user avatarDefne Erdur Eligible Member // Teacher
user avatarDaniela Schwartz // Teacher
user avatarDilek Üstünalan // Teacher
user avatarBarbara Stahlberger // Teacher
IDOCs » CONTACT FESTIVAL FREIBURG & IDOCDE.net Collaboration 2018
This document is the copy of the information letter that has been shared with the CI teachers attending the Contact Festival Freiburg - Teachers Meeting. It is here to contextualize the documentation work facilitated by Defne Erdur and Dilek Üstünalan during this meeting. It explains the aim and direction of the DOCUMENTATION PROJECT - A NEW COLLABORATION BETWEEN CONTACT FESTIVAL FREIBURG (CFF) & IDOCDE.net. There are also notes from the preparation period taken by Defne Erdur, shared here for shedding light to the planning process, line of thinking and what actually could happen (in italic notes).
2019.05.10

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LETTER TO THE CFF TEACHERS :

Dear Teachers,

Every year Contact Festival Freiburg invites one former teacher to help collect the Lab notes and reflections produced during the Teachers Meeting. These people take notes themselves and are responsible for collecting visual, written or audio material from other teachers and the different labs. It is a very difficult task to carry alone. And every year these documents compile into a booklet thanks to the Festival team editorial efforts. And we are all able to access past years’ documents at the Festival Library.

However at the 2016 and 2017 Teachers meetings, Defne Erdur and Eszter Gal introduced an online platform that they have co-founded with Kerstin Kussmaul and collaborating with many other contemporary dance teachers.

IDOCDE.net is a community-run website that acts as a database enabling the publishing and sharing of documentation concerning dance and dance teaching. It seeks to establish a knowledge base, a living archive, and encourages collaboration and dialogue for fostering of both individual practice and the dance work field. It supports creative approaches to reflective documentation. With its sister digital publication MINDTHEDANCE.com (covering a wide range of approaches from writing, drawing, notating, video art to creating scores and templates), IDOCDE.net aims to guide the teachers towards development of a personal and sustainable documentation practice. (A printed copy of Mind The Dance can be found in the Festival Library).

During the presentation of IDOCDE.net in Freiburg, there was a discussion about the documents of Contact Festival Freiburg Teachers Meeting (CFFTM), and the issue of sharing these documents with other teachers in our work field, outside of the festival, came up. All the teachers were interested and supportive of the idea. Defne and Eszter, mentioned that idocde.net can be used as a platform to share the CFFTM documents and these files could be compiled in a folder on IDOCDE.net and access could be just open to invited teachers, or open to general public depending on the decision of the documentors and Festival Organizers. 

This year Dani, Barbara and Defne are willing to give it a try, considering the points that were shared during the IDOCDE presentation meeting. On the value and potential of Contact Festival Freiburg Teachers Meeting Documentation the following important points were shared by the teachers of 2017 CFFTM: 

- Subjective documents, besides edited/academic ones, are as relevant — functioning as some kind of a living archive of today, informing the future.

 Articulating in different means and ways allows different perspectives to emerge and co-exist. Words do have limit(ation)s and they do limit the way of thinking and proceeding.

- Poetic and artistic approaches in documentation (images, metaphors, excerpts,..) have their place and value as reflective traces.

- A reflective practice has the potential to help the facilitator, the participant, and the observer, documenting the work, to have another level of relation to their experience.

- The different layers of a work - format, content, approach, intention, etc - can be reflected upon and elaborated through documentation. It is important to be open to sharing at any level.

- The documentor needs to have a clear personal intention in documenting.

- Out of reflections some scores can be created to trigger, propose further experience.

Given the big interest to develop an integrated documentation practice to the inquiries, teachings, discussions we carry in and around our work field, having heard the desire of the CFF teachers to develop the practice together, and given the wish to open the CFF Teachers Meeting Inquiries out to the wider dance teachers community, this year we are inviting you to start the collective work during our 2018 Teachers Meeting.  

Defne, with the help of Dilek, will be facilitating this journey. As the program of the meeting gets clear, they will be suggesting some scores, asking some questions, directing our attention to certain aspects of the ongoing sessions, in order for all of us to actively engage in the reflecting/harvesting/documenting the inquires we share this week. They will propose their ideas at the beginning of the meeting. Than the process will in-form us all… 

Before we hear Defne and Dilek’s suggestions, below are some questions[1] to start "warming up" into documentation... 

Looking forward to researching and reflecting on our teaching/practice and sharing the outcomes with our colleagues out there…

Here we go!

