Features
Dance art education revisited
French choreographer Boris Charmatz is launching his project BOCAL at
ImPulsTanz 2003. BOCAL is a nomadic and provisional school reflecting upon and questioning arts education. This experiment is developped in the context of Charmatz three year residency at Centre National de la Danse in Paris. It will bring together 15 students from different backgrounds from July 2003 to July 2004, when they will come back to ImPulsTanz to present "T.P." (travaux pratiques). In a letter to the festival Charmatz gives details on BOCAL.
Bocal, Bocal, Bocal,
Sorry - this text is a mere draft, but I spend much more time on selecting "Bocalists" than on preparing contents which qualify for being communicated to an audience. The outline is not all that clear yet, but I hope that the energy carrying the project is already perceptible.
I am not quite sure whether I should simply say something about the project and explain our reasons for being in Vienna, or whether I should introduce all the extraordinary people involved. I will do a mixture of both.
From the very first moment on I had known that yes, I would stick to this "pedagogic creation" for a whole year, and yes, Vienna was indeed the ideal location for it.
"Bocal" is based on the conviction that any contemporary school should not just limit itself to being a mere presenter of already existing knowledge, serving it on a silver plate to its students. On the contrary, the content of a lesson has to become manifest via the experience of teaching; our concept relies upon the hope that the school will develop out of itself, during a process of creating methods and techniques for practical work. What we want is to create our own pedagogy, and we hope that our creation will serve as a way of teaching. The course will thus be based on its own creation.
When I, as an artist, happen to get involved with teaching, one might expect that I will advance art by the means of performance, by introducing the imaginary world of artistic creation. This is not the case. I firmly believe in all artists? capacity and duty of teaching; their task is to consider school and pedagogy in the same way as they might have considered performance and art before, namely as an open space in need to be turned into an issue, to be criticized and, most of all, to be created or even recreated. As has been the case with those performances of recent years which stimulated interest: there, questioning the ideas of conventional performance became the very subject-matter of performance itself. Hence it is obvious that the idea/concept of the school, with all its problems and tensions, has to become the focal point of any project claiming to be based on research and pedagogic creation. We will start the project on basis of our methods and artistic credo, and we will try to find out what our ideas do to the school, and, at the same time, what the school does to our ideas.
Another goal of "Bocal" is to understand pedagogy as as a research topic in its own right, and not as a mere tool necessary for the teaching of techniques. We will observe its aesthetic consequences, its eminent theatre of various stances ? pedagogy is like a huge score, and we might just as well be its performers. The score consists of many a stock role, a special kind of music, and quite a few power struggles. We will be playing the score of students and teachers, of tyranny and docility, of rebellious students and experimental teaching ? With pedagogy forming one of our research topics, the theme of our Viennese debut has already become evident.
We will arrive to see and observe what conventional training looks like, then isolate ourselves and work alone, exclusively accompanied by the poverty of our shared knowledge. In Vienna we will plunge ourselves into an immense spectre of courses. Immense: how many students, how many teachers this time? 2800, 3000 students plus 65 or 80 teachers of the internationally renowned kind ? this is where we belong: within the heart of live pedagogy, within the heart of an international platform, within the heart of dance ? Our own project is humble by comparison:
13 or 14 students, accompanied by one teacher, the latter quite unexperienced. Yet I really like the idea of starting ?Bocal? by diving into a huge mass of bodies.
At this moment I am asking myself what Nicolas Couturier, one of the "Bocalists", might be thinking. I lied to him, quite shamelessly. He asked me whether ?Bocal? was a dance school, my answer was vague. Therefore he might believe that even if he never danced in all his life, never had any intention to become a dancer, he is not at risk, since this is not going to be a dance school anyway. Perhaps he was caught in a trap ? For a whole year he will leave his brilliant studies of the applied arts behind, in order to participate in ?Bocal? . Should you meet him in the halls, while he is running around and tearing his hair, please be kind to him. He did not know that dance can be so pitiless, neither did he ask. He wanted to know which kind of gear he will need for the courses ?
I like the idea that we are strangers within this settled community, alien to the well-organized dance courses which, by the way, constitute one of the most lively forms of dance education. Within this group of ?Bocalists? there are many who have no idea what a dance school is all about; they were either not admitted, or their home countries provided little opportunities, or they started too late, or they had no interest whatsoever.
Therefore we are not going to be the best of students. By the way, the selection of "students" did not take place via an audition. We have met and chosen one another in a chaotic, anarchistic, random way. The spirit of the project itself determined the selection. Therefore it was not even a selection of ?students?. I could have just as well invited anybody. Is it not pedagogy of the absolute kind, to work with ?anybody?, and to still achieve something that might be considered as important and interesting? Be careful: I did not say that I did actually invite "anybody". Yet the group arrangement might indeed be regarded as rather "alternative".
We will be officially squatting the courses of ImPulsTanz, and I am indeed very grateful to the festival management for actually having us. We will be discreet, scattered, almost invisible, yet we will enjoy this grand opportunity with all our hearts, an opportunity that allows us to take part in an enormous pedagogic event absorbing everybody in a hurricane of magical movement. Because it surely takes a little magic to make so many students move all at the same time. During this summer we will vanish among and behind the regular participants, but next year this adventure will be finalized in Vienna, by a public event dealing with the aesthetic consequences of teaching. I do not know what this event will eventually look like, but it is surely not going to be another end-of-season gala ?
Be that as it may, the public presentation of our achievements will certainly provide us with an opportunity to give back a little of what ImPulsTanz supplied us with in 2003.
