Parameters of Professionalism for Contact Improvisation Trainers in the Mixed Abled Context

Issued by:

D_Trace DiversDance_TrainingResearchApplicationCompilationEducation

(Elisabeth Löffler, maRia Probst, Christian Apschner, Cornelia Scheuer, AT)

Introduction:

D_Trace is a research project that was initiated and facilitated by MAD – The association for the promotion of mixed-abled dance and performance. The goal of the project is, among other things, to examine and develop the necessary framework and optimal methods of high-level mixed-abled dance training based on contact improvisation, as well as, to make them available to trainers in order to support their work.

The success of contact improvisation dance classes in the field of danceAbility is influenced by a variety of factors, as previous D-Trace experience has shown. For the purpose of facilitating high quality trainings, in what follows, there is an orientation guide describing the parameters of professionalism for trainers.

The term professionalism, according to Google:

“A special skill (and a sophisticated radiance) owned solely by an expert”.

• Awareness and application of appropriate frameworks for dancers with physical constraints: accessibility (the free access to studios, sanitary facilities, changing rooms etc.) and time factor (more time needed for the arrival, the changing of clothes, necessary pauses and the time space for personal assistants)

• Fundamental knowledge of CI-basic principles and an extensive CI-dance experience acquired in courses and jams: with at least five and ideally ten years of dance practice

• Knowledge of contact improvisation (CI) as an art form and a form of social movement, and the awareness of CI’s position in different spheres (artistic, pedagogical, therapeutic, social)

• Basic knowledge of anatomy, physiology, pedagogy, training techniques and psychology

• Experience in bodywork/-therapy

• Ability to personally demonstrate the guiding steps of a training session and having enough personal training for the exercises given

• Empathy and the ability of anticipation, including its various facets: I am able to anticipate and estimate in which way you are able to feel/understand my instructions, and also how they affect you etc.

• Ability to translate in an understandable verbal form the movement and body processes, and vice versa

• Ability to perceive oneself from within and from the outside simultaneously

• Capability to motivate

• Ability to give appropriate feedback; appropriate in the sense of being supportive for further development

• Ability to pose questions (in a dialogue) i.e. the ability to formulate questions for the participants that are relevant for their own inquiry

• Reflection capability – verbal and nonverbal

• Knowledge of own strengths as well as weaknesses

• Ability to discern and estimate one’s own borders and to deal with them

• Ability to estimate other people’s borders, and to set borders if necessary