Jane Hawley Honored for Grace and Style in the Arts

DECORAH, IOWA, March 27, 2015, Jane Hawley, Professor of Dance at the Luther College Center for the Arts of Movement Fundamentals: Liberating Practices Dance Artists and Movement in Life & Art, was recently named a VIP Member of Worldwide Branding. This special distinction honors individuals who have shown exceptional commitment to achieving personal and professional success.

Possessing nearly two decades of performing arts’ experience, Ms. Hawley is best noted for developing the movement fundamentals curriculum around the U.S. and recognized for a radical shift in dance training, and bringing movement and dance artistry into everyday life.

As a dance artist, Ms. Hawley specifically explores movement by emphasizing skeletal initiation, imagery, and proprioception to create dance material. Contact Improvisation (an art/dance sport) highly influences her choreography and duet work. She teaches the accumulation and integration of images (gesture, line, momentum and spatial intent), rather than steps, to inspire technical range and virtuosic intention.

As both a teacher and scholar, Ms. Hawley is deeply curious in renovating dance training through the exploration and research on the relationship of self to body. Her research emphasizes understanding how the body is the realization of self through the continuous study and practice of movement fundamentals. Challenges within this research lie in negotiating the boundaries between developing innovative and intentional movement vocabulary; organizing dance making with intentional performing; and living with dynamic and authentic movement vitality daily.

For 15 years at Luther College, Ms. Hawley has been teaching courses in the Movement Fundamentals curriculum, along with devising and producing dance performance works. In additon to teaching one to two courses per day, she is serving on committees, advising students and their dance research and practice, and conducting guest artist residencies at various university dance programs. In the future, she would like to conduct the Movement Fundamentals Certification program and Coalescence for dance and movement professionals and Practicing Embodiment Workshops for all people on a tropical island.

Ms. Hawley is often invited to conferences so others can gain more awareness of her curriculum and innovative techniques. She has presented the Movement Fundamentals curriculum and appeared at numerous events, including: the National Dance Education Organization Conference (2002, 2010); Motus Humanus’ Laban Institute of Movement Analysis Conference (2006); the Performatica International Forum of Contemporary Dance and Movement Arts at Cholula, Mexico (2007-2008); International Association for Dance, Medicine and Science (2008); American College Dance Festival Association (2004, 2012); Fostering the Future’s Higher Education Dance Curriculum Development Sessions hosted by Movement Research and Tisch School of the Arts at New York University (2014); and “Does it Matter? Composite Bodies and Posthuman Prototypes in Contemporary Performing Arts” program at Ghent University in Belgium (2015).

In recognition of all her achievements, Ms. Hawley has received numerous accolades. She was featured in Dance Magazine’s American College Dance Festival Association at the national festival at the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts at the Terrace Theatre in Washington, D.C., in 1994. She was a selected artist to participate in the National Endowment for the Arts’ Art Corps Pilot Project coordinated by the National Assembly of local arts agencies. She also won the Vannie L. Sherry Award for Distinguished Performer at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, which was where she earned an MFA in performance and choreography.

Ms. Hawley attributes her success to good training from the university and innovation within dance training and performance by creating a new paradigm for dance artistry and pioneering new styles to dance. She says, “I have always felt the body as my primary source and most authentic communicator. Moving and dancing is my primary form of communication and understanding ideas and myself.”

Ms. Hawley’s uninhibited approach has brought her various roles in performing arts at many locales, among them: the Unit One Program at the University of Illinois; Beloit College; Interlochen Arts Academy; Leelanau Children’s Center; Dance Arts Academy; Northeast Michigan Human Services Agency; Developing Educational Practices and Theories Foundation; Luther College and guest artist residencies at K3-Zentrum Fur Choreographie Tanzplan in Hamburg, Germany; Birr Theatre & Arts Centre, Offaly, Ireland, through Arizona State University; Kansas State University; and the University of Colorado, Boulder. She also maintains affiliations with the National Dance Educator’s Organization, the International Association for Dance, Medicine and Science, and the American College Dance Association.

Even Ms. Hawley’s charitable efforts are based in dance. She created and devised performance works for sexual consent education on the Luther campus. She enjoys developing practices for residency workshops in “Practicing Embodiment,” an interdisciplinary exercise between spirituality, sustainability, and the body with her partner, Guy Nave, a professor of religion.

Movement Fundamentals is a performing arts curricula that brings movement, dance, the body, specifically dance artistry, into life and art. For more information, visit http://www.movementfundamentals.us.

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