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 aloows 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 28 to 48 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.
