Teaching Across Boarders (TAB)

Jack Gallagher/Vigorous Risk > Tanzhaus Zurich May 2014

10 classes over two weeks

Open Professional daily training class

I was deeply invigorated by the layers of context before my arrival. I had the IDOCDE community pulsing through my veins. I had the very provocative Teach Me(Not) issue which is producing more and more fascinating reflections from practitioners who have been there and done that and aren't simply satisfied with a 19^th century power relation in educative environs.

I had the theories exposing the massive attack presuppositions that could possibly appear in my approach, not only because they are possibly contained in my body experience (did I slip into my dancer's old school programming by way of the projection rabbit hole, opened as it is, thru momentary fantasized compassion?) but also because I might be triggered unintentionally in the minds/histories of the participant? Do I speak the jargon which is encodes my learner centered approach?Am I guilty by association when a participant hears their old drill sergeant? Who's in the end responsible for keeping the post traumatic stress syndrome of the historically acknowledged dancer's military regimen outside our space? To what degree do I even assume i can create the present reality for the other through the indirect means of proposing a training method, which might well indeed include quite a lot of contemporary reassessment of attitudes, notions, approaches, and discourses, but none the less is simply a concentrated formal procedure of offering what I've acquired with in my personal experience? Does quality even exist or is it all just taste in the end?

Certainly what is known as quality is a stand in for a value system, not simply a value. And the systematic implies a great deal of inter-dependency, contingency and the issue of relevance. I can only be relevant from my own experience. But I don't have to impose my experience on others. A proposal is a risk. A programatic proposal is a programatic risk.

Is it OK if my experiences are less relevant to the participants than I hope?

All these and more were coursing through my courses. We were inevitably all running through mental obstacle courses. And it is when this is happening, that I actually feel that what I intend with my work and it's proposals is being effective. Of course right here we might ask ourselves, how willing are we to be affected and even effected?

Can we move and question (especially the last one) at the same time? I think so, and I think it implies a conscious embracing of risk. Layers and layers of risks. Everywhere you turn, everywhere you seek comfort. So as long as we can acknowledge this, embrace them at our own pace and by our own sense of courage, I'm feeling that the work is working. Anything please but a flat line where everything is different, unique and personal, and therefor everything is of the same cordoned off untouchable inoperative dysfunctional value. Idealisms reside everywhere...especially when we try to get away from them, we end up letting them rule...they become the authority we all are trying to manage...as unmanageable as ideals are. (Which might be their very appeal and intoxication).

I attempt to inspire, locate and distribute authority. I do mental gymnastics and clown in front of the room, on the side of the room, in the back of the room to dissuade any and all authority daemons and create as many pockets of located authority as I can. Authority is born out of authorship. It's a recognition. It can be granted to one's self. It can be assessed in the other... to what degree is one authoring? It can be detected in an approach...to what degree are the suggested contents lived? To what degree do dance contents even have to be lived? As a body centered practitioner, I stick to the lived. And the authority which emerges in life, or remains immanent (just as cool), certainly happens after the fact. After the risk, which includes withholding I'd say. It's reflective. It's resonant. It shows up or it remains potent. The romance of impotence is also beautiful and touching and human and relevant to our experience. As long as it is embraced.

So enough for the theoretical reflection of my two weeks, enough problematizing...maybe not enough proposed solutions, but I continue with the actual. I typically propose that the work will challenge: basically everything that takes place in a dance studio (as far as I have experience with...but there my (k)no(w)madism pays back). Once a maverick, always a maverick...even in a steady role. ;-)

Dance Class as an asymmetrical dialogue between proposers and doers, speakers and movers, proposed and felt.

Challenges, Working Questions:

How to establish asap a rapport with a new scene.

• What do I stand by and stand for ?

  • The Vigorous Risk method is about the acknowledgement of what a dance training proposes, opening ourselves to the work and relating to what could be considered as a quality standard. Of course there are multiple preferences for any and all dance material > some prefer softness, some prefer a relaxed execution, some go for the maximum performance specificity... clear, exact, punctuated. But what I brought to the Tanzhaus and the Zurich freelance community was a series of exercises that propose a certain physicality (preparation, deepening, body shaping, path and sequence, impulse, cause and effect) and a process whereby each participant may acknowledge their own approach, desire and body feedback in order to locate risk. Far from being a daredevil class, where the limits of risk are approached asap, contrarily, the aspect of risk can be found in just about anything. And by locating it and consciously embracing even the most subtle of thresholds, the body gains confidence directly in correlation to the thresholds embraced and crosses, regardless of their particular “success” factor. I personally believe in a dance art that does not generalize quality, does not reduce all efforts into a swamp of relativity, but more firmly believe in a practice based on distinction, articulation and physical engagement “the live moment”. The Zurich dance scene is filled with a large variety of do it yourself practitioners, independent makers in the post post modern genre which emphasizes authenticity and rhetorical prowess. My particular brand of physical coordination and (non)logistical assembly of dance material was extremely foreign to the participants. This coupled by an amazing occurrence of 1 time participants made it all an extremely spontaneous and short lived exchange.