See you soon
Boris Charmatz
Paris, June 2003
ImPulsTanz 2003. BOCAL is a nomadic and provisional school reflecting upon and questioning arts education. This experiment is developped in the context of Charmatz three year residency at Centre National de la Danse in Paris. It will bring together 15 students from different backgrounds from July 2003 to July 2004, when they will come back to ImPulsTanz to present "T.P." (travaux pratiques). In a letter to the festival Charmatz gives details on BOCAL.
Bocal, Bocal, Bocal,
Sorry - this text is a mere draft, but I spend much more time on selecting "Bocalists" than on preparing contents which qualify for being communicated to an audience. The outline is not all that clear yet, but I hope that the energy carrying the project is already perceptible.
I am not quite sure whether I should simply say something about the project and explain our reasons for being in Vienna, or whether I should introduce all the extraordinary people involved. I will do a mixture of both.
From the very first moment on I had known that yes, I would stick to this "pedagogic creation" for a whole year, and yes, Vienna was indeed the ideal location for it.
"Bocal" is based on the conviction that any contemporary school should not just limit itself to being a mere presenter of already existing knowledge, serving it on a silver plate to its students. On the contrary, the content of a lesson has to become manifest via the experience of teaching; our concept relies upon the hope that the school will develop out of itself, during a process of creating methods and techniques for practical work. What we want is to create our own pedagogy, and we hope that our creation will serve as a way of teaching. The course will thus be based on its own creation.
When I, as an artist, happen to get involved with teaching, one might expect that I will advance art by the means of performance, by introducing the imaginary world of artistic creation. This is not the case. I firmly believe in all artists? capacity and duty of teaching; their task is to consider school and pedagogy in the same way as they might have considered performance and art before, namely as an open space in need to be turned into an issue, to be criticized and, most of all, to be created or even recreated. As has been the case with those performances of recent years which stimulated interest: there, questioning the ideas of conventional performance became the very subject-matter of performance itself. Hence it is obvious that the idea/concept of the school, with all its problems and tensions, has to become the focal point of any project claiming to be based on research and pedagogic creation. We will start the project on basis of our methods and artistic credo, and we will try to find out what our ideas do to the school, and, at the same time, what the school does to our ideas.
Another goal of "Bocal" is to understand pedagogy as as a research topic in its own right, and not as a mere tool necessary for the teaching of techniques. We will observe its aesthetic consequences, its eminent theatre of various stances ? pedagogy is like a huge score, and we might just as well be its performers. The score consists of many a stock role, a special kind of music, and quite a few power struggles. We will be playing the score of students and teachers, of tyranny and docility, of rebellious students and experimental teaching ? With pedagogy forming one of our research topics, the theme of our Viennese debut has already become evident.
We will arrive to see and observe what conventional training looks like, then isolate ourselves and work alone, exclusively accompanied by the poverty of our shared knowledge. In Vienna we will plunge ourselves into an immense spectre of courses. Immense: how many students, how many teachers this time? 2800, 3000 students plus 65 or 80 teachers of the internationally renowned kind ? this is where we belong: within the heart of live pedagogy, within the heart of an international platform, within the heart of dance ? Our own project is humble by comparison:
13 or 14 students, accompanied by one teacher, the latter quite unexperienced. Yet I really like the idea of starting ?Bocal? by diving into a huge mass of bodies.
At this moment I am asking myself what Nicolas Couturier, one of the "Bocalists", might be thinking. I lied to him, quite shamelessly. He asked me whether ?Bocal? was a dance school, my answer was vague. Therefore he might believe that even if he never danced in all his life, never had any intention to become a dancer, he is not at risk, since this is not going to be a dance school anyway. Perhaps he was caught in a trap ? For a whole year he will leave his brilliant studies of the applied arts behind, in order to participate in ?Bocal? . Should you meet him in the halls, while he is running around and tearing his hair, please be kind to him. He did not know that dance can be so pitiless, neither did he ask. He wanted to know which kind of gear he will need for the courses ?
I like the idea that we are strangers within this settled community, alien to the well-organized dance courses which, by the way, constitute one of the most lively forms of dance education. Within this group of ?Bocalists? there are many who have no idea what a dance school is all about; they were either not admitted, or their home countries provided little opportunities, or they started too late, or they had no interest whatsoever.
Therefore we are not going to be the best of students. By the way, the selection of "students" did not take place via an audition. We have met and chosen one another in a chaotic, anarchistic, random way. The spirit of the project itself determined the selection. Therefore it was not even a selection of ?students?. I could have just as well invited anybody. Is it not pedagogy of the absolute kind, to work with ?anybody?, and to still achieve something that might be considered as important and interesting? Be careful: I did not say that I did actually invite "anybody". Yet the group arrangement might indeed be regarded as rather "alternative".
We will be officially squatting the courses of ImPulsTanz, and I am indeed very grateful to the festival management for actually having us. We will be discreet, scattered, almost invisible, yet we will enjoy this grand opportunity with all our hearts, an opportunity that allows us to take part in an enormous pedagogic event absorbing everybody in a hurricane of magical movement. Because it surely takes a little magic to make so many students move all at the same time. During this summer we will vanish among and behind the regular participants, but next year this adventure will be finalized in Vienna, by a public event dealing with the aesthetic consequences of teaching. I do not know what this event will eventually look like, but it is surely not going to be another end-of-season gala ?
Be that as it may, the public presentation of our achievements will certainly provide us with an opportunity to give back a little of what ImPulsTanz supplied us with in 2003.
See you soon
Boris Charmatz
Paris, June 2003