idocREPORT

NOTATION SERIES #4: SYMPOSIUM ON RESEARCH WITHIN DANCE EDUCATION @ ICKamsterdam

29st June 2014

LABO21

a report by Jesse Vanhoeck[1]

Introduction

Notation Series is an initiative to exchange issues and projects dealing with a broad idea of Dance Notation. Here analysis, re-presentation, preservation, re-enactment and re-interpretation go together with the creation of documents. Scores, interaction, writing, reading, re-enactment, systems and models, artistic questions and multimedia environments have been welcomed themes during the past encounters.

Being the result of a growing collaboration with the Art Practice and development Research Group of Marijke Hoogenboom at the Amsterdam School of the Arts and other inter-national partners, Notation Making use of different formats of gatherings between interdisciplinary groups of researchers, scholars and artists, Notation Series continues to explore relevant issues on new methods of documentation, on transmission and preservation of performing arts

Notation Series #4 proposes two different encounters, June 21^stand June 29^th. Themes of these encounters are (1) Dance Research and  (2) Dance Research within Education.

Since a few years already, processes of creation of renowned contemporary dance choreographers have been disseminated under formats other than that of the performance.  This shift has provoked new questions in relation to notation, dissemination and education. In this light, research in dance has expanded into issues of the archive, artistic processes, methodologies of work, interdisciplinary collaborations and the creation of tools. During the first day of Notation Series #4 not only the current state of the art will be presented, but space for discussion will be created for those interested to contribute to the future developments of Dance Research.

Accompany the presentations and discussions of this first day there will be two other proposals; an exhibition of interactive installations that have been generated within the research projects at ICKamsterdam and a lecture/performance by choreographer Mor Shani and researcher and visual artist Bram Vreeswijk part of the new research proposal at ICKamsterdam Let’s talk about dance.

During the second day Notation Series #4, will look at the research developed within the school, the role of digital tools within dance education and the future ideas to further develop these relationships.

The second day of the Notation Series #4 took place at studio Habertu, the working space of the International Choreographic Arts Centre (ICKamsterdam). In an informal setting, the afternoon and evening were filled with presentations and discussions around research within dance education. This is a report of that day.

Introduction to Dance digital Tools

Presentation by Bertha Bermúdez

Digital & analogue dance documents

More and more artists create their own artistic driven environment coming from their own practice. Several of them use digital tools. But there are also still lots of books published on this matter, like A Choreographer’s Score by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker or A no can make space by Daniel Linehan.

One example of a digital environment is the website http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu by William Forsythe. He created this space not from the purpose of research but out of the need of having a tool to explain the material/ methodology of work of his improvisation technique to new dancers in the company. He presented it as a DVD ROM, and it grew from being a users tool for the company to something many dancers and researchers within the dance world have bought and used.

Next, Bermudez showed her own publication: Capturing Intention; based on the work of Emio Greco | Pieter C. Scholten. The book publication is accompanied by a DVD ROM which offers a digital environment with images and an  interactive space.

Different websites have emerged that offer possibilities to document and archive information and processes of performances: Rekall (Clarisse Bardiot), TKB (Transmedia Knowledge Database by Carla Fernandez), Jar Journal Research Catalogue (log in, create an account and upload what you want).

All these publications and digital environments look very different. The design is always very diverse and important. They all search for a way to let content and design come together. The content can vary from informative to very interactive, from ‘read this’ to ‘let’s do something together’, an invitation to participate as in Capturing Intention.

The question Bermudez poses is what all these different things are dealing with? What are they trying to tackle? For who do we do this and why? Is it a personal interest? Is it something we do in order to show funds what our practice is? Is it a way of communicating?

Of course they inform as normal publications do. It is a reflection on the work and a wish to open this up to a broader audience. What is great about these projects, is that they find ways to share this knowledge coming from an orally based art form. The dance material is transmitted in the studio. This knowledge exists and can easily slip away. In order to grasp this knowledge, technology has been introduced to the institution of dance education. But the knowledge of how to deal with this documents and tools is not yet there. Although it was often not the aim to produce them for dance education, these tools have a great potential for it. But there is still a gap between the production of these things and the use in education coming from a lack of knowledge of their existence and how to use them. Students are more and more using technology themselves. They share Facebook groups with instruction films etcetera. How can we implement our dance tools into their education? And do we want this?

What is the advantage? The digital normally goes into the cognitive area, it works on a more rational level. This forces us to go much more in depth and do the effort to say exactly what something is. To use this in a workshop demands a very different preparation and structure than in the studio. It is a disembodiment. Students can prepare themselves individually by absorbing this different phases of information. It contextualizes. Bermudez explains how she saves time this way. If the students, before the workshop, can use the tools to understand the structure of the workshop, they have already taken huge steps before entering the studio.

