Michael Mansfield
Classes
Michael is an experienced teacher of dance theater and creative movement. He has been a Leap Teaching Artist for over 30 years in many San Francisco, Peninsula, and East Bay schools. Although he has taught TK through Graduate School students, TK, K, 1st , and 2nd grades have become his specialty. He began his teaching working with this age group 50 years ago. He returns to many schools year after year to teach dance and collaborate with teachers to accomplish their students’ learning goals.
Michael helps young people learn about life through the performing arts – dance, creative movement, song, theater, music-making, puppetry, and clowning. Michael's dance background includes tap, jazz, ballet, modern, ballroom, historical dance, cultural/folk dance, musical theater, ice dance, improvisation, and creative movement, having studied dance since 1976 in London, New York, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and the Bay Area. He has an extensive background in African-Haitian Dance, sometimes known as Primitive Rhythms or Dunham Technique (created by pioneer choreographer, anthropologist, and dancer Katherine Dunham). He has taught and/or studied world dance in Central America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. His training includes an MFA in theater from The Acting Company at the Arts Educational School in London and a BA in Philosophy, English, and Theater from St. Louis University. He has Master and Doctoral degrees in arts, ritual, world religions, and education.
“I design learning experiences based on the questions, ideas, and concerns of the young people. Using the arts to do justice in education is my goal. Putting young people into direct physical contact with their own body’s wisdom, their cultural heritages, their imaginative worlds, their school subject matters, and their classroom community becomes my artistic intention. Changing how we see ourselves, one another, and our world is the surprising result as we create new and possible worlds together. Besides the exuberant culminating-performance-event or graduation celebration, pure joy and knowledge of how to better move through the world are often two of the lingering side-effects students have after their dance experience with me. I have a contagious kinesthetic bias.'“
When not teaching dance to young people, he works with college students at University of California Center Sacramento helping young adults explore internships and careers in government, social, and civil service positions. He directs Berkeley Interactive Theater, a company of teaching artists providing life-long learning experiences for groups and teams of students, faculty, staff, and administration in universities and medical centers around themes of race, class, religion, age, ability, gender, and status using theater, grounded in the work and practice of Augusto Boal’s “Theater of the Oppressed” pedagogy.