I especially enjoyed the morning classes a lot. It is a big pleasure to get to know different teaching styles and physical interests in such a short amount of time. In general, engaging in discussion and research with different members of the group felt inspiring. The reflection around definitions, needs, legacies and the future of training feels like a starting point to me, especially as I have not been part of the sourrunding discourses for such a long time. The following is a loose collection of ideas and questions of mine: 

 

1) I realize I go to professional training for several reasons: 

a) I want to be part of a group and move together with people. This is a big motivation for me, as it is much easier to become very physical within a group. Dancing with people is different than moving alone.

b) I want to be inspired by specific, interesting, potentially virtouso (in their respective styles) movers. This also means I evaluate in terms of inherent aesthetics of the technique or style that is offered by a teacher. This is clearly, at least from my side, a choice based on taste. As technique implicitly produces an aesthetic, I look for teachers whose dancing I can connect to specifically on this level. Parameters range from movement vocabulary, muscle tone, to wording, performance mode, also purely 'social' characteristics of teaching style, etc.    

c) I want to reconnect to knowledge that has to be reactualized. Professional training reminds me of things I might have forgotten. Physical information, certain vocabularies, a specific muscular tone, and so on. I do not go to training because I hope to 'improve' physically. Actually, this is somehow problematic to me. I would like to 'improve'. I understand that there is several good reasons to be changing teachers for the professional training regularly, but on the other hand, I do not have the chance to go deeper into a specific sort of information or style. But maybe there is other formats for that also (aka Workshop), no?! Which leads me to the following: 

 

2) Technique and Practice:   

I realize I am most interested in specific practices, rather than in the notion of technique. I also have the feeling that this is a trend within the contexts I know or have got to know a little bit (e.g. in Stockholm). (In my opinion, one of the most interesting references in that regard is Chrysa Parkinsons 'Self-Interview on Practice'. To be found here, for those who are interested:https://vimeo.com/26763244) There, my quesion would be, how can a specific training be described in relation to, articulated and intergrated into the process of defining one's own practice? Is there ways of grouping information, maybe also grouping different teachers within training cycles, that allow for information to interface easily with one's own practice, rather than following the pre-determined trajectories of style and aesthetic references implicit in technique? How can training foster and ask for people to define and deepen their individual physical practice? (A teacher that I cherish a lot and that very specifically asks these kind of questions, is Martin Kilvady, for example.) And finally, how do practices of moving in the studio relate to the outside of the studio? What can one take into 'life'? 

In this regard, training in specific institutions (such as K3) could also be curated directly in relation or negotiation with the practices and interests of the local scene. Maybe there is ways of fostering discussion between the scene and the training program even more. 

 

3) Grouping information

In loose relation to these questions, and with reference to a discussion or negotiaton between more 'somatic' and more 'physically, form-based' practices of training that I encountered during the discussions of the last days, I'd like to propose a different idea of describing physical knowledge. It is just a starting point for my reflection, probably also not new, but I'd like to share it, in order to see if it triggers any response. I propose to think of physical practices in relation to two terms: Information and Interface. Rather than ending up in binary oppositions (somatic - physical, slow - fast, form-based - formless classes, and so one), one could then think of complex informational systems (one of them obviously being the body, others being the group, or also sub-systems of the body, such as the organs, or the skleton) and their respective interfaces. In order to access specific blocs or chains of information, any wording or description, any act of 'showing movement', but also any exercise can be seen as an interface. Different exercises, different metaphors make accessible different information about one's own body or about relation to other bodies or the space. In this sense, movement patterns, speed, muscle tone, but also form (or movement vocabulary) would only be informational layers that can easily be articulated with other layers, be them more sensation based or spatio-temporal. Specific forms very well articulate with certain anatomic functions, aka spiral movements or elongation between poles, but maybe also with inner sensations or even emotional states... A training can then be evaluated and cherished in terms of the informational interfaces it offers and creates. (As I am not a teacher, I can say little about what it means in class as yet.) 

 

4) For whom is the professional training? Is it for professionals? 

I here finally want to carefully point at a double bind or paradox that I believe to be percieving. I feel that those colleagues in the field that work a lot within projects do not go to training very much. On the one hand, obviously, because they are working in their respective processes of creation. But maybe also because they engage with very specific practices that relate to their creative processes (be that tai chi or somatic practices, or so on). Maybe, professional training rather is a place for the in-between working periods, and also for dancers/performers who are looking for jobs or are hopefully on their way to professional engagements. How could professional training take that into account, maybe even empower those people even more and at the same time address itself towards the 'professional scene' at the same time?   

(@the participants from Hamburg: I'd be happy to find ways of exchanging further on training needs and also of informing each-other about what classes on takes and is intersted in. Let's mobilize each-other.)  

 

Finally, I want to thank the organizers very heartily! It was a very nice chance to meet around certain questions and I am happy to have been taking part in the week (at least partly). It has been very nice to meet all of you and I hope to see you soon in the future.