LETTER TO THE CFF TEACHERS :

Dear Teachers,

Every year Contact Festival Freiburg invites one former teacher to help collect the Lab notes and reflections produced during the Teachers Meeting. These people take notes themselves and are responsible for collecting visual, written or audio material from other teachers and the different labs. It is a very difficult task to carry alone. And every year these documents compile into a booklet thanks to the Festival team editorial efforts. And we are all able to access past years’ documents at the Festival Library.

However at the 2016 and 2017 Teachers meetings, Defne Erdur and Eszter Gal introduced an online platform that they have co-founded with Kerstin Kussmaul and collaborating with many other contemporary dance teachers.

IDOCDE.net is a community-run website that acts as a database enabling the publishing and sharing of documentation concerning dance and dance teaching. It seeks to establish a knowledge base, a living archive, and encourages collaboration and dialogue for fostering of both individual practice and the dance work field. It supports creative approaches to reflective documentation. With its sister digital publication MINDTHEDANCE.com (covering a wide range of approaches from writing, drawing, notating, video art to creating scores and templates), IDOCDE.net aims to guide the teachers towards development of a personal and sustainable documentation practice. (A printed copy of Mind The Dance can be found in the Festival Library).

During the presentation of IDOCDE.net in Freiburg, there was a discussion about the documents of Contact Festival Freiburg Teachers Meeting (CFFTM), and the issue of sharing these documents with other teachers in our work field, outside of the festival, came up. All the teachers were interested and supportive of the idea. Defne and Eszter, mentioned that idocde.net can be used as a platform to share the CFFTM documents and these files could be compiled in a folder on IDOCDE.net and access could be just open to invited teachers, or open to general public depending on the decision of the documentors and Festival Organizers. 

This year Dani, Barbara and Defne are willing to give it a try, considering the points that were shared during the IDOCDE presentation meeting. On the value and potential of Contact Festival Freiburg Teachers Meeting Documentation the following important points were shared by the teachers of 2017 CFFTM: 

- Subjective documents, besides edited/academic ones, are as relevant — functioning as some kind of a living archive of today, informing the future.

-  Articulating in different means and ways allows different perspectives to emerge and co-exist. Words do have limit(ation)s and they do limit the way of thinking and proceeding.

- Poetic and artistic approaches in documentation (images, metaphors, excerpts,..) have their place and value as reflective traces.

- A reflective practice has the potential to help the facilitator, the participant, and the observer, documenting the work, to have another level of relation to their experience.

- The different layers of a work - format, content, approach, intention, etc - can be reflected upon and elaborated through documentation. It is important to be open to sharing at any level.

- The documentor needs to have a clear personal intention in documenting.

- Out of reflections some scores can be created to trigger, propose further experience.

Given the big interest to develop an integrated documentation practice to the inquiries, teachings, discussions we carry in and around our work field, having heard the desire of the CFF teachers to develop the practice together, and given the wish to open the CFF Teachers Meeting Inquiries out to the wider dance teachers community, this year we are inviting you to start the collective work during our 2018 Teachers Meeting.  

Defne, with the help of Dilek, will be facilitating this journey. As the program of the meeting gets clear, they will be suggesting some scores, asking some questions, directing our attention to certain aspects of the ongoing sessions, in order for all of us to actively engage in the reflecting/harvesting/documenting the inquires we share this week. They will propose their ideas at the beginning of the meeting. Than the process will in-form us all… 

Before we hear Defne and Dilek’s suggestions, below are some questions[1] to start "warming up" into documentation... 

Looking forward to researching and reflecting on our teaching/practice and sharing the outcomes with our colleagues out there…

Here we go!

PRIMING QUESTIONS SHARED WITH THE CFF TEACHERS :  

Questions to think before, during and after documentation process:

1- Who are you? Teacher, participant, outside observer...

2- What do you wish to share? Is your sharing theoretical, reflexive (discussion), personal record, public record, poetic, visual, literary, practical, experimental?

3- Whom do you wish to address? Who is your potential audience for this sharing?

e.g Yourself, students (which ones), teachers or performers (which ones), everyone?

4- What tools do you have for documenting / sharing?

5- What could be your obstacles along the way?

6- What are your resources to overcome these obstacles? 

7- Where would you like to realize this sharing / publicize your document?

8- How would you like your document to be utilized?

e.g. can others use it? do they need to cite you? do you need to cite others? can it be modified?