Maria Ines Villasmil, teacher at the Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten adds to this that it is not about replacing studio time, but to find a more efficient way to go through a process. This allows teachers to go more into quality.

Fransien van der Putt, dance journalist, dramaturge and teacher at ArtEZ: points out that it is also about sharing repertoire. Several parties are informed about the work of an artist. It is a fruitful creative exchange.

Bermudez concludes this part by stating that according to her there is a mind shift going on. People want more and more to open their own practice and they do that in different ways. More examples to open up the processes are rising.

Introduction to the meta-academy

Presentation by Marlon Barrios-Solano

We meet Barrios on Skype. The first remark made is that the format is reflecting the content.

How humans create knowledge is one of the fundamental questions for Barrios. His aim is to explore what it is what we actually call an environment.

His meta-academy project is an investigation using the internet/online and cloud tools to share and search the way choreographers produce knowledge, going from the most skill based, to a more highly abstract level. How do the embodied knowledge of a choreographer can be explored? Therefore the meta-academy is a digital environment that is really creative and dealing with the practice of choreographers. Participants are using internet-based tools to creatively explore questions about embodiment, training and memory, composition, and politics of the body. They also explore how to translate embodied practices onto the internet.

The first pilot of meta-academy was dealing with Nancy Stark Smith’s “Underscore”, an approach of improvisational dance/movement that she has been developing for over 30 years. It was an exploration of  presence, co-presence and how there was this tension between ideas of movement and movement itself. It focused on the epistemology of the artist.  How the artist is constructing the mind and the body. It also tried to investigate how knowledge is inscribed in the digital world. What kind of new textualities are nurtured in the digital?

The meta-academy starts with the direction given by the artist. It comes from the method used by him or her. In the case of Nancy Stark Smith, the underscore was used to design three phases consisting of core activities and experiments. Real time workshops for the participants were translated onto the internet. People working with the embodied material of the artist, created content for the cloud.

Teaching and digital tools at the Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten (AHK)

Presentation by Maria Ines Villasmil

Villasmil is part of the so called Arti group. The aim of this group is to bring teachers together to invest more in creating knowledge and to keep this knowledge in the faculty.

As teachers they are busy transmitting knowledge in a very solitary way. They open the door, give class and go on. They normally don’t have the practice of sharing this with colleagues. Because of the lack of a structured meeting where the exchange of knowledge and experience could take place, they founded the Arti group. As one of the projects for the group, they started to look into digital tools to figure out what is relevant in this topic.

First thing they did, was making a list of terminologies, very clear body principles and put them in a database of vocabulary. Next came the search of what could help them in transmitting this knowledge. A search into the digital tools.

The first motivation was to be efficient in the use of the body but also in the way of teaching. For example, one of the teachers who teaches partnering came across videos of lifting in different fields (science, nature,…) Each body has a different way of learning so this suggests different approaches.

A second interest is how these  tools enlarge the experience in the class. With the Double Skin / Double Mind interactive installation of the Inside Movement Knowledge project, they investigated how the installation can enlarge the experience of all kind of dancers. They experimented with hip hop dancers, mime students,… In a documentary the students talk about their experience. The students were relating to the sound or to the image of Greco. They reflected from different corners on what they experienced. When in a normal studio situation, not all this elements are there. 

By combining the first and second interest the experience can be made more efficient. The teachers  have four years to create artists and the program is very full. Digital tools can help to enlarge their experience.

Bermudez remarks that people learn dance in very different ways. Digital tools are mainly addressing the visual. She wonders whether this group was also thinking of different aspects not only based on the image.

Villasmil explains how they started working with pictures of objects. Making a series of objects is very related to the way we write choreography. It is a way of documenting you also see, for example, in the drawings of Trisha Brown. It is a document but also a very personal experience. And they are also interested in words. In the second part of the documentary they had taken away the image of Greco in the installation. They were interested in the vocabulary that would rise, they could only rely on their own experience.

In between education, research and praxis; The Faculty of the Voice

Keynote presentation by Saskia Kersenboom

Intercultural Explorations into Performance.

The background of Saskia Kersenboom plays an important role in this research. She studied Indian languages and dance but found herself in the academic world not able to communicate her knowledge. How to share an oral tradition? Sharing an event; a performed experience,  it has a time, space, depth, which all is so incredible complex to share. Plus the complexity of bodies that connecting with each other and all the knowledge that is present in the bodies. Transmitting is co producing the performance, the knowledge. That is hard to catch on paper.

