Colette Sadler 1974 Dancer/Choreographer
First dance class 1977.
Studied Classical Ballet with teachers from Scottish and Royal Ballets in Glasgow and London. BA(Hons) Laban Centre London. Worked in UK and Internationally as performer since 1994. Current choreographic work 'Dummy' in Collaboration with NRLA Tramway and CCA (centre for Contemporary art) Glasgow.
This year i accepted a number of teaching opportunities in performance and choreography within State funded University and higher education Institutions. Owing to the impressionability of students and the power at stake in knowledge transmission i have felt at times the almost moral responsibility involved in this decision.
One is confronted in these situations with the disease of bureacratic apathy and crippling public funding packages that impact all levels of the learning experience, however despite this inital disenchantment a belief in the transformative potential of learning forces one to act. How does an outsider inject other knowledges and experiences (or indeed judge the value of one knowledge over another) into the prescriptive play of tradition and economics which produces the culture 'industry' and therefore the wordly pressure facing students to survive in the job market or better still how does one empower them both mentally and physically to create better and imaginative solutions for themselves?
As both learner and teacher looking at the role of agency, creation of sense of world through experience, auto-didactism, certain teacher-pupil traditions and if in fact choreography is something you can actually learn or teach.
By passing the normalizing effect of standardization and categorization in an attempt to affer something hopefully and usefully to the creative individual one finds oneself trying to come up with an open structure drawing on multiplicity and diversity without diluting source through a re-interpretation and reappraisal of existing knowledges surrounding the body dance and performance.
Is it possible to build on the known with what could possibly appear by-passing the need to show anything by example?
Is it perhaps at times better not to learn?
