by Viva Wittman
From the age of ten, Irene Van Zeeland has been a teacher. After having taken ballet for one year, she created her own ballet class, borrowing a ballet CD from the library, copying every song onto a tape, and labeling each one with an exercise. Soon, she was running a school for the neighborhood girls in her bedroom, gently, but firmly, guiding them as her own teachers guided her at her studio.
When one of her teachers became pregnant, she asked Irene, twelve, to assist her in her classes, demonstrating movements she could no longer execute with her swollen belly.
Officially, Irene didn’t begin teaching until her third year at Amsterdam University of the Arts, Theater School where she studied dance intensively. Upon graduating, she went on to study for a year in New York at the Merce Cunningham School, “the year after his death,” she informs me. “It was a beautiful program,” Irene goes on to say, recounting that she and the other students had the opportunity to dance his work and to see his company perform in the farewell tour. |
Irene tells me hesitantly that her students have told her that they appreciate how she approaches them as human beings, not just dancing bodies. “They say I have a way of connecting to people that makes them want to connect to me.”
Irene is just as dedicated to her students as they are to her. In fact, her students are the primary reason why she keeps coming back to the Centre de Danse du Marais to teach in the summer. This is her eighth year running but she says, “I still have to prove myself every time. You have to earn your position as a teacher.”
The first time I take class with Irene, she tells us, “Today is a special day”; it is the anniversary of Merce Cunningham’s death. In homage to the man whose technique she bases her classes on, she teaches us the warm-up that Merce’s company and school used every day.