Dance-tech Pedagogy

[Sicchio]

Hello all.

I thought it would be nice to share teaching practices on this network as I have noticed quite a few members work in some form of educational context. I currently am course leader for BA (Hons) Dance Practice with Digital Performance at University Centre Doncaster. It is a relatively new undergraduate course and a lot of development is still taking place.

Some of my interests lie in the balance between teaching dance and teaching technology, or in most cases finding a more holistic approach. Also, I find getting dancers to approach technology can be difficult at the undergraduate level. The most common negatively responses are 'I am just here to dance' or 'I'm scared.'

Anyone willing to share their experiences with teaching please do post! I will try to add more about my approaches to the above issues later.

[mpgough]

neat,

lots to keep in mind. esp how to upkeep and shared resources, given the many that have faded into obsolescence.

i might be good to gather a list of resources pre-discussion to look at and refer back to. will get gathering.

m

[Armando Menicacci]

Yes... 2 years ago. But still.
I agre with Johannes neuer tanz.... newer pedagogy. And newer pedagogy means not only new techniques of teaching but new technology of pedagogy. Techniques are just procedural works to achieve determined goals. A technique becomes a technology, for me, when techniques brings new LOGOS, meaning in this case new understanding, new perceptions of the world. So I can understand why someone can call a certain pedagogic approach a technology: because in a certain sense wigman is already a daughter of a highly technological world. and at the same time all the new perceptions are there. (IN fact as de Kerchove says the first new technology is the telegraph which changes the perception of space and time forever. Bringing a glimpse of ubiquity.

I'm not again a romantic or a spiritualistic conception of producing art. it is just important to remind that these feelings are not at all the guarantee of the capacity of a production of a good artwork. But, one would say that lucidity and laic feelins are not a guarantee too. After all it is just the choice of posture.....

[Johannes Birringer]

Armando, when you say "it is all a choice of posture", what do you mean by this? is this an approach to enjoying the body practice? a philosophy or logos (what would this term mean for physiological or somatic knowledges, yoga and body mind centering, Indian classical dance?)? a specific pedagogy based on particular principles, such as T. Suzuki's emphasis on the actor's animal energy and on the feet?

can you say more about posture? I recently took part in a very interesting workshop led by an australian philosopher, and we focussed (similar to Suziki) mostly on feet and gravity, and the approach was called arborescent movement..... the teaching involved indeed, as you suggest, a different perception of the world (now one would have to define what one means by different, and differing from what). Wigman, indeed could be said to have been a daughter of a highly industrialized world, and a contemporary of someone like Loie Fuller (in dance) while at the same time, if you look at the holistic and craft oriented Steiner-derived philosophies of the founders of the Hellerau Gartenstadt (garden town), it seems to me that Wigman's philosophy of Moderne Tanz is rather different from Fuller's, or perhaps one would say that her Technologie and pedagogy was committed to letting organic (heightened?) expression evolve from the whole person.... (i am not sure now how to talk about Wigman without refering to certain ideologies of the natural or organic).... How did butoh arise (a culturally specific posture or understanding of darkness and the existential body, the earth? the post- atomic bomb landscape? the ashes?) ....what perceptions did contact improvisation change, the Judson Church? how would we compare William Forsythe and Steve Paxton?

[charlotte nichol]

Hi,

Thinking of Armando and Johannes response, I work lecturing on screendance and am doing a Phd on the notion of how somatics can inform the screen. Authentic Movement is a Jungian based practice from Whitehouse I am very familiar with, but for me any ideokinetic function assists in approaches to the body and screen. And certainly the notion of inner projection onto the screen of the unconscious addressed sometime ago in psychoanalytic theory reinforces a bodily connection to imagery. Thus connections to other modes of imagery from material such as dreams say is an interesting visceral link to an intermedial transformation through varying media forms. Just off the top of my head really....

[Renata]

Hello!  I wanted to share a workshop I am co-leading at the Creativity and Cognition Conference in June in Australia.  This workshop looks at using the body as a guide for the design of computational models, for interactive design.  Please check out our website at http://movement.iat.sfu.ca/c+c2013-movement-workshop/

Of special interest to our workshop is how we teach technology and how we impart the skills needed for the sensitive creative process needed to work with technology-based systems.

Beautiful Dance Moves: Mapping Movement, Technology, and Computation.  June 17, 2013 Sydney, Australia.