Think outside the old box: how a return to pedagogy can (still) support our creative and physical capacities

The body is already written, but our experience of discovering it not.    Why then, is our exploration and nurturing of our body's capacity through technique understood as a more creatively constraining, unconnected, and outdated vehicle, in comparison to those processes that we access when choreography is being made?

We've hashed out what doesn't work about pedagogy.  We've articulated how and why creative processes stimulate our development.

But....

It seems like the body has certain needs.  Functionally, I can't offer a sustained improvisation as a dancer if I haven't supported myself with some physical endurance training, as well as some training to support work of focus and presence.  I can't sustain any body anything if I neglect what it basically needs: strength, mobility, stimulation, sustenance.  There is no escaping the biology.  Right?

I was reading over my notes from a workshop I participated in as a dancer and this caught my eye:

"What [activities, tasks, approaches, or forms] could I go back and test?  [I could] work work at different levels or with different degrees of intensity, I could work specificity (stable increments), and then flow.  Work is not always a progression.  How do we change propositions to encourage integration of concepts, of work?"

      Aha!  The training that we do is about our learning.  And learning is about understanding something.  So the protocols for engaging with material in class should function as a means for us to understand our facility (our bodies, our creativity, and so on).  

      So, great if I go to pilates to work specifically the strength of my hamstrings, so that I don't over-recruit my quads.  But this is a moment specific task, that is, I need more hamstring strength at this moment, and hopefully I won't have to go to pilates forever to answer this need.  Because, pilates is a test.  It is a resource.  It is only one part of me developing.  And my developmental needs are in flux.  If I work on my hamstring strength, at one point, I won't need this specific work anymore, it will be time for me to integrate it into a larger flow of work, a complexity of work, that I am (hopefully) also engaging in.  

      Pedagogy doesn't need to be something that is fixed.  It can (must) fluctuate with our needs.  Biological, aesthetic, creative, or otherwise.  It can shift to support our curiosity.   (I know practitioners who have shifted their pedagogical approach; this is underway, though less acknowledged or visible).  At one point we need to make the conversation of what is possible in pedagogy louder than our complaints regarding it's limitations.  No?

This post was inspired by an article in Research in Dance Education:

"Interfering with the lived field of dancepedagogyfrom organizational and leadership studies perspectives–an explorative intervention with performing and teaching dance artists"

by Tone Pernille Østern & Eirik J. Irgens

Variations on a theme

I am thinking about binary opposition.  Loosely, the categorization of things into this, or that, distinguished in direct relationship to one another.

As my inquiry looks at different instructors' approaches to teaching contemporary dance, and that, I too, am searching to define my own distinct approach, I sometimes have the feeling that I am searching for a formula.  A formula for how to inspire, nurture, develop, engage and motivate the participant to realize their physical and creative potential.  I am approaching my inquiry with the assumption - a bit - that there is a better way to carry out this task of teaching.  My thinking in very binary in this respect.

In my notes from the 5pm MAPP November skype chat, I have written down the following:

"Place and Order:

- what do [specific placement and/or order of material, information] have to do with how we learn?
- what does learning look like without them?"

We discussed the idea of a 'web of ideas', of non-linearity, of research and reflections overlapping and being connected for diverse reasons, due to many variables.  The image is a strong one:  a web.  

What if I considered my approach to teaching as more of web and less as a formula?  Where themes dilated to the fore and then contracted or faded out.  If multiple layers existed at once, with different densities of importance depending on the present moment? 

Right now, both when I contemplate my teaching, as I plan my classes, and as I carry them out, I think about whether I should be planning, if there is a way that I can become a great practitioner of intuition, of responding 'to the moment' in class.  Is there a way to do this?  As I read over my data collected as part of my research inquiry, I look for an indication of such a practice in the work of teachers that I am observing.

How are these instructors making available 'the moment', remaining attuned to the present?  (Is this a useful value where dance instruction is concerned?)  Across my data there is, in each instance, some trait of how the room or class is set up.  This I believe links directly to a tone that sets both the student and teacher on a specific path of experience during class.  This makes me come back to the idea of a formula, which is, in some sense, at work here.  The consistent appearance of a certain set of rituals (loaded word, I know) at the outset really does have the potential to impact our journey through class.

So then, what about the web?  Is it more embodied over time?  Over a series of classes (as an example)?  

......