What is dance teaching for me? What am I bringing in? How am I collecting material (such as texts but also images) and what kind of outcome do they produce? Why do I want to keep our imagination alive?

How to promote safe spaces in within the dance studio that alows vulnerabilty to co-exhists in with us?  

In my experience as a teacher but also as a student, non-hierarchical pedagogical practices have much more possibility of bringing everyone to the present moment creating conditions for freedom, joy, and resistance that potentially can help us heal from capitalist ideologies. But how do I design my classroom and my performativity when teaching that highlights care and curiosity and help us to heal and dream so we move foward together? How to build togetherness? What do we take from these practices of attention and attune that we do inside the dance studio to our everyday life as a tool to protest against hegemony, authoritarism regimes and erasing memory politics? What does it mean to teach nearby, rather than about? How can non-hierarchical, relational practices in education create conditions for new forms of knowing, feeling, and becoming? What kinds of knowledge emerge  from there and what we do with it?

This study took place in a workshop with the duration of a weekend at Fundação Serralves in Porto (Portugal). Participants reqquirements were simply that they had encounter dance or other perfoming art already in their lives and that they were curious about dance. The group was from 25 to 50 years old, mainly consisted of dance teachers working with communities in around Porto, we had also visual artists, curators of independent galleries and dancers. Is it always a big challenge to plan a workshop of short duration with people who most likely never met and this is one of the base I depart from when I think about what material bring to the dance studio. 

The main criteria when I chose what to bring in as tasks is how to make them curious about themselves and others, how to create tasks they they can participate and care for each others but yet be creative and fun and truly exchange thoughs, feelings, moves! Bonding through movement and feelings and feel that our studio is a safe space for trust and joy.  For who is this  workshop for? Which material and Why I make this choice of working material? What practices of healing, care, identity, agency, transformation, can be performed/choreographed? How to co-creating pratices in participatory in a weekend workshop with people who never met before and still create a safe space? How to introduce the idea of share intimicy whithout begin apart from the participantory group? What is suggested? What is already there? 

Through writing and sensory exercises, to explore and interconnect the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions of the body. I encourage symbolic and metaphorical relationships inspired by the experience of different body parts, promoting the use of imagination and fiction as operative tools. I also stimulate our capacity to invent practices that are meaningful and transformative. My wish is for this to be a space to listen to and work with what inhabits and moves in, with and through us in the present moment—desires, restlessness, questions, intuitions, impressions, tensions, doubts — and hoping for the collective experience of doing so to be both revealing and catalytic. Opening up artistic practices spaces of affection, ritual, and healing.

In this workshop we have created what we called the surgery room (as a tool to heal), a fantasy or a magic spell ritual (creation/artistic/performative), aiming to provide opportunities to feel more (tunning in/opening/ rooting from and through our senses), to belong better (working with what might mean self-image), to sense the power of a community (addressing the political and ethics on artistic research),and finally but not least, to imagine a future made by us to us (imagination as a tool from where we can embrace and activate all of the previous modes mentioned) and where we hope to dissolve the separation, the other, the stranger, the foreinger, navigating together as a moving entity on an ongoing research, adapting and dancing forward and backward, from the present moment. 

To teach dance is to practice becoming — an ongoing movement between knowing and not knowing, doing and sensing, leading and following. Teaching, for me, is never static. It is a relational choreography where learning is lived, embodied, and continually reimagined.

Dance teaching is a practice of attention — of listening to what moves within and between us. It is about holding space where vulnerability and imagination can coexist. It is about creating an atmosphere of care, where everyone is invited to arrive fully as themselves and to explore movement as a shared inquiry into being alive together.

In both my experiences as a student and as a teacher, I have found that non-hierarchical pedagogical approaches make this becoming possible. They allow each person to step into the present moment, to feel seen, and to move from a place of curiosity and trust. Such practices create what I call conditions of freedom — spaces where participants can unlearn competitiveness and perfectionism and instead encounter joy, presence, and mutuality.

I believe that in the dance studio we can rehearse ways of being that resist the capitalist demand for productivity and separation. Dance becomes an act of healing and resistance — a collective return to slowness, touch, and care. Thus, I ask:

• How can I design pedagogical structures that cultivate care and curiosity?

• How can we move toward one another rather than away, allowing vulnerability to be part of learning?

• What does it mean to teach nearby, rather than about?

• What kinds of knowledge emerge when learning becomes relational, improvisational, and embodied?

From the framework of a/r/tography, these questions become invitations to dwell in the in-between — to navigate the fluid roles of artist (a), researcher (r), and teacher (t). A/r/tography, as articulated by Irwin and Springgay (2008), values process over product, uncertainty over conclusion, and relation over hierarchy. It is a living inquiry, where art-making and pedagogy are inseparable from research, and where meaning is constantly unfolding.

Teaching through an a/r/tographic lens invites me to remain in a state of becoming-with (Manning, 2016) — learning through relation and transformation. It calls for teaching nearby, engaging alongside rather than in front of others. This proximity allows the studio to become a porous space: a site where knowledge, emotion, and imagination intermingle.

Imagination, in this context, is both method and matter. To keep imagination alive is to preserve our collective capacity to dream and to resist. It is a radical gesture — a refusal to accept what already is, and an opening toward what could be.

• Set a 3-minute timer

• Both performers write what they have felt. One as a giver and the other as a receiver. Only a list of words. No sentences

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