DOCUMENTATION PROJECT

A COLLABORATION BETWEEN CONTACT FESTIVAL FREIBURG (CFF) & IDOCDE.net

Dear Teachers,

Until 2017, every year Contact Festival Freiburg has invited one former teacher to help collect the Lab notes and reflections produced during the Teachers Meeting; taking notes themselves and being responsible for collecting visual, written or audio material from other teachers and the different labs.
These documents compile into a booklet thanks to the Festival team (Barbara's) editorial efforts. And we are all able to access past years’ documents at the Festival Library.  Since 2018 we are collaborating with IDOCDE.net and the documents are now accessible online.

IDOCDE.net is a community-run website that acts as a database enabling the publishing and sharing of documentation concerning dance and dance teaching. It seeks to establish a knowledge base, a living archive, and encourages collaboration and dialogue for fostering of both individual practice and the dance work field. It supports creative approaches to reflective documentation. With its sister digital publication MINDTHEDANCE.com (covering a wide range of approaches from writing, drawing, notating, video art to creating scores and templates), IDOCDE.net aims to guide the teachers towards development of a personal and sustainable documentation practice. (A printed copy of Mind The Dance can be found in the Festival Library).

During the presentation of IDOCDE.net in Freiburg in 2016 and 2017, there were discussion about the documents of Contact Festival Freiburg Teachers Meeting (CFFTM), and the issue of sharing these documents with other teachers in our work field, outside of the Festival, came up. All the teachers were interested and supportive of the idea. Defne and Eszter, mentioned that idocde.net could be used as a platform to share the CFFTM documents and these files could be compiled in a folder on IDOCDE.net and access could be just open to general public depending on the decision of the documentors and Festival Organizers. 

In 2018, Defne and Dilek fascilitated the first tryout of “collective documentation” of the Teachers Meeting (TM). And since August 2018 the TM documentation is available on IDOCDE.net : 
2005-2017 lab notes onhttp://www.idocde.net/folders/95

2018 lab notes on http://www.idocde.net/folders/92

It is clear that we still need to find creative ways to include more of us to actively participate in this venture. For this year Dani, Barbara and Defne are willing to give it a second try, considering the points that were shared during the IDOCDE presentation meeting.

On the value and potential of Contact Festival Freiburg Teachers Meeting Documentation the following important points were shared by the teachers of 2017 CFFTM:

- Subjective documents, besides edited/academic ones, are as relevant — functioning as some kind of a living archive of today, informing the future.

-  Articulating in different means and ways allows different perspectives to emerge and co-exist. Words do have limit(ation)s and they do limit the way of thinking and proceeding.

- Poetic and artistic approaches in documentation (images, metaphors, excerpts,..) have their place and value as reflective traces.

- A reflective practice has the potential to help the facilitator, the participant, and the observer, documenting the work, to have another level of relation to their experience.

- The different layers of a work - format, content, approach, intention, etc - can be reflected upon and elaborated through documentation. It is important to be open to sharing at any level.

- The documentor needs to have a clear personal intention in documenting.

- Out of reflections some scores can be created to trigger, propose further experience.

Given the big interest to develop an integrated documentation practice to the inquiries, teachings, discussions we carry in and around our work field, having heard the desire of the CFF teachers to develop the practice together, and given the wish to open the CFF Teachers Meeting Inquiries out to the wider dance teachers community, this year we are inviting you to continue the collective work during our 2019 Teachers Meeting.  

Defne and Dilek, will be facilitating this journey again. As the program of the meeting gets clear, they will be suggesting some scores, asking some questions, directing our attention to certain aspects of the ongoing sessions, in order for all of us to actively engage in the reflecting/harvesting/documenting the inquires we share this week. They will propose their ideas at the beginning of the meeting. Than the process will in-form us all… 

Before we hear Defne and Dilek’s suggestions, below are some questions[1] to start "warming up" into documentation...  

Looking forward to researching and reflecting on our teaching/practice and sharing the outcomes with our colleagues out there…

Here we go! 

Questions to think before, during and after documentation process:

1- Who are you? Teacher, participant, outside observer...

2- What do you wish to share? Is your sharing theoretical, reflexive (discussion), personal record, public record, poetic, visual, literary, practical, experimental?

3- Whom do you wish to address? Who is your potential audience for this sharing?

       e.g Yourself, students (which ones), teachers or performers (which ones), everyone?

4- What tools do you have for documenting / sharing?

5- What could be your obstacles along the way?

6- What are your resources to overcome these obstacles? 

7- Where would you like to realize this sharing / publicize your document?

8- How would you like your document to be utilized?

       e.g. can others use it? do they need to cite you? do you need to cite others?

              can it be modified?