Courage

We had two chats yesterday.

In the morning we talked about the AOLs 

We talked a lot about how the AOLs are capturing your experiences. The experiences that you feel are learning (responsibility) at MA level. Because of this one persons AOL might be a completely different topic from another persons. In fact it is not the topic that makes it at MA level it is the depth of analysis, understanding sensitivity that you have of the topic that makes it MA.

Across the years I have heard people say they don’t understand (don’t want to bother with) all the theory (particularly introduced in Module Two).  We talked about this in the evening chat. But we are not working with theory as something different from practice. The reason your AOL is at MA level because of what you make it not because of the topic itself is because this whole course has a non-positivist approach. In other words there is not a secret cave of MA level AOLs that you can discover and mine. There is no existing AOL that is at MA level. It is what you do with the AOL that makes it.

I feel as people finish Module One they have this but Module One is not a closed event. Thinking about what you did and why- how things worked out for you is thinking about the theory that you meet in Module Two.

Sometimes we doubt ourselves even when we are in the middle of something but I feel that to some extent one has to be brave enough to not waste too much time on this.  We talked about this in the evening session also. Rilke writes so well about this in ‘Letters to a Young Poet.’

‘…I want to beg you, as much as I can dear sir, to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers , which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything.’ p. 35

They ‘cannot be given’ you is not that they cannot be given because someone has them and will not hand them over. They ‘cannot be given’ because you already have them – they are already in you.

‘…Think, dear sir, of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking what you will; whether it be remembering your own childhood or yearning toward your own future – only be attentive to that which rises up in you and set it above everything that you observe about you. What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love; you must somehow keep working at it and not lose too much time and too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people.’ p.46

It is a kind of love that allows you to both not spend too much time considering yourself and doubting but also not too much time assuming you have a full grasp of everything.

As always we are not static in one defined thing we are in movement. We are not the AOL we are how we do the AOL - Going back to the ‘theory’ the perspective here is one is not looking for certainty because that impossible task has no grounding in lived experience , which is about change.

‘…consider yourself and your feeling right every time with regard to every such argumentation , discussion or introduction; if you are wrong after all, the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and with time to other insights.’ p.29

The grace in this is when you consider your self ‘right’ do not consider yourself better. Just as you do not indulge in feeling less when someone does something that leads to a realisation and growth in you.  If we spend too much time on organising ourselves and others into being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ we are stealing the movement of growth from the situation and statically switching from this (right) to that (wrong) instead of finding the artistry of change.

The dance is in the inbetweeness.

What do you think?

Adesola

Feedback

I wrote this for my BAPP blog. What do you think?

All most Christmas: I wanted to say a quick word about feedback. Remember the idea behind having an advisor and not a ‘puppet master’(!). Is that it is your work. You are not writing to please us. I understand that sometimes the University culture can seem quite foreign and you appear to be asked to do things for no particular reason other than to say you did it, but do not let this mean you start to feel you are just ticking the box of the whim of the ‘teacher’. We are helping with two things:

Firstly, the form you present your ideas in – that is they are your ideas but we are helping with the conventions of academia.

Secondly, we are helping with teasing out more ideas or helping you develop your ideas further. But they are your ideas.

So how does this reflect when you ask for feedback?

When you ask for feedback – explain what you want feedback on, what you want your advisor to look at. Just sending your essay again, again until the advisor says it is ‘right’ is not what this is about. You are in discussion with your advisor with your work write a note explaining what the draft is attempting to do or explaining changes you have made.

For example:

“Dear Adesola, I have changed the order I introduce the different elements of the research inquiry. Can you tell me if you think it is easier to follow in terms of understanding what I did to collect data? “

It is important you feel ownership of your work and you don’t feel you are having to stab in the dark at what someone else wants from you.

Happy Holidays!!

Adesola

Remember, Remember 17th of November: Our Group SKYPE meeting

Hi
Don't forget our group SKYPE meeting is November 17th at 11am. (That is next Sunday.)
The meetings are a great way to talk through ideas with peers on the course in real time and also see links across the modules. The link made by people talking together from different modules are great because it helps to see themes that run across the course through the module and the teaching experience.
If I have your SKYPE already just be on-line ready. If I have not SKYPEd you before please send me a request, or an email with your SKYPE address so I can send a request to you!

Please comment to encourage others to join who have not done it before.
Say what you think...
Adesola

Order & Trust

This week seems to have rushed by.  

I have been thinking about order. There is a certain amount of trust that is required to follow the steps (tasks) in the modules. To some extent one needs to trust that they will add to your learning experience and not just be extra work or hoops or boxes to check. It is one thing to do them and another to open up – undo your thinking - enough for them to affect your plan or research or process.

This is the trust it takes to not look for the certainty of having ‘done that’ and allow instead for on-going development, on-going inquiry. This trust is not just some kind of courage to find within yourself it is also about how the ‘teachers’ / ‘advisors’ / writers-of-the-module present as trust worthy. I think learning is a two-way street the experience of learning is the situation of the material, space, teacher, student and those roles are interchangeable.

What do you think?

Adesola

Containers

I am trying to write something each week but time goes by so quickly and I sometimes feel I have not moved on from the last thoughts in the last blog post. So for this week I am going to share my notes from listening to a talk and watching some work on-line by Ralph Lemon.

The talk was loosely about two pieces

‘come on Charley Patton’ and ‘How can you stay in the house all day and not go anywhere?’

His process means that a work takes years to make.

He talked about a container: the puzzle that is the inquiry that holds to together a activity. You can’t solve it, it’s a thing you read about, think about explore but it is not to be solved. The container is what holds a dance; it is an opportunity.

