lens, the dance class becomes a portal for arriving to our aliveness, a transformational space of self-discovery, movement meditation, and weaving ourselves into connection.
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Alison began dancing in the fog and forests of the Central Oregon Coast with Nancy Mittleman-Merkens. Her dancing path has been illuminated by her experiences performing with The Eugene and Idaho Ballet Companies, Ballet Pacifica, and a decade working with Jean Isaacs and San Diego Dance Theatre. Other important influential teachers/choreographers include: Margaret Marshall, John Malashock, Christopher Pilafian, Joe Goode, Kim Epifano, Lisa Naugle, Donald McKayle, Yolande Snaith, Risa Steinberg and the work of Jose Límon, and Ohad Naharin’s Gaga Metodika. Core matrilineal teachers/wisdom-holders include, Anna Halprin, Shiva Rea, Starhawk, Evelyn Rysdyk, Sharon Blackie, and Clarissa Pinkola Estés. Alison also honors all the inspiring faculty, guest artists, and students that have passed through the studios of the Molli and Arthur Wagner dance building at UCSD for the past 25 years.
Alison’s choreography and dance films have been presented at UC San Diego, UC Irvine, San Diego State University, Palomar College, Jean Isaacs San Diego Dance Theater’s site-specific Trolley Dances, The City of Carlsbad, The Light Box, The 10th Ave. Theater, Sushi Performance and Visual Arts, The Electric Lodge in Venice, Dance Camera West Festival (Los Angeles); Colorado College Dance Festival (CO); Frederick Lowe Theater (NYU); Constanta Opera House (Romania); and CECUT (Mexico).
Teaching Philosophy
As a teacher, it is my intention to help the students in my courses experience the world more richly. Dance is a field as diverse as the human experience. Each student brings the unique qualities of their physical histories and cultural backgrounds to their movement vocabulary. It is my role as an educator to facilitate the discovery of new ways of moving and feeling the self; to illuminate new insights and connections for each individual student. I am interested in how we all uniquely carry the dance within us. I am curious how we connect and make meaning of the world around us through our physicality. Moving and dancing provide a way for us to tap into our most ancient practices and rituals as humans. I enjoy the process of bringing this tone to my weekly technique classes, lectures, and rehearsals at UCSD. My desire is to create a place where we can feel more of our moving selves, a vibrating, luminous space, where the world unfolds in breaths and connections to the universe around us . . . a place where we let go of the tension of time and step into the dancing ground . . . living each moment in the DANCE.
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I teach the following courses in the Theatre and Dance Department at the University of California, San Diego:
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Advanced and Intermediate Ballet Technique
Advanced and Intermediate Contemporary Technique
Movement Analysis
Dance Pedagogy
Dance History and Cultural Perspectives on Dance
Choreography and Dance Making
Screendance and Dance for the Camera
Site Specific and Site Responsive Improvisation, Performance and Composition
Movement Lab: Myth into Dance
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Dance in your true body before time,
Shimmering energy without end.
Simply go to the intersection of flesh and spirit,
Breathe the tiny sparks that fly.
~The Radiance Sutras, Lorin Roche
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