Ladies and Gentlemen,
on an occasional Saturday I will host a LEAP meeting. A part of my job as a host includes writing summaries of what goes in the meetings. Since I put a lot of effort in writing these summaries and since I summarise content that is dance related and to me very interesting, I thought it would be a nice thing to share those writings right here.
introduction
Stockholm’s first LEAP meeting took place at Danscentrum Stockholm on February 22, 2014. The meeting was co-hosted by LEAP’s own Kerstin Kussmaul, initiator of both LEAP and IDOCDE EU-supported projects and Francesco Scavetta, Italian-born choreographer, dancer and teacher whose Vitlycke Center for Performing Arts functions as LEAP’s Swedish partner. Stockholm’s second LEAP meeting took place at Danscentrum Stockholm on May 24, 2014. The meeting was, once again, organised with the Support of Danscentrum Stockholm and Francesco Scavetta.
short history
Kussmaul’s first EU project was the IDOCDE project; a project whose aim was to create a platform, as the title of the project says, for documenting developments in contemporary dance education. IDOCDE’s contribution to LEAP is its website. Originally created as an attempt to provide dance teachers with a space to share and store ideas, notes, reflections and class and workshop descriptions, the website now serves as a platform that enables and inspires reflection and virtual teacher-to-teacher relationship aka peer-review.
The interactive nature of the website is what inspired the creation of the LEAP project. LEAP’s primary focus is organised and very much alive teacher-to-teacher interaction. For more information about LEAP and various formats according to which it functions, please follow link.
on local meetings
Local Meetings are open to all educators working in and around dance and performance. Local Meetings aim at facilitating time to exchange and participate in discussion amongst local colleagues. Local Meetings are organised periodically by the local administrator and are hosted voluntarily by a local institution.
Local Meetings are organised to suit the needs of their participants, which is why its crucial that you send us your feedback whenever you have some. The effort to facilitate the meetings is done for your benefit!
first meeting
Our first meeting consisted of an introduction lecture, website presentation, couple of hours of conversation and tea.
According to my notes, one of the most discussed and thus relevant of topics was: questioning teacher’s authority, and through that: questioning teacher’s status; the construction of which was reported to be different according to culture, relevant economic structures and corresponding political environments. Analysing systems that produced and supported the role of a teacher and the act of teaching lead us to discuss different methodologies both of teaching and of learning.
We engaged in the analysis of the ecology of passing on knowledge, worked from individual examples and played with pointing at alternatives, both existing and imagined (theoretical).
The meeting was inspirational and frequently produced a sense of agreement within the group. However, a lingering sense of one of the subjects discussed remains in form of the following question: What are the parameters of judgement (according to cultural differences)?
This question stays related to another question: When talking about judging progress and development – what is the status of the process?
*** this meeting was attended by: Janette Bolding, Cristina Caprioli, Sybrig Dokter, Pavle Heidler, Madeleine Karlsson, Kerstin Kussmaul, Stina Nyström, Francesco Scavetta, Sara Ruddock, and Benno Voorham.
second meeting
In my introduction to our second meeting I posed a question that to me seemed crucial: How can a LEAP meeting, and what can a LEAP meeting facilitate for the local teacher? What does a Stockholm teacher need (today) and how can LEAP support that as specifically as possible?
The question didn’t give birth do an immediate answer.
Participants took the question in attentively but with a look on their faces that left me with an impression of having asked too specific a question too soon into the conversation. Upon further reflection I came to think I might have made explicit a question that another facilitator wouldn’t have made explicit in the first place; explicit or public, one could say. Another facilitator, I imagine, would have kept this question “secret” and used it as some sort of a personal motivation, a “behind the scenes” raison d’être.
Here’s the thing: I don’t know what it means to facilitate a meeting in a conventional sense; which is why I sometimes feel slightly insecure when proposing guidelines that haven’t been thought through “mathematically”. This is to say: I do not pose my questions with a specific goal in mind; I do not pose them so as to get to an answer I want to hear. I pose them because I think them necessary but (!) also because I see them being “as of yet: unanswered”.
As I opened for reactions that would serve as a warm up for our upcoming discussion, I sensed the group as still un-focused around an un-clear subject. This is exactly when I wouldn’t want convention to take over. Instead of solving the un-clarity by coming up with “an answer” that would “solve the problem” myself, I decided that a sense of clarity can be achieved through conversation, through mutual effort that would, as we worked through it, bring us to a space of shared interest.
I could summarise our first conversation with a quote from Charlotta: “That’s the difference between why you start dancing and why you continue dancing.”
When talking about dance education in general, we first tried to outline specific knowledge territories offered to their students by different european dance schools; we also tried to define operations by which these knowledge territories became defined. Examples were noted of many a definition existing in its positive form: schools (and other institutions) define themselves publically and otherwise by the spectrum of dance related knowledge they do teach, never by the spectrum they don’t. It follows that the impression many schools (and other institutions) give is that of being open-minded, inclusive and offering variety, meanwhile disregarding the fact that practically what they offer is an insight to what is essentially an aesthetically, topographically and temporally defined knowledge, however open-minded, inclusive and varied in itself.