I am thinking about the containers we are so used to we don’t notice them – the things we do because we just always do and the assumptions we no longer question. What Janet was saying on Hopal’s blog about considering yourself a certain way like seeing yourself as ‘good’ and how that container is so helpful in that it houses you safely but also so restricting in that it houses you safely. What Hopal was saying about time as a container. Thinking about paradigms such as positivism is about the kind of container you use to organise being xxxx but this is also about the container being the assumptions you are willing not to question. Things you will let slide. In terms of research the container is the framework the assumptions you are aligning yourself with the assumptions that will inform your questioning.

He spoke about self-exploration as ‘tourism of My Self’. He talked about the gap where you want to follow your own rules but can’t. I think this is the space artists are brave enough to face again and again. In dance we explore what we do once we have figured out how to balance by tilting ourselves off balance again.

It was amazing how in questions and answers people had talked about habits, impulse, inhabiting the body – all of this Dewey writes about and yet the world of dance and ontological theory very rarely meet and share ideas.

When asked how he manages to keep up the tiring task that all artists have of questioning yourself he mentioned the importance of coming to terms with your Self – being kind

“I am beholden to trying to be as kind to myself as possible”

My final notes to myself in terms of teaching technique are: I am teaching toward - being a good dancer is not about virtuosity it is about being true to yourself, your body and your intent, to the possibility of your practice. That is what I want my students to learn when I teach a technique class. To that end I try to set exercises that through up physical questions that can be answered with the integrity of technique – or that is what I am working on anyway.

So what are your containers as you look at your past experience, or plan an inquiry project or carry one out??

What do you think?

Adesola

Positivism

We have had some great conversations going on in Link-in. One strand explored positivism and non-positivism. But I found myself in an odd position. The idea of the conversations is that we are exchanging ideas with no value placed on who says it, just what is said. The whole point of the course is that we are all experts at least in our own lives. So when we talked about positivism and I felt we were limiting ourselves by the understanding of how large the idea is; I did not feel I could say any more in the conversation because I did not want to devalue what was being discussed or ‘pull rank’. But I also feel a responsibility to you as someone who advises on the course that you do not leave with ideas that I do not think are grounded in how most people understand a theory. So I decided my blog was the best place to talk about it.

Positivism is more than just a method, it is a methodology for understanding the world. It is understanding the world as pre-existing. That there is a truth that we are able to find regardless of what we do: it is there to be found. It is seeing objects are existing in their own right and that your see or note seeing of them, your experiences have no impact on what they are. They are fundamentally real. It sees us as having one reality of which we can be aware of or not but that does not change its existence. This is about the fundamental substance of the world, what it is made of and how it is in relation to us.

Non-positivism is also more than a method, it is a methodology for understanding the world. Here interaction has an impact on the substance of ‘things’. There can be more than one ‘truth’. In fact ‘truth’ does not represent the same thing, have the same meaning as it does in the above. Reality is not fixed. So theses two are about an ontological understanding of what reality is. They are more than about which research method to use. They are important in research not just to indicate appropriate tools but because as researchers we need to have a framework to describe the world we think we are in.

I often use dance metaphors or analogies because I think dance needs to have a voice beyond the studio mirrors but these things are not so often discussed in the context of dance. So the metaphors we use must be seen as that, window on to large ideas that are not limited by a particular subject. Also the dance examples are not comments on dance methodology – what dance is or should be etc… they are using the situation of dance to look at ideas. There are so many beautiful texts, and other work about this I really encourage you to take the ideas and explore rather than decide yet exactly what they mean in the detail of your own day-to-day teaching activity. I really hope my ambition to move away from the usual language to discuss these, into a language that references dance does not confuse or over simplify the beauty of these ideas.

I wonder if I come across ??

Adesola

As we kiss British Summer time goodbye!!!

This is my Thursday / Friday blog a bit late this week! I attended the Re:Generations Conference at the Place and it was really interesting. But first a quick reminder as we wave good bye to half term – Module Ones should have a list of potential RoL areas to be working on, and have chosen one to start writing that can act as a kind of vehicle for learning the writing process for the rest. Module Twos should have an area / interest / questions that they see and the general direction they are going to be taking for their project inquiry and start to be looking at ethical positions within this area as well as models for research and how they resonate with this field of interest – in other words starting to create a philosophical framework from which to hang their research.

The Re:Generations conference late week was much more inspiring than I had anticipated, largely because I heard speak and met a number of artists that were pioneering a technique (these were neo-classical African Dance and Afro- contemporary particularly the key Notes Germaine Acogny & Dr. Kariamu Welsh-Asante). Although they had had different journeys to reach the techniques they were teaching, I was really impressed by the fact they insisted on more than just a physical approach to movement; they had expectations of how students should engage with the movement work and themselves. They saw this as respect for the legacy of the movement as well as the students own respect for self development.  There was also something about the nurturing of the relationship between ‘Master’ and student.

I had met a teacher over the summer who taught Graham and similarly insisted on a kind of rhetoric throughout the class that went beyond just setting and doing the movement. I am beginning to think more and more about how I present my teaching not just the content of the exercise. Recently I have felt there is never enough time to really ‘get through’ to students since the habits of the body out way the 1.5 hours a week I might see someone. But I am starting to think that in building a really, really strong culture (attitude to doing the movement) within the class, one can impress on the student at a deeper level. Having experienced a strict ballet culture and the freedom of community based contemporary dance as a child I have avoided the hieratical structure that ballet imposes on the member of a dance class but I think I may have been too sweeping in my rejection of the rhetoric of a student / teacher relationship. 

How’s it going? What do you think?

Adesola