idocde » Editorial
BIG UPDATE! a NEW Symposium and more…
reflections on the 2022 IDOCDE symposium
The April Issue – symposium description is here
The March Issue
The February Issue
The November Issue
making place for making place
Nancy Stark Smith
The May Issue: Onwards with IDOCDE!
IDOCDE Virtual Meetings starting soon!
The December Issue
The September Issue
on symposium scheduling and languaging against the odds
on beaver dams and the 7th IDOCDE symposium
in lieu of transparency, approaching the 2019 IDOCDE symposium
Tracing Forwards –––––– the question of (human) nature
New Year, New Symposium, New Story
Tradition, Evolution and Diversity – Share Your Legacy
updates, updates, updates
... how many hours in a day
The Cassiopeia score and other matters; power, pedagogy, and the imparting of knowledge
revelations, reflections, confessions; post-symposium update
Months Bleed into New Months
Martin's Alphabet
You are here – I am here
Something New
Ashes to Ashes, Water to Words
Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui ... [1]
a fictional season
on beauty: an unexpected debate
What I Did Not Miss This Summer
I Can Not Not Move. Can You?
IN THE SPACE OF STUDY – notes on The Legacy Project and the 2017 IDOCDE Symposium
Scores for Rest
Everlasting Words
what you give will remain yours forever
the limit of the limitless
ATTENDANCE
What can dance bring to culture?
Documentation and Identity – New lives of memories...
Solo thinking does not exist
The Importance of Being [Un]Necessary
Hot Stones Notwithstanding
Documenting what is in a flux
Symposium Preparations Under Way
Moving images are often read as “the truth”...
The Technology Coordinator
Potential for Relationship, Subversion and Emergence
A quantum LEAP to REFLEX
Abundance of Exchange – no me but for you!
Teaching Form[less]?
Questioning it all?
After a few months of ephemerality…
Failing Successfully!
Her sweet boredom…
teaching dance, flying airplanes and surgery procedures
re-creation – by the writing dance teacher
Revisiting Our Reality
The End
Roll the bones!
And now?
Treasure Hunt
News from the Arsenal
Body time & Politics
Morning training opening at K3
Symposium 2013 Vienna
Time is ticking...
"If tomatoes are a fruit, isn't ketchup...
Symposium 2013: Call for proposals
Teaching at ImPulsTanz: Call for applications
idocde meeting Stolzenhagen August 13-17, 2012
More videos please!
Hello… What are you doing here?

I Can Not Not Move. Can You?


Am I a mover?
A performer, dancer, therapist, a healer, teacher, coach, editor? I always have difficulty describing my work, me – this humble body – in a short biography. What is written on my diplomas seems certain. Yet, what is embodied, and what deserves to go into the “max 100 words paragraph”? I hate it each time I have to give it a try.  “I am what I am and you will see when you meet me!” I wish to say…

Does it matter? When millions of people are forced to redefine who they are as they leave their land and families – their pasts literally behind; when thousands of people are dying in the seas; when people are jailed because of their thoughts or because of their color; when environmental protection can still be questioned; when this precarious world is sucking up joy and hope I can only say: I am lost. That is what I am.

Right now, my reality: I am not moving. I had to move out of my own country a year ago. Now I sit – learning French for 7 hours each day. I am able to go back “home”. Yet, each time I pass the border, I still wonder if I will be arrested or not. I fear going back. Simply. My neighbors at the French table are war refugees from Syria, others are from Sudan, Kosovo, Albania. I ask myself: What kind of a refugee am I? [1]

Does it matter? Sitting still: Still believing in dance, still hoping for the initiation of a movement to come, I sit. I wait. I can only sit. All winter, I sat for long skype meetings for the REFLEX project and our e-publication Mind The Dance. I sat to prepare the symposium program with the Project Team. All my work around dance when I could not find my own dance! I sat at airports, I sat at immigration offices, and am now sitting in front of a blank screen writing this editorial. I can not move. What kind of mover am I?

Now. Just now the blank screen is filling up. Movement calls in. Many people are walking for justice in Turkey now! [2] Performers are walking in Germany covered in clay to peacefully protest G20 and urge people who have lost belief in solidarity to embrace more self-responsibility. [3] I sense my solitude deep down. … The initiation of the movement I have been longing for kicks in my hips. The eczema on my skin itches louder. I go out to the park and walk with all. Slowly but surely. Breath.

I come back, sit at my desk to realize that actually movement has been there within – calling. And, that actually, I have been participating to this call in silence [4] and stillness – breathing, reflecting, digesting and gradually reaching towards the strength and crutch of collective hope. And because I am a mover, I can not not move! Can you?

Whatever you call yourself: a dancer, teacher, artist, student, performer, cultural worker – remember that you are not alone and we are all participants in the making of this world. This year , the IDOCDE Symposium inquires: Why Compromise. Mind The Dance. So, before it is too late, let’s shake off the ashes and come together! Please join us this summer and ask with us “what is my practice actually doing to the world – given my experience of managing personal pedagogic and artistic practices? How are my pedagogic and artistic decisions shaping the world of others – my students? My peers? And what, in particular, is the effect of the decisions I am not making?”

And we will mind our dance thru the lense proposed by the REFLEX Europe Researchers via their “Guide to Documenting Contemporary Dance Teaching”: Mind The Dance.

Feeling so lucky to have this connection to this page I am creating now; to have you all who are reading these lines; and having met all the people who have made it possible for me to move and be still, and realize the moving in the stillness, I hope to meet you beyond this screen and beyond the troubles.

Defne Erdur,

Lyon, 12.07. 2017

 


 

[1] More than 50,000 people have been arrested and 140,000 dismissed or suspended during a state of emergency in place since last summer's attempted military takeover in Turkey. I have friends who lost their jobs, their freedom, their lives. I myself had to sit and self-censor my own PhD. Obediently, resonating with the fear of my professors, and in anticipation of something much, much worse, I sat to remove from my thesis words like democracy, hierarchy, authority, sexuality, gender role, … As I write these lines now, the news of detention of the director of Turkey Branch of Amnesty International and more human rights activists, academicians takes place, next to the news of the detentions of leading journalists and members of the parliament. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40547972, https://turkeypurge.com/70-from-istanbul-medeniyet-bogazici-universities-under-custody

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/06/turkey-crisis-justice-defence-democratic-values

[3] http://www.designboom.com/art/1000-gestalten-protest-g20-summit-hamburg-07-08-2017/

[4] “The Aesthetic of Silence: Susan Sontag on Art as a Form of Spirituality and the Paradoxical Role of Silence in Creative Culture” by Maria Popova: https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/06/the-aesthetic-of-silence-susan-sontag/