“I’m very flattered,” says Susan Perlis when told her students voted her the Backstage Readers’ Choice winner for best Louisiana dance instructor. “I do enjoy teaching them, so it works both ways.”
Perlis’ passion is evident in the way she talks about those students, who range from 8-year-old beginners to dancers of all ages in her private studio. A longtime dancer with 30 years of teaching experience, Perlis focuses equally on strict technique and the simple joy of dance. In addition to working with future professional dancers as associate director of the Baton Rouge Ballet Theatre, she somehow finds time to teach at both the Dancers’ Workshop and Louisiana State University.
It’s at LSU that Perlis faces her greatest challenge as an instructor. Many of her students there are theater majors required to take a dance course, or nondancers eager to try it as an elective. Perlis enjoys teaching college students because, as she says, “They’re adults to whom I can teach the technique and full aesthetics.” Whether they’re performance-oriented or just taking dance for the sake of it, everyone emerges from a class with Perlis maintaining better posture, presence, and poise.
“It gives them a real sense of body awareness, how to move smoothly,” she says of ballet. “They learn how to take different stances through body language and gesture: ‘Am I proud? Downtrodden?’ Simply the posture can reflect those feelings.”
This is especially useful for actors looking to hone their body language, an invaluable skill in theater and film. Gesture, as Perlis points out, is “acting, completely without dialogue.” A performer who can move with that elusive quality of grace, or who studies movement in front of a mirror, accesses a plethora of additional tools in creating a character or telling a story onstage.
“A lot of times, actors are so involved with the characters that they neglect their physical fitness,” adds Perlis. “One should not ignore the simple physical benefits of dancing.” In addition to aerobic improvement, she says, dance students acquire lightning-quick reflexes. She often teaches students a choreographed routine then asks them to reverse it, stretching their brains as much as their bodies.
“I find most dancers are quite intelligent,” Perlis says. “It’s that ability to process quickly and send it back. There’s no note-taking.”
Certainly not in her rigorous classes.
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