Literacy starts when people started reading and writing, compared to the oral, this is quite new and not even accessible for everybody.  Dancers are the oral people among the literate. They are bringing this two traditions together and that is challenging.

The Faculty of the Voice goes  into the body, the world and the embodiment. For example: the moment you have a voice, there is a person with a body. And there is a listener who is embedded.  He understand or don’t understand what you are saying, and you, as a speaker are aware of the fact whether he does or doesn’t understand. A book doesn’t care whether the reader understands it or not.

Kersenboom tries to create an opening in the academic world to put this new paradigm of performance on the shelf: embodied performance studies to understand other cultures. Create their world and share their world.

She also developed a dialogue between the Faculty of the Voice and the 7 necessities. Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten tried to find out with the 7 necessities what is vital for their dance practice. This is what you would find in India as the creation of the world.

She structures this dialogue in three layers: Voice – Stage – Performance

Underneath is a selection of the examples Kersenboom gives and the terms she explains. Most of them go with a drawing which makes it complicated to describe it in this report (this is actually a nice example of the clash between the oral and the literacy. Again the format reflects the content…) You can find more on: www.paramparai.eu/faculty

1. Voice:

Embodiment: how to acquire the words, sound?

Perspective: Il faut
Subject: who feels that que je vous dise> Subject is total. Experience of itself.
Mind-Body: que mon corps est curieux de tout. Dialogue between male, female, abstract, concrete
Experience: et moi je suis mon corps. The whole methodology of Greco and Scholten is based on that: the curiosity of the body. The split between body and mind is not real. It comes together.

The result of the printed press is that we have deeply invested in langue (grammar, codification). Its counterpart Parole, speech is also very much on the agenda. Langage is not represented in some languages. How to perceive langage? The language of the senses (word – sound – images) are also represented in the arts. Langage and arts are intimately connected.

Script; scripting offers possibilities and choices. The moment you can represent, you can take a distance. Control and choice. Technology can be enriching, it depends on how you use it. Example of scripting: the interactive installation. It opens up both control and choice. The body becomes inscripted, The body becomes a sign.

Signs: a word is an icon. What is this, what does it mean, from which culture does it come?

Utterance: happens in a timeframe and an environment that embeds us. Dance from the past has different structures that may be not embedded in the present. You go to the past to learn something. If you can let this really sink in,  it can grow in the present. The challenge is to not stay stuck in the past but to take the knowledge in the presence.

1. Stage

Doubt: How do we create space? Kersenboom takes as an example The Empty Space of Peter Brook. He wonders: how am I going to use this space? How to fit everybody in the space (director, actors, design, audience)? Is it a case of hierarchy and dominance? In the end the content has to fill the space. All the roles are there to talk about and are in function of the content.

1. Performance

Time: the world speaks among itself, it recreates itself. (Les mots et les choses Foucault). There is an organic relationship between speaking and creating. By speaking you create a world. What an artist offers, is an imagination that he has shared with us.

Roos van Berkel, teacher at the AHK asks Kersenboom why she isn’t working with the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Kersenboom answers she thinks he is overused. In an academic context it has become impossible to use him. Once you bring him up, you are put in a certain box. Van Berkel disagrees and mentions that at the university of Eindhoven, where she also teaches, this is absolutely not the case.

Digital: the mentality is changing. There is more about the oral tradition coming into the digital. The challenge is to take the embodied knowledge along in this project because this is the real knowledge we have.

Research within Dance education, a research project

Presentation by Lot Siebe

Since 2004, the Lectoraat Arts Education research group at the AHK picked up the idea of research within dance. Dance research at the university is limited. In theatre it happens much more.

In 2005 came the decision to focus the research on interculturality.

The idea of having an artist in residence, coming from Greco, was very vital to the exchange of space and knowledge. First came Nita Liem and later Germaine Acogny.

Dance as expression is very embedded in the student population. They see dance as a way to express emotions. The idea of dance as energy and collective experience is very unknown to them. Looking at Capturing Intention is one step to let them realize that dance can also be something else, even in the western tradition. The aim is to let them think about the body as a collective body and experience and have them teach dance more as something collective instead of something individual.

Very successful within the program of artists in residency was Germaine Acogny because she is working from traditional African moving principles but very related to western principles as well. She can really transmit and build bridges. The question posed to the students was: how can you use the transcultural approach of Germaine in your own work? Also because the students work a lot with children in the suburbs of Amsterdam, it was good to have knowledge of a different tradition. What Germaine brought to the school was an oral experience. She is not theorizing about it.

