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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?

on beaver dams and the 7th IDOCDE symposium

Dear Member of the IDOCDE community!

 As the annual symposium approaches, the highlight of the IDOCDE year, I cannot help but wonder: will anything of the sense of purpose that veils the IDOCDE symposium, which is a one time event, ever veil the IDOCDE website, which is at our disposal all year round?

*

On a recent trip to Earthdance, which some of you––especially Europeans––might know of from dance history books, I saw the beaver dam pictured above. The dam got me thinking about beavers in their effort to build dams; in their effort to redirect water flows so as to make homes, and collect food more easily. (This will not be how evolution works, but just for laughs: imagine the first beaver that built an underwater entrance to their den! The underwater entrance must have been the talk of the town to make all the other beavers decide to standardise the practice.)

My thoughts turned from the effort it takes to build and maintain a dam to the effort it took to build and takes to maintain IDOCDE. What if, I thought, IDOCDE could be thought as an equivalent of a beaver dam, which––I draw immediately––would make knowledge about dancing, pedagogy, and art-making equivalent to a stream or a river; i.e. it would equate said knowledge akin to natural and existing (!) phenomena. There is no dam, after all, without there being a stream or a river first.

Thinking further, I thought: what if IDOCDE’s purpose, as is the purpose of a dam, is to redirect the flow of knowledge, maybe to collect knowledge, maybe to draw the attention a specific segment of the ecosystem to the existence of this knowledge? Knowledge that would otherwise remain invisible in the natural flow of things? Maybe because knowledge, understood like so, serves its purpose so well. Maybe because it’s so highly functional, it doesn’t need to get recognised as something that can be articulated, as something that can be studied: learned and taught.***

...

(I thought I was writing to understand what I am taking care of when taking care of IDOCDE. Now I think I am writing about the difference between talent and practice. I'll come back to this thought in the next Editorial.)

*

As you might have seen, the full list of keynote speakers and practitioners who are to participate at the 7th IDOCDE symposium, has been released. (The list is available on the IDOCDE homepage.) We are soon to follow up with a closer look at the symposium’s content (link) and the particulars of this year’s programmation.

NOTE! The 7th IDOCDE symposium is a 25 hour long event. The question in focus at this year’s symposium is: can we treat the symposium in its entirety as a unit of somatic exploration? Giving and receiving information, dancing, sleeping, eating, resting, contemplating, listening, sharing, touching and being touched, breathing: together.

A detailed description of the symposium program is available under symposium: program & schedule

Stay tuned for updates, more information about the symposium will be released as the symposium approaches. If you're new to the symposium and have questions regarding, feel free to contact members of the IDOCDE community who have been to past symposia via this website or by placing a comment on the IDOCDE's Facebook page wall. Members of the community who have been to the past symposia will, I'm sure, know how to answer your questions best!

 

Till soon,
may your dance practices prosper
pavleheidler for Team IDOCDE

 

***note for future reference:
what if the western culture's failure to recognise value in embodied and non-verbal knowledge as globally relevant is the equivalent of the western culture's inability to recognise value in indigenous knowledge and ritual practice as globally relelvant?