on beaver dams and the 7th IDOCDE symposium

Dear Member of the IDOCDE community!

 As the annual symposium approaches, the highlight of the IDOCDE year, I cannot help but wonder: will anything of the sense of purpose that veils the IDOCDE symposium, which is a one time event, ever veil the IDOCDE website, which is at our disposal all year round?

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On a recent trip to Earthdance, which some of you––especially Europeans––might know of from dance history books, I saw the beaver dam pictured above. The dam got me thinking about beavers in their effort to build dams; in their effort to redirect water flows so as to make homes, and collect food more easily. (This will not be how evolution works, but just for laughs: imagine the first beaver that built an underwater entrance to their den! The underwater entrance must have been the talk of the town to make all the other beavers decide to standardise the practice.)

My thoughts turned from the effort it takes to build and maintain a dam to the effort it took to build and takes to maintain IDOCDE. What if, I thought, IDOCDE could be thought as an equivalent of a beaver dam, which––I draw immediately––would make knowledge about dancing, pedagogy, and art-making equivalent to a stream or a river; i.e. it would equate said knowledge akin to natural and existing (!) phenomena. There is no dam, after all, without there being a stream or a river first.

Thinking further, I thought: what if IDOCDE’s purpose, as is the purpose of a dam, is to redirect the flow of knowledge, maybe to collect knowledge, maybe to draw the attention a specific segment of the ecosystem to the existence of this knowledge? Knowledge that would otherwise remain invisible in the natural flow of things? Maybe because knowledge, understood like so, serves its purpose so well. Maybe because it’s so highly functional, it doesn’t need to get recognised as something that can be articulated, as something that can be studied: learned and taught.***

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(I thought I was writing to understand what I am taking care of when taking care of IDOCDE. Now I think I am writing about the difference between talent and practice. I'll come back to this thought in the next Editorial.)

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As you might have seen, the full list of keynote speakers and practitioners who are to participate at the 7th IDOCDE symposium, has been released. (The list is available on the IDOCDE homepage.) We are soon to follow up with a closer look at the symposium’s content (link) and the particulars of this year’s programmation.

NOTE! The 7th IDOCDE symposium is a 25 hour long event. The question in focus at this year’s symposium is: can we treat the symposium in its entirety as a unit of somatic exploration? Giving and receiving information, dancing, sleeping, eating, resting, contemplating, listening, sharing, touching and being touched, breathing: together.

A detailed description of the symposium program is available under symposium: program & schedule. 

Stay tuned for updates, more information about the symposium will be released as the symposium approaches. If you're new to the symposium and have questions regarding, feel free to contact members of the IDOCDE community who have been to past symposia via this website or by placing a comment on the IDOCDE's Facebook page wall. Members of the community who have been to the past symposia will, I'm sure, know how to answer your questions best!

Till soon,
may your dance practices prosper
pavleheidler for Team IDOCDE

***note for future reference:
what if the western culture's failure to recognise value in embodied and non-verbal knowledge as globally relevant is the equivalent of the western culture's inability to recognise value in indigenous knowledge and ritual practice as globally relelvant?