OBSERVATOR CULTURAL - Spiritul critic in actiune

This meetings took place in Bucharest at the National Center of Dance between the 8th and the 14th of October, organized by ArtLink as part of the project Jardin d’Europe and led by the dramaturg Bojana Cvejic, the visual artist Jan Kopp, the choreographer Jennifer Lacey and the director-dramaturg Jan Ritsema. The common denominator of all the encounters was an eloquent “Time to Think…”, various methods of education and methods of creation, relations between choreography and dramaturgy.

I was there too, because I am a teacher at the University of Performing Arts “I.L. Caragiale”, choreography section, and I felt the need to debate many questions: methods of teaching, topics, purposes, strategies, goals, and nevertheless the way of communication with the students.

How to start? We found this general question: “What do you do while you teach?“.

So we interviewed each other about our personal teaching-experience.

But a research in Bucharest without context seemed sterile; by consequence they open the encounter to everybody interested. Cooperativa Performativă came in, with Ion Dumitrescu, Mădălina Dan, Carmen Coţofană, Mihaela Dancs, Paul Dunca, Cătălina Gubandru, Florin Fieroiu, Andreea Novac.

We had a brainstorming, testing where we are and what we think about the performing process, defining differences between education and creation.

Hard: after watching NVSBL, we tried to do what we think we perceived, as a method of creation.

We meandered from social choreography to the anarchical experiments of the Collectives, from aesthetics to the philosophy of perception, from Deleuze, Bergson, Pasolini to cinema, visual art, performance.

We reflected upon different school systems:

n the P.A.R.T.S. University, where programs have changed in time in order to achieve better results;

n the “nomad” University of Choreography in Stockholm, always changing the place and the teachers;

n the PAF ( Performing Art Forum), a model of self-education directed by Jan Ritsema from 2005, where different artists and theoreticians go to work on their own projects.

I felt excited and depressed at the same time, old-fashioned, very little in touch with contemporary art and with the process behind. I took a moment of self-criticism… Discussing the way I was thinking that a dance education must be for a student that wants to became a choreographer of our times.

I don’t want to be pathetic but the words of Jan Ritsema, Boiana, Jan Kopp and Jennifer are still in my mind…learn to think, learn to make through the process of doing, exhaust what you want to do, look for different layers of a performance, don’t worry if you get contradictory information, get in touch with the contemporary arts and artist, allow contamination, teachers must be makers, know about the social-economical-political context, inquire into nowadays society, create a flexible situation in which every student must be responsible for himself.

Valentina DE PIANTE NICULAE, born 1972 (Udine, Italy), Italian and Romanian nationality. She lives in Bucharest, where she’s assistent at the U.N.A.T.C “I.L. Caragiale” – Choreography Department. She is a freelance choreographer and dancer, graduated the Department of Choreography Bucharest and attended the University of Performing Arts D.A.M.S. Bologna.

She’s leading lectures Body-Mind Centering and Feldenkrais methods, for professional dancers, in Bucharest.