• Why? Well, I think I said that already above.

• What am I picking up in terms of investment, interest, body language.

  • Is it fear, hesitation? Certainly it is reserve...maybe self preservation in the name of wholeness. How to deal with the asymmetry when it slips into standard leave me alone to my work out, let me get what I paid for body language barrier.

How to provide a training that is mutable, responsive to the particular constellation of the attendees. I have to then perform the material as a response, improvising it as I go. Taking risks to trust the unsaid in dance, the residual effect.

• How to learn what works and what is less relevant to the attendees.

  • There are multiple agendas established by multiple participants.

  • Mix the general and the personal body response > harmonize.

  • What do we give weight to? > The “best” or “strongest” in what I give? Or is it more important to establish a middle ground, a medium? Do different levels of difficulty persist side by side? YES! Can i teach beginners, non-professionals and aspiring young professionals all at the same material? YES

    • I think yes, but I already said that above.

    • Some ideas that the work explores are unfamiliar to everybody. When the ideas are more familiar to some and less to others, then one adds another sentence for the idea. For example a qualitative one...so that a sense of development (which could easily be 'personalizing the idea' and /or taking it further into the inner subjectivity or the surrounding space) accompanies the basic principal, new to some.

• How does feedback occur in open training classes? Spontaneously and constantly. I must then choose what to engage with in my self, of the variety of angles and lightening fast intuitions.

• How does a trajectory appear? In response to the collective movement...this takes me 25 minutes to assess the “room's” spirit: that particular energetic constellation that occurs once we all have sustained a amount of engagement, adjusted the expectations, begun to participate. (Not participating but not leaving is a certain kind of participation)

What transforms?

Every work session was beginning again.

Every reaction accumulated and shaped the atmosphere for as long as it remained.

Every participant took a bite, somehow.

I built the structure of a work session out of everyday's positive feedback. I built material according to the scene as I felt it. I reduced, I pumped up, I got fanatically ridiculous, i got deep into the heart of a free lance scene as it showed itself to me.

I concluded things I will also un-conclude in time. I left with a funny assignment for myself. To continue. But also to remember the Zurich scene as one in which many people express dissatisfaction, thousands upon thousands of personal dissatisfactions. And based on the attendance, i fear that I contributed to that. What could I do? I was honest. I adjusted just about everything without dismantling and destroying the approach. But we old work horses like me, the ones that gave up everything a long time ago to pursue dance and surrender to dance and be transformed by dance, and to be reborn thru dance, and to earn with dance and to share the magic of dance and to trust dance to address the anything and everything that is present in the moment, we have another time now to deal with. The present time, the feeling in the free lance, independent aspirational dance is one of self loathing. The gentle kind. The kind that occurs by giving up hope in little pieces here and there. The kind that creeps in through the space left by being unacknowledged. So instead of the open class being a reservoir of inspirational challenge, what's being created is a place of consolation and support. Support for being exactly what you are. For practicing exactly what you practice. For exploring the infinite and vast “self out of context”. It's not at all only Zurich. It's quite common in every place that I have visited. The separated (at dance birth) of the initiated elite gets more and more status, more and more exclusivity, and the rest get their community of direct action. Hopefully the exchange rate within the free independent scene doesn't turn into a funhouse of mirrors... and the strange maverick might still be able to stir what it is that dance shares with the one who is watching, not only the one who is doing for there own sake. It's a paradox of course. The deeper we go in, the more relevant our contents to share. But surely what completes the circuit, what allows for a kinetic exchange, is the intention to show and tell. As I write this, I might be feeling a bit insecure that I sound as if I'm against dance therapy, the healing involved in a dance practice, the personal growth factors that reward a personal approach, or the idea that there are now plenty of variations of applying physicality and anatomy for a variety of inter-disciplinary purposes. Quite the contrary. All these and more I celebrate. In my own practice, in the practice of others. Maybe we just need another format, different versions of open professional classes? More open studio time made available to those who want to do and share spontaneously? But certainly the spirit of the “open professionally oriented training class” is not all on the shoulders of a teacher to massage the egos and cater to supply and demand. Certainly we have to share this issue? What is happening to a European aspiring independent dance scene? Have the independants of the previous generations been outdated, by missing the performative turn? Is a technical approach to dance simply 20^th century and that's that? A dualist world view, a complete and utter divide between state supported super commercialism on the one hand and the dance a means to “personal goal” ends on the other is unacceptable to me.

IDOCers help me out here!

Thanks for reading... wow, you read a lot!