Dear Reader,
excuse me, for it’s been a while since I last met you on the pages of this blog. I hope you can forgive my prolonged, obviously unannounced absence. It turned out so that I needed some time to think, during which period my writing ended up being almost exclusively self-critical and self-indulgent; surely not publishable. My thinking has since changed quality and I can now write once again.
I would thus like to introduce you to my plan for the coming months.
In the coming months I will be delivering a variety of forms to this blog, only one of which will be that of the review. What you might expect to read on the pages of this blog are different kinds of texts that will look at dancing from many different angles. I will, thus, write about teaching dance, about making dances; I will write about creative processes of other people, dancers, artists, students and teachers alike. I will write meditations and publish interviews. Different forms will manifest or relate to different interpretations of what it means: reality; and they will feed (hopefully) different types of hungers – some more and some less dreamy, if you understand what I mean.
I hope you will enjoy the ride by continuing to read, think, and create.
And lastly, but not least-ly: Thank you very much for all the support you’ve given to this blog thus far. I am both humbled and inspired by the interest shown. Thank you.
Devotedly,
pavleheidler
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The following text is to document and-or articulate a reflection upon the LEAP-initiated TAB (Teaching Across Borders) exchange facilitated by Elina Ikonen through ISLO, Joensuu with support of Ulla Mäkinen through Outokumpu’s North Karelia College’s Movement and Performance Research Program OUTOKUMPU. The exchange took place between February 16 and 19, 2015. The exchange was joined by an Amsterdam-based teacher Roos van Berkel and myself, and was supported by a Helsinki-based artist choreographer Pia Lindi; and, naturally, all ISLO and Outokumpu students that attended the sessions – whom I specifically thank for all their work and given attention.
for more information on LEAP, TAB etc please follow link: link.
Set in the east of Finland, in the region of North Karelia, The City of Outokumpu sits on an enormous copper mine. The mine was closed down in the year 1989; which was the year of the fall of the Berlin wall, and the year in which the blue-print for the internet was handed in to a Swiss supervisor; 1989 was also the year of my brith. After it was closed, the mine’s tunnels had to be filled in with sand because the city started to fall through the ground! fyi: The same thing is currently happening to the Swedish most northern city of Kiruna. To protect it from collapsing into the ground, Swedish authorities decided that the whole city of Kiruna is going to be moved three kilometers east from it’s current location. Isn’t that exciting?
If you want to read a bit more about Kiruna, please follow link. Link.
The city of Outokumpu, now a small Finnish-speaking city numbering a population of about 7 200 people, used to be a copper-producing giant regularly visited, but also continually inhabited by a large percentage of foreigners. Similarly, so to speak, the dance-school too used to regularly welcome students of international origin. The school’s fate changed a couple of years ago, when the current Minister of Education passed a bill that said that each foreign student who wants to study in Finland has to pass a Finish language test before starting their course of choice! (The mine’s fate changed, obviously, upon its closure.) If I understand correctly, this means that Outokumpu did not start off as a predominantly Finn-ihabited city. Rather, it grew to become it.
If you, then, walk the tunnels of the mine that are currently open to public, and/or visit the Outokumpu museum – you will meet recolections telling of a vibrant past dating back to the early 1900s (as far as the mine is concerned). Its past is rich with excitement, and filled with thrilled shouts that had to overpower the thunderous sound of rock-crushing machines. My contemporary impression, however, is that of a quiet city; a city whose strong will to imagine and make reality happen only becomes unveiled after a period of mildly intimidating, yet necessary silence.
One last important impression of Finland I’ve got, and that I’d like to write about, is ‘its’ relation to space. Take Joensuu for example, and the street Roos and I lived on for the period of 5 nights (one called Koulukatu). The distance from a building to a tree, from a tree to a parked car, from a parked car to the road – all these are proportional to the distances you’d recognise anywhere else in Europe (as far as I’m concerned), except in Joensuu the named objects are proportionally more far away from each other than they are elsewhere. The impression I’ve got from the realisation: I was made conscious of my breathing. I started to inhale purposefully whilst looking around in excited amazement!
The students of the Outokumpu’s Movement and Performance Research program came together every day with the students of ISLO Joensuu’s Education in Dance and Somatics’ program at the Outokumpu dance studios: one of which is set in the building that used to be the mine’s production plant. Between 10AM and 12:30PM, the students participated in the workshop facilitated by Roos van Berkel. Between 1:30PM and 5PM, the students participated in the workshop facilitated by myself.
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One thing to say about the students themselves: never have I met a group of students who was as timid and mousy, and as outspoken and demanding as this one was: all at the same time. Never have I either met a group of students who, on the second day of our encounter, put forward the question: “Excuse me, but why do you think we need this? Why do you think we need to get in touch with our baby self?”. (In other words, the students were asking: “What is the point of Developmental Patterning?”.)
