The five of us (Kirsty Alexander, Charlotte Darbyshire, Henrietta Hale, Laura Glaser and Kathryn Crick) would like to introduce our personal experience and involvement in teaching various components of the Fundamental Skills Module, offered to first year students at Laban from 2000 to 2011. This module was specifically created by Gill Clarke and Kirsty Alexander to foster an investigative experience of movement at the outset of the students' full time education on the BA (HONS) Dance Theatre Programme.

This focused, supportive and inspiring start to their studies revealed the act of dancing itself to be creative and exploratory and engendered a curiosity that permeated how students approached both technical, repertory, improvisation and choreographic study on the rest of their programme.

We envisage our discussion/experiential presentation to be a live documentation of our individual experience, which aims to draw a collective reflection on the philosophy, politics and quality of content of this specific module. We will describe the background and context of the subjects taught, and invite participants to engage in  one or two ‘ways in’ that we used. We will outline some of our observed learning outcomes and more specifically, share some students' responses; verbal and written comments, journal entries and drawings. We will consider what made this approach to contemporary dance training in Higher Education distinct and fulfilling and share some of the challenges we met within the context of a mainstream institution.

Rather than a ‘lecture’, we hope to create a space that reflects the teaching environment that we are discussing. It will therefore be an open informal setting which values an embodied engagement and welcomes the sharing of other people's questions and experiences.

Between us, we hope to create a direct discrete live documentation of the particular time and setting of the Fundamental Skills Module taught at Trinity Laban for the past ten years. Perhaps more importantly, we will reflect upon the values and vision on which this module was designed and how as an educational approach it may support the student dancer in today’s climate. 

- AIMED AT WHO (AND HOW MANY PEOPLE MIN /MAX?)

 Whoever is interested is welcome. Minimum 5. Maximum 30

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-  TIME REQUEST                                             1.5 hrs                                                                                                                        

- TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS (audio, beamer etc):  

Audio system to play some voice recordings.

Projector to make some non-electronic writings and drawings visible to a larger group.

- SPACE NECESSITY (studio size etc):  small to medium sized STUDIO

 Thanks!!!