Call for Proposals

4th IDOCDE Symposium on Contemporary Dance Education

July 29 - 31, 2016 at ImPulsTanz – Vienna International Dance Festival

The Importance of Being [Un]Necessary

Tapping into the body’s potential for relationship, subversion and emergence.

What parts of your dance practice are relevant in the context of today?

Many activities of those who practice dancing, dance making and dance teaching, have shown an immense potential for encouraging different types of personal, creative and relational developments. Particularly autonomous, subversive, intelligent and compassionate strategies for approaching the challenges set forth by living in a global contemporary society.

What if we regard the attention that we, as dance practitioners, give to the subtle, detailed, discrete and relational, as politically relevant? How does this focus influence the attention invested into dance practice, specifically teaching, and what are the forms we choose for this?

“The Importance of Being [Un]Necessary” discusses what other aspects of our daily repertory we can recognize as valuable and relevant: What kind of knowledge do we practice and attend to? Where and when is knowledge stable or rather ephemeral? And how to make use of our documenting and communicating abilities to enhance this investigation and its potential?

Parallel to questions pointed „inwards“, we also want to look at the mechanics of dance practice in relation to our realities and environment. These include market economy, survival, achievement, perspective, values and politics - influencing the choices we make. Are you, for example, arguing your art / teaching “for art’s sake” or is there a purpose in your work that reaches outside dance? How do you deal with the increasing need to justify contemporary dance and its education by other (outside) standards?

“The Importance of Being [Un]Necessary” is about coming together and making visible, as a common base, what is already there; it provokes to recognize what we agree on and share as much as to what is excluded and where we differ from each other.

It is an invitation to study, reflect, and discuss together the development of strategies - all for better attending, pursuing and communicating.

It is about valorizing the sensible, sensitive, fragile and soft - the ephemeral - in a world which is predominantly concerned with something else.

IDOCDE invites contemporary dance practitioners, dance and movement educators, researchers, theoreticians and other practitioners contributing to this field

to submit proposals for the 4th IDOCDE Symposium!

All practical or theoretical proposals centered on aspects of teaching, researching or practicing dance, in relation to the proposed theme, are being considered.

Formats might range from teaching a class and sharing reflections, hosting a lecture demonstration, talk or discussion, to more uncommon or experimental formats, or anything in between.

Propositions of a length up to 2 hours (ideally 90 minutes, longer propositions will be considered whenever possible), individual and team proposals from teachers all over the world and the IDOCDE community are warmly welcome.

Proposals for “The Importance of Being [Un]Necessary” may include (but are not limited to these):

§ Examples of subversion (on any level, in any kind of interpretation of the word “subversion”) in teaching and other dance practices
§ Proposals regarding learning / teaching environments and how to situate the people involved there (roles of teaching and learning)
§ How outside frames like teaching schedules, preset formats determine the experience - proposals on how to think outside these boxes (i.e. are classes for professionals meeting the needs of the field?)
§ The practice of attention: how or where to place attention before / while / after the teaching or your dance practice
§ Proposals on the interaction of social and political realities of daily life with the content and form of your practice
§ The expectations / goals in your dance practice or in your teaching and how they interact with your colleagues’ / students’ interest
§ Proposals addressing the economical and political necessities of dance studios / dance providers and their effect on contemporary dance
§ Visionary thinking, i.e. how to think outside market structures, what dance will propose in the future to contemporary societies, looking at how examples in the past were able to achieve this

All lecturers have free access to all symposium events and will receive high quality documentation from their contribution.

For further questions on the symposium, please contact Olivia Schellander

For technical issues/ idocde website, please contact defne.erdur@idocde.net

More info on work exchange options in and around idocde & the symposium and on registration will come soon.

We are very much looking forward to your ideas!

Your symposium and REFLEX project team:

Defne Erdur, Eszter Gál, Pavle Heidler, Kerstin Kussmaul, Olivia Schellander, Martin Streit

The IDOCDE symposium is part of the EU program REFLEX EUROPE.

REFLEX researches and uses documentation as a tool for reflection in order to improve the teaching and to increase the impact on the learners in contemporary dance.