Due to the fact that several people fought with colds, we moved the meeting on short notice from the studio to an „extended breakfast talk“.

There were many other dance teachers interested in the meeting, but could not make it to this specific date or also were dealing with colds. We decided to start with the 1st LEAP meeting anyway, to break the ice, and to get all the questions about the new program, especially about eligibility, out of the way.

Most, but not all of us knew each other to some degree – one „key teacher“ came from IDOCDE. So we started an introduction round which already lead down several paths about the practice of dance education. Also, everyone of the 5 of us works with different target groups and work realities between total freelance to institutionalized teaching. Comparing the work in these situations and target groups (children & youth, dance in therapy, dance students, professionals, adult education), raised awareness for the different challenges and strategies we developed.

Some themes we touched were:

-       How neuroscience supports the practice of dance education. Focusing on the nervous system, we came to talk about different viewpoints from BMC to Polyvagaltheory

-       How competition and the need to keep (potential) students interested shapes our teaching – especially in the freelance situation and in institutional settings

-       How to teach dance (technique) in an aging body

-       How our biographies led to what we are doing now

-       The use of language – If English as the „main somatic language“ possesses some imminent qualities of freedom in thinking and imagination that make it especially useful for somatic teaching. Or if it is due to the fact that most of our learning happened in English that we feel is so connected to somatic learning. Or if it is because of the fact that English is not our mother tongue, and the ambivalence of not ever knowing down to the ground if we understand it correctly that actually helps in the process of physical learning.

After an introduction to LEAP, the IDOCDE website and eligibility criteria one if us also raised a question about how to come up with a choregraphy for a very heterogenous adult beginners group that meets once a week, and where always someone is missing.

Ideas ranged from Authentic movement as compositional process, using objects to preset movements, getting movement patterns from improvisation phases whereas the improvisation tasks need to be very simple, structured and limited to make it as easy as possible for the students to join in (best thing to do is not even mention the term improvisation). More proposals were put up such as dancing a learnt phrase with eyes closed to overcome one´s shyness, moving between mundane movement and dance vocabulary as a creative strategy within the group.

All of his led to a sharing about teaching situations where we found ourselves at our wit’s end and what we learned from it. This was actually quite fun!

Rather unexpectedly it was then already past our 4 hours.

We decided that we wanted to do LEAP meetings more often than the 4 times projected by LEAP. Quarterly meetings seemed realistic.

We also decided that Kerstin would send out a doodle to this group and all the other interested people instead of just sending out a set date.

Another idea was to use trotting & talking for the next time, to get into a different mind set other than sitting and talking and/or meet in the studio for some physical exchange.

It was a successful start into LEAP and we left into the weekend inspired and affirmed in what we do.