Roos, who was faced with this particular question, found herself in one of the most exciting situations a teacher can find her/himself in; I think. It is the situation in which ones work is finally, outspokenly challenged! Also, challenged in “a general way”, but within an already established, focused and practice-minded situation in which the teacher does not need to do much more than to follow the question with her next example, thus providing her students not only with an answer to the question that was posed, but also with the answer to the question that was posed silently, namely: What is the point of getting a physical insight into any specific vocabulary, especially if only for a brief moment in time?
One of the points Roos made that day (and I’m paraphrasing) was of the fact that no matter what you think of your relationship to your own body, your body is there supporting your ability to reflect and daydream – by staying alive and minding its own business. More specifically, no matter your relationship to your own body, your body is there supporting your ability to reflect and daydream – and so it has done since the moment you were conceived. Take it or leave it, but deny it you can’t.
I have recently been both concerned with and excited by the prospect of the body’s autonomy as expresed by its continued survival against its inhabitant’s better judgement or conscious support. This autonomy is of the kind that reverses the cartesian mind-body split from “I think, therefore I am.” into “It’s alive, therefore heartbeat – digestion – eventually self-reflection”. Mind you, for some the self-reflection phase, of the kind that enables empathy, comes too late, if ever it does come. Which I do think is a problem. I think that maintaining its potential to empathy is the challenge that the ever-growing society needs to be in on top of – if it is to prevent wars, etc.
The challenge becomes very clear to me in the following situation. e.g. I have recently met resistance from a number of students when I asked them to consider their bodies, for however brief a period of time, as organisms that survive on their own accord. Specifically, I would ask such a thing of a student in the context of a somatic exericse, for example: when tuning in with the fascia. (I often use the fascia as the primary example when I ask for this kind of relation of the student to their anatomy, because I find fascia to be the most easily accessible autonomous tissue that moves, almost obviously, on its own accord.) Often students will say that they don’t know what I mean when I say that fascia will move by itself. Often students will come to me for assistance, and when I engage with the movement of their fasica, and when they recognise it for what of it is already familiar to them – they will re-formulate my words and: we will come to an agreement about the temporary definition of what is autonomous about fascial movement.
On several occasions students have, however, told me that they don’t believe their body can move without them being in control of the movement (absolute control is often implied). On those occasions the resistance of the mind – to accepting the movement of the fascia as autonomous from its control – was extreme. In the same time as their fascial movement was, however, as clear to me as ever before. The students simply did not (or at that point could not?) relate to the moving connective tissue as to anything else but my manipulation of it.
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My questions is: How are we to relate to anyone else, if we can not relate to ourselves in a variety of different ways? To say the least.
My last note is of technical kind:
The first two days of our Finnish spree I took Roos’ class; the two following days I observed: an opportunity presented itself and I decided to study Roos at work. To study Roos’ work was in itself a particularly rewarding experience. What made the experience of studying even more rewarding was the fact that the observation came in combination with nightly informative conversations that took place over dinner. During our evening conversations we took the liberty to analyse each other’s relationship to their work, often focusing on specific examples. We pointed to those specific examples and asked specific questions.
I say we because Roos took up studying my classes, too. I also say we because of the nature of our conversations. At each point in the conversation we were both the one who was analysing and the one whose work was analysed.
Amongst the sea of things I was inspired with and could write about, I’d like to address a simple detail, the study of which was extremely clear because Roos’ teaching is based on a vocabulary that is not of her own invention. > Let me insert here an expression of my utter respect. Having observed Roos navigate through Laban and Bartenieff’s vocabulary with ease and having seen her use their work to make points that were as clear and as fresh and as relevant as any other clear, fresh and relevant point is, I’ve been made aware why I myself never wanted to teach / deliver the work of others. The responsibility is simply too great! To share the work of another, responsibly, whilst also using it for your own purposes – however wholehearted these are – is simply too challenging a combination for my current abilities. And so I teach what I come up with myself, minus an occasional stolen sentence.
To get to the simple detail. Having observed Roos at work, I’ve realised that in a teaching-learning situation: everyone has, per definition, too much work on their hands at any point in time. Which, in itself, is not a problem. A problem potentially arises, however, when teacher’s vocabulary is not common, or is not (at the time of teaching) already one with the student’s vocabulary. If the teacher, then, speaks in time with his/her own vocabulary, the teacher can easily fall out of sync with the student: because the student, at the time of teaching, is not only learning new concepts, but is also learning new vocabulary.
To give an example. Yielding was one of the words that Roos first delivered in the context of her teaching the method behind Developmental Patterning. The students accepted the word quickly – but as was later made obvious – they accepted it only as vocabulary. I say obviously because the day after the word was introduced, a large part of the group still did not develop ways in which to relate to its supposed meaning. It took four days alltogether for yielding to become a word received immedately upon utterance with a minimum dose of physical confidence, I thought.
I am not bringing forth a conclusion, but rather bringing forth a question: How to decide, as teachers but also people who communicate and in communication – as people who want to be understood, about how much time to spend on defining our vocabularies whilst speaking in order to make sure we are actually understood?
pavleheidler 