At beginning of this year we spied on our German neighbours, as their Federal Cultural Foundation declared a euphoric plan, which gained great reponse from the press. No wonder, as it concered nothing less than the Tanzplan Deutschland, which is part of a project intended to provide support and funding for dance projects until 2010. That is the plan. The Dance Plan.

For this an educational project in terms of a comprehensive academy for contemporary dance and choreography has been etsablished in Berlin (Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum für Tanz in Berlin). This model experiment aims not only to create new ways of working, so that students will be better prepared for their practical carreers, it also offers first study courses at Bachelor's and Master's Level, beyond „restricting and unidimensional compulsory eductaion“, so they say.

We really go in for the idea of an informal dance education. However it remains to be seen, whether this academy for contemporary dance really opens its doors for tout Berlin‘s dance scene and does not emerge as a comers hatchery for established companies and producers. Which wouldn‘t be really satisfying. Being against such a form of dance education the wellknown choreographer Boris Charmatz founded two years ago the project BOCAL.

Funded by ImPulsTanz and CND, Boris Charmatz‘s education project BOCAL was the antipode of a conventional and conservative tuition at classic dancing schools. At BOCAL the independent self-conception of artistic dance should merge with practical experience of contemporary art and discursive learning. With BOCAL Charmatz didn‘t only want to bear good dancers, he als wanted to afford mature and crucial artists. Thus an alternative teachware, which focussed rather on creativity and mental freedom than on technic and virtuosity. (Find more details here: Boris Charmatz in dialogue with Jeroen Peeters on Bocal)

These attributes take also the centre of Jan Ritsema‘s new project PAF (PerformingArtsForum), which the Dutch director and performer founded in December 2005 together with the dramatic adviser Bojana Cvejiic. Thereto Ritsema purchased a former convent in Reims, France, and settled a place for professional and not-yet professional practitioners and activists in the field of performing arts, visual art, new media and internet, theory and cultural production, who seek to research and determine their own conditions of work. PAF is for people who can motorize their own artistic production and knowledge production not only responding to the opportunities given by the institutional market. Initiated and run by artists, theoreticians and practitioners themselves, PAF is a user-created, user-innovative type of institution. Not a production-house, neither a venue nor a research-center, it is a platform for everyone who wants to expand the possibilities and interests in his/her own working practice.

Well, things are moving again in matters of contemporary dance education. We like that.

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