PSR Co-teaching

Coteaching is an experimental educational format during which between three and five teachers share the teaching process. Teachers can be dance pedagogues, practitioners, theoreticians, historians… They share the process by creating an overall score and tasks for each session/day and by taking initiative and taking over the facilitating roles they create space for new knowledge to appear. In this way the educational process is opening towards non-invasive learning field for all involved and where communicative fluidity is intensified. The new knowledge is produced rather than an old one reproduced. It is partly structured and partly open-scored format based on movement research, improvisation and theoretical knowledge. The main goal is to reorganize the knowledge on movement research and create new methodologies of teaching.

Coteaching session in Academia dell’ arte in Arezzo, Italy has been co-organized by the Academia staff and the teachers of NDA. The two-week educational programme was based on the proposal by the NDA. The sessions were organized into morning and afternoon sessions, of 8 hours daily in a beautiful villa in Arezzo, where all conditions were set for a group to get immersed in learning process. We have organized the work around somatic practices, technical floor work, voice work and reading/watching videos together and commenting. Teachers were Dragana Alfirevic, Gregor Kamnikar and Dejan Srhoj, with visiting teachers from ADA.

The final presentation was organized on the 14thday and was aimed at other students and teachers and the staff at the Villa, as well as wider audience from Arezzo. The presentation was created by the students and was comprised of teachers’ proposals and their own ideas and discoveries. 

After the two-week program we organized a 3-day meeting of teachers (Martin Sonderkamp, Martina Ruhsam, Gisela Mueller, Gregor Kamnikar, Dejan Srhoj and Dragana Alfirevic), where they exchanged the information of our studying programs, students, future plans and looked for the possibilities to collaborate and create exchange programs. All program directors/teachers have committed to creating links and opening up towards the programs of the others, with the aim of creating a new module “artistic practice as educational platform”.

Experience Report by anonymous participant:

Please reflect on your experience of the CoTeaching intensive with Dragana Alfirevic, Dejan Srhoj and Gregor Kamnikar and give any and all feedback:

+ loved it, wish we didn't do as much release work and moved more, Gregor is the best!

+ The CoTeaching intensive was very interesting. The teachers had a lot of information to share and interesting approaches for us to use. I do wish that one of the intensives was technique based and the other was improv. Four weeks and seven hour days of improv is a lot. I do think there should be an audition or interview process for the program.

+ I loved working with familiar concepts and ideas but through a different perspective.

+ The intensive was crucial to my dance technique. I appreciated everything Dragana, Dejan and Gregor had to offer to our class. They created an environment that to me felt supportive, welcoming and collaborative.

+ The beginning of these two weeks started off extremely slow. I had not prepared myself to dive so deep into the improvisation concepts. Especially after such a structured composition week with Wagner. As the weeks have gone on, I have noticed that my cohort and I really enjoyed when they have us space to choreograph based on the concepts and ideas that they offered to us. We all responded well to being giving a technique and then space to fully embody that technique into our own bodies. It is a little nerve wracking that our final presentation is an improv scorer for an entire hour but it is part of the experience. We mentioned to them before that we would like to know where the class is going and so they have been describing more what we are doing in class which has been great!

+ I had am amazing time exploring my own movement and interacting with other dancers to create new ideas and movements.

+ I had an amazing experience these past two weeks. I enjoyed getting to have three different perspectives from three different people and learning more about myself and others. We were told to find the joy in what we do and to open our gaze, and it helped me with my movement so much. 

+ I would love to see all three work together more rather than only having two at a time. It would be really affective to have coteaching first.

+ They are beautiful teachers from whom I have learned so much from them!

+ It was really interesting to have three teachers and see how their different perspectives on the same topic introduced different ways of thinking for each other. I enjoyed how the class started from one thing and ended completely different, including a different mental state. We spent a lot of time one each exercise so we could really immerse ourselves in each idea. I would have liked to see just a bit more structure within each class. The directions were sometimes unclear and the pace of the class was sometimes very slow.