Gifts from Sensei-tionals

Teachers who teach dance to children at school came together to establish a dance company called “Sensei-tionals” in January 2025 and gave a performance. In January 2026, 15 teachers joined its second production, making a stage that conveyed the joy of dancing. Its director, Takahiro Mochizuki, shares the feelings behind this performance and project.

 

Top star: Takahiro Mochizuki

 

Takahiro Mochizuki

 

In January 2025, a rare group, almost without parallel anywhere in the world, was born at Session House (first performance: January 2025). Its name is “Sensei-tionals” (先生ショナルズ). All its members are currently working elementary-school teachers or childcare professionals. In other words, these “teachers,” for whom appearing before people is everyday life, bare everything on the extraordinary space of the stage in a dance collective that celebrates teachers and takes on challenges. With the concept “When teachers dance, children dance; when children dance, the future dances!”, we aim to nurture the future of the performing arts through education. And... after writing all that, I should say this is the group I, Mochizuki, lead. (I’m a little embarrassed.)

 

The spark for founding the group goes back a year earlier, to January 2024. While drinking with people who had come to see my performance (now Sensei-tionals members), one of them murmured, “We’d like to express ourselves too (we’d like to go onstage)...” At just that time, I—a dance researcher and university teacher—had been wondering how to improve expression training for elementary-school teachers (training in the expressive-movement area of physical education). The instant I heard those words, I thought, “THIS IS IT!!” You see, when I go to those training sessions as an instructor, everyone thinks about how to teach physical expression to children and researches teaching materials. But those teachers do not understand dancing (and naturally have reservations about it), and I have repeatedly seen discussions that look like purely theoretical arguments. Then... then surely getting them to dance onstage would be the quickest way!! So it began with: “Let the teachers working in classrooms first experience bodily communication, the foundation of physical expression!! Let’s get onstage!!”

 

 

Rehearsals with these teachers who knew nothing about dancing began in November 2024. Even when I made choreography and taught it, they could not understand, no matter how many times I demonstrated it. So I communicated each movement by adding words. After repeating this several times, I suddenly began to think, “Maybe it would be better if I didn’t choreograph,” and shifted to having the members create it themselves. Before my eyes, lively, original dances sprang up, and the work’s creation accelerated all at once. It is the same when guiding children’s movement play: trying to instruct them and make them do something does not work well. What matters most is a little intervention and advice to make it more enjoyable—that is all. The teachers’ dance-making was no different.

 

 

As a result, “SHIKI—Haru (Spring)” in January 2025 and “SHIKI—Natsu (Summer)” in January 2026 achieved completely packed houses for every performance, a first for Session House’s audience attendance since the pandemic!! “SHIKI—Aki (Autumn)” is already scheduled for next January. And that is not all: we also plan free workshops for childcare professionals and elementary-school teachers (“Tada de Dance”—Dance for Free), and school performances.

 

Now, here is a concern I have about dance: I get the impression that creating a work has become an end in itself—neatly assembling its structure, exhausting physical techniques, incorporating social messages. Of course I think those things matter, but is the “person” being made superficial? The power to express yourself and communicate to someone through your own body, the energy at the root of it: I feel that this is what dance should originally be. The Sensei-tionals members’ everyday work is communicating with children, so they need no training in that. And since each approaches children differently, each member’s “person” emerges of its own accord, making me chuckle. Perhaps it is a “rich flavor of expression” that only childcare professionals and teachers can bring out. Every day they face children, let their hearts be moved, and devote their energies to the children’s growth. They have their own hopes and anxieties and concerns for children living in today’s society, and so they want to convey something. And because they know the supreme joy of “It got across!!”, each individual audience member’s reaction makes them “rejoice or worry.”

 

 

Great leaps that inspire wonder and outlandish movements unlike anything seen before are certainly dance techniques, but is this “power to open the body and communicate” not a dance technique too? Do we recognize this technique of dance, of expression, or not? A dance work from which the “person” has disappeared feels somehow lonely and sad. I cannot help feeling that this is a challenge the dance world must tackle precisely now, in our present day. Through Sensei-tionals’ activities, I feel that my previously vague unease has acquired an outline.

 

Sensei-tionals

 

Well, everyone, we are determined, with our whole bodies and souls (advancing with our whole souls), to forge all the way from education through the performing arts. Let’s open the way together!!