As you may have realized when visiting our website, there has not been a continuous feeding-in of content. Before the start, the team had decided to first leave the text developments within an intranet before they get edited and mirrored onto the public site. In doing so, we would like to allow the materials to mature with time, so that they can develop a clear structure.
Nonetheless, mode05 understands itself as a transparent working session on the issue of dance/choreography education. Therefore, we would like to share some of the developments and thoughts of the last three days and give a description of the processes and the contents. We do this chronologically, so you can get an impression of the work flow.
Monday:
We started after a tuning-in session with photos, objects and a loose round of "shaking hands". Then we continued with a collection of crucial questions the participants have concerning dance/choreography education.
These questions have a very wide range: Technique? - Who needs a dance education? - how to proceed? - WISSENTRIEB - WISSEN-TRIBE - How can dance be vital? - How can we teach from a position that questions authority?
Next was a round of structuring the questions into thematic fields. From there, workgroups took up the different fields as starting point for a first deepening into the issue.
In the afternoon there was a round of presentation of the excerpts of the group work. These presentations have been video taped and will be put on the public site soon.
After this Florian Schneider and Susanne Lang gave an introduction into the technology. mode05 is a minimalistic approach to web-aided development of new educational models in dance and choreography. Its goal is to simplify effective tracking and handling of collaborative developments, enhancements and overall progress. Tools like Wiki or Ticket were introduced in order to make the writing, editing and informing of the material accesable to the participants.
Starting from there we had a plenary session in order to reorganise the emerging questions and topics, the outcome you find on
marten spangberg's blog - please, log in to read the attachments.
Tuesday
According to the outcome of the evening, we came together in the Fischhaus and had a session that gathered people's dissatisfactory experiences with existing educations in performance/dance/choreography.
We give a selection:
dance market invades school
control by authority
question of mentoring
lack of continuity
the tyranny of the contemporary that erases history
the tyranny of fragmentation (of time, of credits,...)
how to provide specialism and at the same time contexts
the tyranny of (non)ballet
generally education is bound to young age
how to implement strategies in the organisation of a school to deal with change
in the afternoon there was a split into 3 groups:
a feldenkrais lesson
a group defining terminology
a group discussing the specificity of choreography
(also see foto)
Katja Müncker was teaching the Feldenkrais lesson.
The group sessions need still some time to be edited, we work on it and we will put the results on the website.
Tuesday night after dinner was a first late round of wild improvisation with the different possibilities of the intranet.
Wednesday
In a plenary session led by Scott DelaHunta the day was structured into the following topics:
- research of existing models; participants who had been involved in existing models were interviewed
- proposal for a new model; discussion concerning politics and ethos of a possible model; introducing concepts such as doubt, protection from the market, distinction between subject and object, aquirement of knowledge, model of collectivity
- specificity of the dancer; keywords/definitions: undoing, choice = decision, option, preference, control =to be in command of,direct, self-discipline, integration, manipulate, talent = the seed/source aptitude, flair, gift,capacity, faculty, ability,genius !!!, aptitude = skill, capacity, fitness; definitions, e.g. the dancer - one who embodies presence
Afternoon
Philosopher Stefanie Wenner gave a talk; among other topics the following was discussed: "Teaching as seducing students to have desires. You can very easily get this desire into the students. The desire for desire. Missionary type of teachers: bringing the desire to the ones that are without desire. To evoke desire in the desireless."
- continuation of research of existing models
- continuation of proposal of a new model; later on, this group split into two groups:
a) continuing with politics and ethos
b) starting to work on specifics of a possible education
Today, Thursday, the work on existing models and on the two proposals (political/ethos and specific) continues. In the afternoon, there will be a session with visual artist Geoffrey Garrison on "The Patients have taken over the asylum, or have they? a rat's-eye view of the Jan van Eyck post academic institute for research and production."
Besides the here described, there are plenty of meetings and individual work sessions that we have no overview about - which is one of the ideas of mode05.
To be continued...
