Master of Arts (by dissertation) — Dance postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Mr Abrahams, who has danced langarm in the same church hall for longer than I have been alive, never counts to eight. He says "slow, slow, quick-quick" and then, when a new couple loses the step, he hums the bass line and taps the man's shoulder on the beat. I first noticed this while attending the Friday class with my housemate in my third year. It became the starting point for my honours research essay, and I hope to develop it into a fuller study at master's level: how social dance is passed on when nobody involved thinks of themselves as a teacher.

My undergraduate degree combined technique classes in contemporary and African dance forms with choreography, dance history and a strand of research methods. I enjoyed performing, but the written and analytical work held my attention for longest. In a second-year course on dance and the body, I read Diana Taylor's The Archive and the Repertoire. Her distinction between the archive of supposedly enduring materials, such as documents and recordings, and the repertoire of embodied practices that are transmitted through being performed, gave me language for something I had felt in the hall. A video of a langarm evening keeps the steps. It does not keep the shoulder tap, the hummed bass line or the joke that tells a nervous beginner it is fine to stand on someone's foot.

For my honours essay I attended the class weekly for a term, kept field notes, and carried out six short interviews with dancers aged between nineteen and seventy-two. I obtained ethics clearance through my department and permission from the class organiser, and I recorded only the interviews, not the dancing, because several older participants were uncomfortable being filmed. This shaped my method: I relied on writing about movement immediately after each session, and I learnt how difficult and how valuable that discipline is. I argued that instruction in the class happens mostly through touch, rhythm and partnering rather than demonstration, and that experienced dancers adjust their cues to each beginner. My supervisor felt the argument was well supported, but that six interviews could only suggest patterns. I agree, and a dissertation would let me spend longer in the field, include more than one community, and set my observations against existing writing on social dance in South Africa.

Two jobs since graduating have kept me thinking about bodies and instruction in ordinary settings. I work early shifts in a supermarket bakery, where I was trained not from a manual but by standing beside a colleague who shaped rolls faster than I could follow and slowed down only for the difficult fold. On two afternoons a week I also run creative movement sessions for Grade 2 and 3 children at a primary school. Planning those sessions has taught me to break an idea into tasks that a seven-year-old can try at once, and to notice which children learn by watching and which only understand once they move. Neither job is research, but both have sharpened my attention to how people actually pick up physical skills.

Outside work I still dance socially, and I have started to read more widely on ethnography and on writing about movement, because I want my own descriptions to be precise without becoming stiff. I am aware that studying a community I also take part in brings both access and responsibility, and I would like supervised time to think carefully about consent, representation and how to give findings back to the people who shared them.

A master's by dissertation suits me because my question is already defined and needs sustained, independent work rather than more coursework. I am organised, I keep to deadlines alongside early-morning shifts, and I have shown that I can carry a small research project from ethics application to final draft. I would now like to do the same thing with greater depth.