teachback Vienna 2013

Upon invitation by Jennifer Lacey and Alice Chauchat, Valentina Desideri, Alix Eynaudi, Paula Caspao, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Keith Hennessy, Rasmus Ölme and Angela Schubot gathered from July 29 – August 4, 2013 at ImPulsTanz to start the follow up project of teaching the teachers, the first teachback edition. The proposed target of research was the following:
“What if your class was a whole school. What if the product of this school, the needs of the teachers and students were in complete accordance with your school. Such needs would be internal, they would be those of the persons engaged with the school, and let's take this fiction further by deciding the school is context free albeit an integral part of the rest of the world. We know this seems absurd. What we really mean is.... what if we looked at the implications of what is taught/shared without assumptions as to its application or the nature of its necessity?

What if we go at it like mystical archaeologists or subjective scientists. What if what we are doing is not "questioning" (because honestly this word, it needs to go) but observing and proving alternative schools, communities, bodies and institutions. What possibilities are we sub-consciously evoking with our practice? What if the forms we practice still hold mystery?

So we can reformulate like this : what are your needs within the school/ the class? Which needs do you presuppose your school/class addresses, even though you don't know what these might be? What is its influence?

Let's focus on teaching as an artistic practice and a form of research rather than the passing on of pre-existing knowledge. If we agreed that the major knowledge that is passed on is often more an attitude, a way of dealing with things than the things themselves, then the door opens for considering teaching/studying as performance, and to apprehend dance or performance as a behavioural skill (a way of behaving that we artificially artfully select, work on, develop).” [excerpt of the invitation by Jennifer Lacey and Alice Chauchat]. The setting for this research was the following: everyone should be at least six hours all six days in the studio. Considering their sharing resistance at forcing a product from this space of convivial inquiry, they agreed on writing poems as primary form of documentation. The poems were collected and published in the compilation “let’s poem back”.