Wild Card - workshop with Iñaki Azpillaga Brussels (BE), September 6 - 10, >>more Wild Card - workshop with Martin Kilvady & Chrysa Parkinson Stockholm (SE), September 13 - 17, >>more
Wild Card - research residency at iDans04 Istanbul (TR), September 20 - October 30, >>more
Critical Endeavour 2010 Istanbul (TR), October 18 - 31, >>more
Meeting Jardin d'Europe Coorganizers Istanbul (TR), October 29 - 31
Prix Jardin d'Europe 2010 Istanbul (TR), October 31, >>more
When: August 3 - 9, 2009 Where: in Vienna during ImPulsTanz - Vienna International Dance Festival
Participants: DD Dorvillier, Christine Gaigg, Keith Hennessy, Karine Label, Jennifer Lacey, Sri Louise, Jennifer Monson, Janet Panetta, Frans Poelstra and LoIc Touzé.
Jennifer Lacey in her invitation letter to the participants, about her idea and expectations towards the upcoming session:
"[...] After taking part in the festival [ImPulsTanz - Vienna International Dance Festival] for 9 years, I suggested that the teachers also need a kind of DanceWeb [danceWEB Scholarship Programme], that we could also profit from the high activity, high assimilation/ consumption, heterogenous-dance-language circus that is the teaching festival. We could use it to investigate teaching and the medium of the Class. I proposed a gathering of artists who sometimes find themselves in the role of the teacher. We would gather to take classes, read and have a time of contemplation framed within the energetic chaos of the festival. This desire came directly from my own experience of taking as many classes as I could while I was at Impulstanz as a teacher. In addition to enjoying my own dance effort during these classes I was really fascinated with the different methods of communication used by my peers and by the very clear aesthetic bounderies the forms of their classes suggested beyond of the technique or repertory content. I also just wanted the time to be a student again, to observe, practice, assimilate and reject. [...] My point of view is that we come together at Impulstanz and use the classes available to observe the divergent modalities of teachin, what forms they produce land what experiences they generate. We can do this is an auto-ethnographic manner, studying and engaging in the differences of language, voice modulation, style of transmission, identity of "studio", teacher attire etc. We will not be engaged in quality judgement or hierarchy recognition. We will be testers and tasters of communication modes - what is being communicated and how and to whom. We can consider these phenomena as manifestations of dogma, fictions of our community, esoteric rituals, propagandaor initiation rites. You can also decide to take it differently.
I would also like time to read, to read something, or several things together . I am looking for supportive interesting texts and welcome suggestions. I have asked for a small book budget. I would like to offer this time to myself and to you to consider The Class, to engage in its varieties of form and content as well as its production of meaning. We can observe The Class as a creative act for the teachers as well as the students. We can consider it as an art object. [...] We will be somewhere between 7 and 10 participants with a few floaters. Floaters are teaching artists who are teaching during the actual time of our meeting and cannot devote themselves entirely. Each participant will construct his or her own class schedule. We will have a small studio in the throbbing heart of the Arsenal to use as a library, meeting place, studio and class room. I would like it if our "discussion" could largely take place through intra-group classes, responses to and remixes of what we are experiencing during the day. I am quite open to other proposals. I also thought that we could do an open event on Sunday, an all day marathon of class forms, one that could accomodate all interests and proposals, ie five minute classes, co- teaching, non teaching etc. There are no expectations of what this time should produce - it is a prototype. the project itself does have a responsibility towards documentation. I would like to do this largely amongst ourselves although there my be some professionals also around. The medium of documentation is open.[...]
The mentioned all day marathon took place on Saturday 8 between 12:30am-4:30pm and was called "Free class marathon". Teachers teaching at the ImPulsTanz Festival were invited to join this research project. Class form after class form was proposed in a continuum for the whole 4 hours. The idea of sharing what has been discussed through experiencal, participatory classes shaped this marathon. During these seven days, ways of teaching had been shared;
Frans Poelstra and DD Dorvillier shared their experience during this ttt-session and stated that content-wise, the strongest part of ttt were the examinations of the questions: How to work openly? How to discover? What was important to them was to stay open-minded, no consensus needed to be found.
feedback reports / texts from Jennifer Lacey, Karine Label and Keith Hennessy
