What I Did Not Miss This Summer

At the “Kitchen Table” during the 5th IDOCDE Symposium Keith Hennessy asked for tangible stories to be shared, inviting us to connect the meta discourse we got entangled with to the real politics of daily life.

Deirdre Morris and Daniel Davis had already prepared the ground for such a sharing in their workshop “Somatic Insights into Performance with Marginalized Groups”, as participants were asked to engage from the point of contact with their own personal stories.

On the trajectory of my personal following, I have also witnessed Monica Gillette and Clint Lutes’ perspective on how we, dancers, have the potential to relate to the “different” without creating hierarchies. In their “Role Change” session, participants with and without Parkinson’s Disease we were able to be different  – all of us.

I saw Sybrig Dokter interviewing (actually audio-visually recording 3 minutes of automatic speaking on “compromise”) some of the participants as I was running to connect Adham Hafez on skype for his lecture demonstration “Olim Lacus Colueram”. Adham could not travel from Cairo to Vienna, but  still managed to lecture about multiple lives, forbidden choreographies, cultural infrastructure, and dance education; in the same studio that Nita Little’s “Listen, A Rose Arose” performance and Brigitte Wilfings’s “Becoming Europe” took place the night before.

Sunday, for me, started with Rock Paper Scissors between Inaki Azpillaga, Sri Louise, Zvi Gotheiner facilitated by Keith Hennessy. Then and there history, expertise, humour, and intensive learning were embodied… Followingly I had the chance to share my own PhD research in the Touching The (Not) Touching Panel with Michael Kimmel, Kerstin Kussmaul and Kevin O’Conner. Leaving the depths of different researches in and around Contact Improvisation behind, I dove into the unknown territories of dance teaching documentation via the “Performative Bookbinding” of the brand new digital publication: MIND THE DANCE…

As many of the participants of the 5th IDOCDE Symposium, I have missed most of the Symposium. This is a fact. I could not be in 3 studios at the same time. This is what a Symposium is, I guess… You miss, so that you continue following up... You are always left with the things you have and the things that you will never have, or maybe get to have later on in life...

Yes, I missed. I made peace with what I missed. And I decided to share what I caught. Yes, the above is the brief storyline of “my” 5th IDOCDE Symposium… I am curious of other story lines… Hence I value the documents of other participants. Hence it is so important that we continue to document in our ways –  in our words, images, movements, emotions, meanings… and share!

If you were there in ImPulsTanz this summer, please share your IDOCDE Symposium Story with us here on idocde.net. [1] If you cannot, do not worry!

Would we be unhappy? No! We can still reach the sessions we missed through Symposium Team’s Documentations. There are videos and facilitator reflections becoming gradually available on our idocde platform here in our Symposium Documentation Folder. And if we are really really curious and have the time, we know that all the video recordings of the sessions are available in Vienna and we can go ahead and even watch the whole symposium… Of course it would not be the same, but… isn’t it all about compromise?!

Defne Erdur

Lyon, 12.09.2017

[1] If you need help, inspiration, ideas on how to share through documentation, visit our new publication mindthedance.com . And if you need help on how to dive deeper into MIND THE DANCE, reach us at info@idocde.net, we can organize outreach workshops for you.