PRIMING QUESTIONS SHARED WITH THE CFF TEACHERS :  

Questions to think before, during and after documentation process:

1- Who are you? Teacher, participant, outside observer...

2- What do you wish to share? Is your sharing theoretical, reflexive (discussion), personal record, public record, poetic, visual, literary, practical, experimental?

3- Whom do you wish to address? Who is your potential audience for this sharing?

e.g Yourself, students (which ones), teachers or performers (which ones), everyone?

4- What tools do you have for documenting / sharing?

5- What could be your obstacles along the way?

6- What are your resources to overcome these obstacles? 

7- Where would you like to realize this sharing / publicize your document?

8- How would you like your document to be utilized?

e.g. can others use it? do they need to cite you? do you need to cite others? can it be modified? 

 

FREIBURG TEACHERS MEETING DOCUMENTATION PROJECT FACILITATION NOTES :

Breakfast meeting - Dani, Bryce, Mary, Joe, Dilek, Defne : going over the ideas and propositions of Defne and Dilek. Brainstorming for further sharing of the "documents" to be created.

- Proposition follow up : 

With all the documentation we have gathered on site, we will create place holder idocs (templates) with what we have and invite the people who were part of each lab into being co-editor of that idoc. Gather all the idocs in a FREIBURG FOLDER. (Due to internet availability and the business of the involved teachers this had to be done only by Dilek and Defne and the idea of creating notes on site did not work).

- Proposition onsite of lab : 

Having a Lab Documentation Template for gathering the core of the lab. To be filled by facilitator and documenters right after the lab for about 20 mins. (For some of the labs this template was collected, for some it was too formal for the format of the gathering, we left it to the decision of the teachers).

LAB DOCUMENTATION TEMPLATE : 

Title of the LAB

Inquiry of the LAB (Questions, Propositions)

Participants

Documentor

Flow (scores, exercises, discussions…)

Reflections (discussions,writing, drawings…)

 

- Facilitation During Teachers Meeting : 

To what extend do we / can we lead people to document? Asking questions at the end? Filling out template together with documentor volunteers? Interview with facilitator.

- Questions / Template for Documentation can be given/faciliated by Defne, Dilek, Joe. 

- 2 people from each group helping, supporting documentation facilitators. (Some facilitators took the initiative to really make a comprehensive documentation i.e. Malaika Sacro-Thomas's documents, mostly the documents were gathered, created, transcribed by Dilek and Defne.)

SUGGESTED COLLECTIVE DOCUMENTATION SCORES DURING LABS : 

collective snapshots - visual perspective. co-authors can add few lines under the shared photos. 

collective note/image taking - Paper on the Walls/Floor - witnessing role as a documentor all along the labs.

note taking of the flow, tasks

video/sound recordings


SUGGESTED COLLECTIVE DOCUMENTATION SCORES FOR CLOSING THE LABS
 :  

Spiral Method (Each participant talks 2 mins, others take notes on a common paper in the center, 5-10 mins open round of discussion and comments with/out sound recordings)

Casopia SCORE for documentors - what was this lab about… with/out sound recordings)

Embodiment SCORE moving what is the remains of the encounters realized during the lab... with/out video recordings)  

SUGGESTED POST DOCUMENTATION : 

Lab Facilitator Harvesting Interviews :  (Due to lack of time these interviews were not realized)

What was the lab about? How did go? 

What are the outcomes of this Lab? What are the answers and new questions that arise now?

- After Teachers Meeting:

Invitation of all the teachers to idocde.net (during the teachers meeting) (Due to internet availability this was not possible during the meeting. In fall period the teachers were invited by Defne to the platform.)

Creation of Freiburg Teachers Meeting Folder full of idocs on idocde.net - co-editing (for clarification until end of September) 

Editing and finalizing idocs / folders - end of October? or a month duration later in the year. (December was aimed and the process was finalized by the end of January.)

Personal Teachers Online reflection and elaboration. Any time on idocde.net : commenting and linking recomended for community interaction. (still an open option)

PDF Booklet ? To be decided by CFF Organization Team

 

 
 


[1] These questions are a collage compiled from two documents on idocde.net. http://www.idocde.net/idocs/1059 and http://www.idocde.net/idocs/398

 

This document is created based on the consent of all the participating teachers during the contactfestival freiburg Teachers Meeting 2018. 

If for some reason you (as one of the participants of this meeting) changed your mind and wish some or all parts of this document not to be published, please contact defne.erdur@idocde.net.

 

 


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