Valentina De Piante Niculae

                                                                 

Valentina De Piante Niculae


1. Report about T.T.T. 2013 Budapest

For 7 days I was an observer, a thinker, a listener, a mover, debating different topics and practices. I went through different roles. Each day was divided in interesting  subunits where freedom and creativity were inventing  improvisation structures. We started from analysing topics, then jumped into the body, reflecting, dancing and thinking, followed by drawing and moving or writing. Everyday unfolded in a different order, listening to the needs that arose at the moment. Like in nature, I felt the information inside like seeds and now I am waiting for the time when they will grow.

THE GROUP

We, as seven international teachers and seven native young teachers-performers met to focus about teaching as a place where knowledge and consciousness are tied together, helping each of us to grow in all directions. In this proccess of learning, the teacher is confused with his student and he learns what he actually needs to learn. But we also exchanged the roles, creating a practice where everybody is a student and asks questions, followed by the practice where everybody is a teacher and is proposing things he is searching and he doesn’t know yet. We asked a question: has the art fixed notions or it is free, with the posibility to invent something new? So we proposed questioning as a tool to learn better. In this process each member of the team was my teacher, harvesting together something unic and personal.

As a group we had to find ways to organize as a collective. During the process interesting time suspensions and lack of decision occured. But at the same time we  learned how to listen, how to wait for something, anything new to appear: a new option,thought, practice. And I like how our minds were flowing. Sometimes speaking loud our problems, wishes and needs, we could find out interesting things. Listening from the inside and outside at the same time, we became a differentiated unit, a group that organized simultaneously in different directions: for example we were giving two-three practices at the same time , or we were separating into smaller groups to discuss topics that interested us. After each discussion or practice we had time for reflection. Also, amazing practices came out from little problems of tuning between each others and in this confusing situation creativity could transform strange feelings in beautiful moments of sharing. So working with improvisational structures and not with the things we have already experimented, we have encountered the Unknown.

WHY I AM TEACHING

From the first day we needed to find the main topic, around which all the other subjects would have organized themselves, a topic that was actually a question: what is the role of art in our teaching?

We realized that art is a necessity, a need through which we can express ourselves. But art has so many functions like opening the world/the heart to what/who is different, like creating links between theories and practices, between worlds, cultures, between me and you. And art can also breake the borders between body and mind, between my cultural and personal history. In this context, a lot of different perspectives around the main topic were born spontaneously and from this starting point we weaved the web, like Penelope, knowing that the next day we would have challenged the practice, theory and reflexion, unraveling the web.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN , WHAT DID YOU EXPERIENCE

At the end of the week I started to see the whole picture: we need to make connections between every person and information and we need to find practices of this embodied knowledge. In this special context, teaching and learning became a place where also  feelings, failures coexist and where we could experience our doubts without fears.

I am grateful WSF for this experimental week of great research!

2. Pedagogical statement

I conceive de lesson like an open space and structure; we investigate the body from different perspectives, becoming each of us the subject, the object and the observer of what we experience.

I propose flexible themes, to be amplified by the dancers.  

We will access the body through patterns of movement that build up a more complex coordination. I like to search our ancient bodies that remind us our phylo-genetic heritage.

Every movement can be explored freely like kids do, with the different intentions of the body itself.

The starting point will be to do, to think and to feel the movement at once, combining thinking with doing and perceiving. We will separate intentions to reach the goal from the action, finding suggestions to look at the action from other points of view.

I conceive the lesson as a creative practice, where people enter the space searching and developing the original ideas. I prepare general themes and a basic structure of warming up: we go through different systems, becoming aware of the earliest connections formed in the body: we explore gravity and its opposite levity, we use the organs to increase mobility, and we search basic actions, like pushing, sliding, rolling, and spiralling.

In the early days I use to expand the material, and then I find the thread that links the moments, improvising with light and music, words if necessary.

 I am mostly interested to see the personal responses to the themes that activate a deep perception of the body and everyone’s creativity.

From the experiential anatomy and body connections each student  can create in the flow of breathing a multiplicity of events, a multiplicity of bodies depending on which system or part of the body became his centre.

I use to suggest two themes at once, to reproduce the compresence of levels in each of us.  

From a certain moment the lesson became a platform of sharing ideas, of proposing actions that enrich what is happening.

At the end the practice is performed as an organic study that activates a syncretic perception of the being.

From teaching contemporary dance to the students at the Faculty, to teaching the kids of different ages at the school I got the impulse to create pieces, to search, to find links between different disciplines.

 Right now I am in the second year of a doctorate in somatic education, proposing to actors and choreographers a complex knowledge to access the body.

My way of teaching is permanently questioned by the studies I am doing and the feedback I am receiving from people I am working with.

The practice of dancing for me is a possibility to experiment an individual and a collective creativity, a chance to produce ideas, to debate, to discuss and to translate views in personal body languages.