I feel the Choreo Lab was a huge success. I felt nourished, challenged, stimulated, loved, and fully engaged in process/product as well as community. I am so happy and honored that I got to be a part of it.
The following thoughts are only possible because you all jumped in with such great generosity and bravery to create this Lab. I feel so grateful to J.R., Celeste, and Lisa, Kristina, and Loren for making this opportunity to get into this stew together.
What might I experiment with the next time, if I were to be part of the planning team?
These are some questions I would ask myself, that were all stimulated by the amazing work we just did together.
0. What is “embodied learning”? Is it the same, different, a subset of “learning through dance”? Let’s understand/analyze/define what learning through dance is... how does it work? (Once we know how it works, then we can communicate this to others....) (Remember when TPR - Total Physical Response was popular for second language acquisition? This might be embodied learning, yet is so different from “Learning Through Dance/Dancing to Learn”)
- Dance for Teaching/Learning (in Education)
- Learning how to learn (in general) - possible connection to current brain research e.g. Dan Siegel/how I learn (specifically)
- Learning some “facts” from academic curriculum
(What are our values about these different aspects of learning? Do we understand (after what the choreos presented in this lab) that we might need to tackle a. before we tackle b? or tease out/analyze/understand a. to get to b?
- Dance as Research
- inquiry through the body/with the body -- how? methods/methodologies
- dance as applied to different phases of the research process (when is this analogous to point 0. above?) Forming a research question or hypothesis, creating a method of inquiry, collecting data, analyzing data via different types of coding, quantitative, and qualitative methods, synthesizing analysis with prior research, research done in the community of peers, etc.
- Documentation of dance (process/product)
- purposes/why?
- methods and media
- linking b. to a. (I think this is probably something Kristina and Loren know a lot about)
- Advocacy for “Learning Through Dance/Dancing to Learn”
- in general for any individual/group
- in an educational setting
and, as a corollary, how are we communicating these things amongst ourselves in the Lab? how do we “discuss” or “dance discuss” or “video/power point discuss”? Can we discover ways that communicate amongst all of us (working together in the lab) clearly, effectively, richly? what happens when we communicate if we are outside, at lunch eating, in the St Denis studio, in the Rose studio? (this is yet another question of interest to me- issues of place, time of day, situations for communicating)
I think/feel it was a fascinating idea to have individuals hold different aspects of these question/facets of what we were doing -- i.e. “faculty, researchers, and choreographers.” What did we learn from that? A lot! Let’s see if we can articulate it together (please help!). Also, since I am interested in all the facets and have explored all in the past, I would love the opportunity to be in a Lab/think tank situation in which all of us could work on all of these aspects -- where we acknowledge ourselves as choreographer/teacher/researchers and we all get the opportunity to be in choreographer sessions, researcher sessions, and teaching/planning sessions... of course, this could easily be overwhelming... I might be the only person who would want to be present for all these sessions. It would mean not giving researcher and choreographer sessions concurrently so that those who wanted to could participate in all -- this would take more time. (Discussion here of how we want to create an experience in relation to time.... when do we want to experience an expansion of time, a constriction of time... how does the way we interact with time influence our learning? our learning through dance? our communication via documentation in dance or other medium?)
exposure to/discussion of different ways being considered to research/share the work of the choreographers working in the Lab by Kristina/Lisa -- case study was chosen, what were some others being considered? How would this discussion be supported by a dance research process or how might the dancers and choreos be stimulated by these various research methodologies/choices?
other questions that emerged from our work together:
-- improvisation and set choreography as differing processes/media for research and presentation
-- teaching and directing as similar yet different ways of facilitating -- what do we learn as students in these different processes?
Thank you for inviting me and going on this journey with me. It was an amazing gift!!!!!!!
love, Michael
