it will take a couple of days for me to assemble all the resources and write out reflections. if you're interested in reflections and considerations of questions received at the talk, please check in around the 8th of september.

thank you for sharing your interests.

if you'd like to get in touch with me, please write to pavleh@gmail.com

create references for:

• naturalisation (martin hägglund)
• education (jane elliott)

In that they are spoken to, dancers are given access to information. In that they are rarely asked to speak, their reflective process––assuming that they, indeed, engage in one––remains unwitnessed. I say “assuming that they, indeed, engage in one” not to question dancer’s capacities and/or interest in engaging in a reflective process, but rather to point out (1) that dancers are rarely given the opportunity to share their reflective process in public; and (2) that dancers are rarely given the opportunity to spend time reflecting in any documentable way. What you will often see is a teacher speaking to a dancer then immediately shifting attention to another dancer, in which case the first dancer carries off on their own; or else you will see a teacher speaking to a dancer then immediately asking the dancer to demonstrate in action that they’ve processed the information, in which case the dancer has no time to reflect on their own, no time to engage in a process of trial and error, no time to study between the reception of information and the demonstration of its implementation.

(Heidler 2020, 266-267)

the physical consequence to knowing or what is the difference that makes a difference

Mapping Dance and Dance Teaching: Past(s), Present, and Future(s)

September 3, 2021

references:

Heidler, P. (2019) In Praise of Studying or the Importance of Studying as a Political Action. Available at: https://dancerswriting.wordpress.com/in-praise-of-studying-or-the-importance-of-studying-as-political-action/ (accessed on 2021-09-03).

Heidler, P. (2020) The Physical Consequence to Knowing; A Speculative Report. Available at: https://www.performancephilosophy.org/journal/article/view/286 (accessed on 2021-09-03).

Heidler, P. (ongoing) Soundless Dances. Available at: https://vimeo.com/showcase/3467178 (accessed on 2021-09-03).

Heidler, P. (ongoing) Dances Writing Poetry. Available at: https://vimeo.com/showcase/4875054 (accessed on 2021-09-03).

• my name is pavle, some of my close friends call me pav. my preferred pronouns are they/them. i like to say that i am a movement and a word artist, an educator, and a queer critical thinker; sometimes an amateur, of an independent scholar working in the expanding field of queer critical practice. i have brown hair, i sport a beard. my glasses are a little wonky, silver-framed. i'm wearing a black t-shirt. my eyes are brown.
   
• i am reporting live today from karlshamn, a city of some 20 000 people situated in blekinge, a southern region of sweden. i am here at the brådjupa dance festival, performing in a collaborative endeavour entitled a little bit wet 'n' a little bit wild i created with sanna söderholm and elinor tollerz bratteby.
   
• i currently live in stockholm. i came to stockholm from bruxelles, and salzburg before that. i left zagreb, the city i was born in, when i was 17. i was born in zagreb, but i wasn't born in croatia. i was born in yugoslavia; a country that doesn't exist.
   
• earlier, when i qualified my pronouns as preferred, i did so because i can only prefer my pronouns in the english language. i was born into a language, serbocroatian, which recognises the gender binary as natural.
   
• about a month before by 32nd birthday, in february 2021, i have been diagnosed with ADHD. ADHD is defined by the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) as a neurodevelopmental disability. i will do my best today to speak clearly, and make my thoughts legible. excitement makes the symptoms of my ADHD become more apparent. i will make a conscious effort today and try not to hide my symptoms.
   
• i'm sure all speakers at the conference will say this: it's been a while since we first shared our abstracts with the organisers of this conference. rereading my abstract, i'm conscious i wrote it when i was in the making sense part of my learning curve. it was easy to draw from what i knew then. today, you are meeting me in the expanding horizonspart of my learning curve. observations these days are leading to speculations and questions,... let's see where that gets us.
   
• i am saying all this in order to situate my research and my practice. i am a neurodiverse queer person, a traveler, a dancer. i study experience, and transformation not only because i can. my study is largely motivated by what i cannot. i cannot be neuronormative. i cannot live in the country i was born in. i cannot live in a world void of racism and homophobia. this is my predicament, this is my bias.
   
• okay.

When you expose a problem, you pose a problem.

Sara Ahmed (2017)

notes made on 2021-09-01

consclusion

• what's at stake is the tackling of a stereotype whereby "dancing expresses what cannot be expressed in language." in my research i am only beginning to be able to formulate language from the observations i've been making intuitively since i was a child, namely. that thinking in exclusive opposition is detrimental to the formulation of a study, of an experiential critical practice. the creative process, when silent, when unacounted for, leads to misunderstandings. leads to a loss of opportunity to articulate knowledge.
   
• take a blank canvas or a blank piece of paper as an example. there are thousands of videos on youtube instructing artists in the fine art of getting rid of a writers block. and then there's the example of the author joyce carol oates, who in her masterclass (at masterclass.com) says something along the lines of: i'm thinking and thinking and thinking before i ever approach the page, so that by the time i'm at the page it is not blank. it is, in fact, brimming with the urge to capture any of the thoughts i've developed an emotional, an intellectual, or a spiritual attachment to.

notes made on 2021-09-03

reflections

• if a dancer doesn't have to speak, a dancer will not try. if a dancer doesn't try, a dancer will not be able to learn if speaking is indeed possible or not. so when we say that "dance expresses what cannot be expressed in language," my instinct is to say, well. for the most part, the observation that i'm making is that we don't know if dance canexpress what cannot be expressed in language.
• i work in the experimental field, where dancers are insisting on being recognised as artists. many an artists, much in the same way as dancers haven't, haven't needed to reflect on their process in a medium other than their form. many artists start teaching not having had to translate any of their process in any medium other than the medium of the art they've already created. that might be okay when the artist works with a brush and paint, tools that–for all we know–don't mind being used any which way. when an artist collaborates with another whose equivalent of a tool is their actual body... a person's wellbeing is at stake. and no, the argument that art should take precedence over a person's wellbeing is no argument at all. it is emotional blackmail.
• the beauty of negotiation is that you cannot know what it, negotiation, will look like until you've asked the first question. this is due to the fact that all negotiating parties, their strategies, their interests, their past, present, and futures, emerge (!) through negotiation. as does experience, as does meaning. this is the paradigm shift from anticipation, from assumption, to relationship, to study.

i'm thinking here of two books:

• EMERGENT STRATEGY, adrienne maree brown (see: emergence)
• MEETING THE UNIVERSE HALFWAY, Karen Barad (see: intra-action)