Her method was working with a lot of repetition to lose the analytic way of thinking, to stop counting, to feel it. The students had to make a shift from an analytic style of dance to a more acceptant and more bodily approach. In the meantime students are attracted to the school because of this approach.

The students have to learn how to transmit to the youngsters they will work with. How they can process all the memories they have in their body. In a documentary we see how one of the students gets these young participants focused. That is very interesting material, also to show other students as an example.

Kersenboom adds to this that it is exactly this experience of power, force, energy what is performance art. Performance is not about truth. And if we are theorizing, we are always looking for a truth.

Using Digital Tools for teaching: LEAP and IDOCDE

Presentation by Maria Ines Villasmil and Roos van Berkel

The European project IDOCDE: collective environment for teachers to share documents on the internet combined with meetings for exchanging the know how. The whole project turned out in discussing the website: how to upload documents, which documents to upload? But what they actually were interested in was more the live part. Sharing methodologies. The ATG (Amsterdam Teachers Group) got less interested to deal with subject of the digital platform while the live meetings were very fruitful.

The next European project, LEAP, focused on this live exchange and therefore to the wish of the ATG. The intention was to find space to participate in each others workshops and exchange ideas. After a lot of talking they recently got to doing again.

For example, the day after, Villasmil leaves to Sweden for an exchange with the other LEAP partners of Sweden, Finland and Austria. They meet each other in a small village and they will work with the local community.

One of the main topics of the ATG is documentation; how can you document the content of your class. Right now they are experimenting to bring in people from other disciplines in their classes, like musicians of architectures,  and ask them to document a class.

LEAP made them realize that  physical exchange is more fruitful than a digital one.

Research within ArtEZ and CLOUD

Talk by Fransien van der Putt

Van der Putt works as a dramaturge in the research section of ArtEZ, Arnhem.  ArtEZ is focused on a very physical education. They don’t create so much themselves. It is more focused on bringing repertoire. There is very little time taken for looking at work and discussing it. The whole process of sitting down and discussing ideas happens not that often. 

Students do use digital tools but they initiated it themselves. They can organize their own documents. They went through this emancipation themselves.

ArtEZ has a minor maker and a minor dancer. Van der Putt thinks this distinction doesn’t really work. Not all the students in the minor maker choose this option because they want to be choreographers. Some of them just want to do their own stuff.

Research is embedded in different parts. It is not yet artistic research but as a group process it has its function.

CLOUD, open network organization focusing on research, in the field of dance and performance art,  grew out of a refusal. There is no money, only space. People only invest if they want to. But people are very happy just to have an empty studio for 10 days. Spaces are saturated with programs, obligations,… so to have an empty space without any obligation is already a treat. The project attracts people from different places. They have dance as a common good but often very different political or economical backgrounds. Research is very important. CLOUD offers space to people to take a break of what they already know, and go into something else.

Group discussion

Van der Putt: In education there is a focus on space to reflect. It used to be different. Reflecting was something you had to do at home, while at school the focus was on the doing. Van der Putt organizes all the evaluation in group sessions. This way they can collectively learn from each others processes.

A question from Kersenboom to Van der Putt: What is the goal you want to articulate? What is your method and what does it aspire?

Van der Putt: I’m a dramaturge so it very much depends on what the students do. The method should grow from the group of people that wants to peruse something. A method is always different. Half of my job is uncovering the implications of a certain research process. 

Kersenboom has an uneasiness with the term research. What is research? When can we use this term?

Bram Vreeswijk, researcher at ICKamsterdam: How to create a method that values direct bodily communication? The moment you start documenting your work, you need a different mode of reflection. You have to disembody.

Lot: if somebody wants to do research, there is always this need of a personal interest and a frame. It is good to make a clear explanation of the term

Van der Putt: what some people do is more exploration.

Bermudez: What is research? After 14 years of discussion there is more or less a consensus on what is artistic research. It is all about how you value something. For academies it gets problematic because of the Bologna system. There is this quantity aspect coming in.  So the next discussion is about whether this is also artistic research or something else where we are just taking the terminology for…

Kersenboom: these term is been overused in one area. It is dangerous to use it in another. If you talk about method, I want to hear what it is. If you can’t explain it, than don’t use the word. A good use of this terminology is very important to be able to communicate with people out of your network.

Bermudez: What about the methodologies that are developed in the fields outside the universities? How to apply them in the institutions? What can we learn from them?

It was clear that the group discussion about the terminology and praxis of research could go on for some time. As time was running late, we concluded this day with the wish to continue this talk someday, some place.