I am for an artistic education

Autor: Bojana CVEJIC | Categoria: | 0 comentarii

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During a meeting that took place in Bucharest, October 8-14, with Andreea Căpitănescu, Bojana Cvejic, Valentina De Piante, Jan Kopp, Jennifer Lacey, Jan Ritsema, a few points crystallized on the question: “What is the ideal education in choreography that we can imagine?”. I will try to write down what I retained from them, and this will probably imply my own preferences.

The contemporary dance, by and large, lacks an education for choreographers, i.e. makers in the field of dance. Most of the education follows the traditional hierarchical model: to become a choreographer, one has to be a dancer who climbs the ladder toward mastery. Therefore, dance education is primarily a training of the skills required for dancing: dance techniques, styles and idioms, movement research, composition and perhaps some theory to “feed the thought”.

In what ways would an artistic education be different from the model described above? I will summarize the answer point by point.

n An education of “makers”. They are making their own work and supporting the work of others as performers and various kinds of collaborators.

n All consolidated knowledge or expertise is offered as optional, “elective”, and the authority linked with the expertise is transparent. I am thinking of this as resources mobilized according to the interests and needs of the makers. There are no mandatory courses.

n Teachers are asked not to teach what they master – so, no masterclasses – but to involve students in a research process. Or, alternatively, to conceive the workshop as a new research process which may not necessarily result in a performance. The result is what has the epistemological and pedagogical value: methods, procedures, ways of making and learning about making.

n Two principles underlie the ideology of this school. All that matters is the attitude of the teachers, their capacity to decenter from their own preferences (taste, knowledge, experience, expertise) and at the same time, although it may seem contradictory to what has just been said, their passion or enthusiasm about what they do. Or more precisely, these teachers are enthusiastic about learning, and the process of learning for the students is about learning how to learn. The school is not a “formation-machine”, which should nourish the future artist with all the knowledge they will need for ever, to start their careers, or to be contemporary in three years… A school trains abilities to learn, and the independence an artist needs in order not to compromise, but to genuinely create.

n Two attitudes for the students to cherish: critical (and self-critical) and experimental approaches. A school should be a place where failure and success do not matter, or their criteria dissolve. The makers are encouraged to try, question, share, reflect, change, persist, stop, restart, continue, be slow or fast, choose their tempo without being lazy or disingenuous about their choices.

n In addition to the dance specific workshops, the techniques of other arts are available: image and sound editing, an emphasis on new technologies, media and tools of expression.

n Theory is approached from the same spirit as the movement study: in practice and research.

n The school is organized as a collective practice where peer-to-peer exchange is as important as, or even more than, teacher-student relationship. The school should be as much as possible governed by a community of equals, students and teachers.

n If learning is regarded as intellectual emancipation, whereby one learns by oneself and not by instruction (explication) from authority, this pedagogy involves encounters, setting up situations of rupture with the distribution of rules, roles, voices, and competences.

n Ideally, evaluation should be immanent to the process of making, learning and sharing everything with everyone. This is rarely possible, that where one is, is evident, and needs no judgment from the outside. But if reports should be done, then

Bojana CVEJIC