A part of this argument was concluded by the following. Since we are talking about dance education, specifically education of contemporary dance: Which contemporaniety are we talking about? Which dance? Which dancer?
We continued by defining the dancer we were talking about as that dancer who was rarely given the institution-supported chance to experience a one-to-one relationship with a tutor, teacher, mentor and/or supervisor. We noted that if given the chance, the chance was higher, the higher the education. In comparison, we noted the opposite was often true: the younger the dance student, the larger the group s/he was studying in.
Another attempt at defining the dancer we were talking about was through a comparison with the choreographer: the choreographer was awarded with the freedom to think. The dancer was, in comparison, awarded with the freedom to reproduce.
Not that there is anything wrong with reproduction, as long as it was used within an appropriate context (as defined by the question: which contemporaniety are we talking about?) and even then: as long as it was used consciously and purposefully.
From the efforts put into defining the institution, we continued to invest in the question of the student, more specifically: what age does the dance student receive his or her dance education? Even more specifically: at what age is a dance student (in this day and age) most likely to receive what kind of dance education? At what age is a dance student most like to have access to which kind of information? And where?
The conversation moved into the field of decision making. As we worked through this topic, we isolated an interest in the operation we referred to as: making an informed decision. This we superimposed to questioning the teacher and student alike, and arrived at the next series of questions: Who is, and at what stage, adjusting to whom? Does education change (and how) if everyone involved is (or becomes) a conscious participant capable of moving by making informed decisions? When do we learn to make informed decisions? What does it mean to make one?
These questions brought us to two more sets of questions.
First was concerned with the limits inherent to the educational system. An example of such a limit would be an assumption of progressivity intrinsic to the system (is progressivity intrinsic to traditional systems at large?). This example was paired with the following question: is dance something which should be learned progressively?
Second was concerned with the question of what is essentially an institutional confirmation: should one need to be confirmed by the institution in order to be confirmed in a wider social context? Why and when does a student choose to enter an institution and what is a good time for a student to leave the institution? What of leaving the institution before the time is right? What does refusing the institution mean? What are the ways in which one can refuse the institution and what are the possible effects of such action?
We imagined these questions appropriated by the thinking dancer at about the same time in their personal development at which we imagined the dancer choosing to continue dancing. We imagined this dancer emancipating him or herself from that which is institutionally and habitually imposed by choosing to continue dancing; this we saw as a choice to engage with the problematics of being a part of the (or any) existing institutionalised and/or social system.
*
Not that there is no value in submitting oneself to a specific system; assuming the submission is performed consciously and purposefully. To submit oneself to a specific subject would be, in this case: to subject oneself to incorporating a specific experience. Then, and only then, the process of subjection is not to be questioned whilst within. The process of subjection is to be incorporated and experienced wholesome-ly. Only after the exprerience has been collected – is it to be taken apart, contextualised and finally: analysed.
The conclusion of this discussion was found in the concept of temporality.
An example of which would be the following. We were saying that the learning process is (or should be) about temporally submitting oneself to something you don’t question – whilst inside. In this context, submission was to be paired with absolute criticality; noting that these were different experiences and should be kept as different: each taking its own time, one coming after the other.
It was after all these discussions that we came to the initial question: How can a LEAP meeting, and what can a LEAP meeting facilitate for the local teacher? What does a Stockholm teacher need (today) and how can LEAP support that as specifically as possible?
The follow-up question came from Cristina: Can LEAP help out with opening // setting up // facilitating a space to speak not in terms of: “I am a choreographer” or “I am a dancer” but in terms of: “I work with choreography” or “I work with dancing” – about – recognising the dancer as the choreographer without removing the choreographer from the dance practice?
I have decided not to, in this letter, give further insight into the discussion that followed, which was our last discussion of the day. I decided to do so for several reasons. One being: I would have to account for many concepts which it doesn’t feel appropriate to account for by myself, and specifically not just yet. Also: in order to continue, I would have to give insight into many questions that wish to inspire thoughts on future plans – none of which have been pushed past the point of only being imagined by the people present in the meeting. Lastly: as different from giving an account of a personal impression of a shared conversation, giving an account of ideas and thoughts related to planning movements would put me in a much more sensitive relationship to the owners of these, as of yet, non-materialised ideas.
I will hopefully leave you hungry for more, which will have you ready for when the time is right and further information about facilitating a space to speak about recognising a dancer as choreograper without removing the choreographer from the dance practice, and what that means more specifically – is made available.
To conclude the day, we were visited by Nadia Arouri, the Founder of YANTE – Youth, Art and Levante, the community dance movement in Palestine. Nadia introduced us to the work of her organisation and the efforts she, together with local and international colleagues, was putting into educating young Palestinian dancers and dance teachers.
*** this meeting was attended by: Nadia Arouri, Cristina Caprioli, Margreth Elfström, Anna Grip, Pavle Heidler, Charlotta Ruth, and Francesco Scavetta.
conclusion
Hope this was information found you interested and maybe inspired? I’m working on some belated reviews and preparing other texts, that might find their way to this website very soon! Till then, I wish you happy living!
Yours devotedly,
pavleheidler
pavleheidler 