By Trine Sønderholm Larsen
It started with frustration. One day my colleague, Jonathan, and I were sharing our teaching disappointments over a cup of coffee. The disappointment of a teacher feeling a burning enthusiasm for something you know your students need and to find it doesn’t really turn them on.
My colleague had made a presentation about Sustainable Development Goals, which had been received by the students with blank looks and zero engagement. As part of my teaching of movement, I had just presented a solo course in which the students were to brainstorm and develop themes. As usual, they had served up their own love stories. It was clear to me that they wouldn’t budge one centimetre beyond themselves but would just reproduce all the clichéd themes and movements that already exist in gymnastics. And that I really wanted to move away from. As the conclusion to the semester, the solo project was aiming to home in on the movements they had in their bodies, and preferably through themes that had a little more to offer than their own love lives.
As the conclusion to the semester, the solo project was aiming to home in on the movements they had in their bodies, and preferably through themes that had a little more to offer than their own love lives.
Trine Sønderholm Larsen
Jonathan and I discovered fairly quickly that we ought to try to combine what the students love doing – using and moving their bodies – with what they initially do not respond very positively to, the Sustainable Development Goals as a theoretical framework.
Under the influence of the neuroscientist Kjeld Fredens, Jonathan and I have a common point of departure, a standpoint we both believe in and which we can use as a basis for our teaching. As humans, we have many individual feelings but, according to Fredens, we also have a range of emotions in common – joy, surprise, fear, anger, sadness and disgust. At our folk high school, we work on the basis that mind and body, reason and emotion are linked and that it is through the body that we can and must create sensation, experience and new perception as regards the lives we live. When a student wordlessly moves with another student, a relation is generated, and from that relation arise feelings that are both individual and shared. Feelings and thinking have their origins in the body’s encounter with the world around it, with the other and others. It is hard to put a distance between yourself and something you have sensed and moved yourself close to, and where you have momentarily experienced a connection through your feelings.
Planning
There wasn’t much time. We had two weeks in which to make our new idea and our collaboration work. Frustration coffees turned into inspiration coffees. Our main question was this: How could we get an Ollerup student who was faintly self-obsessed, self-optimising and self-documenting to feel connected to the world through the Sustainability Goals?
The theoretical presentation was to be repeated, but this time with a very important pedagogical ‘carrot’ waved in front of the students. “At the close of this course you all have to dance a Sustainability Goal for the others.”
How could we get an Ollerup student who was faintly self-obsessed, self-optimising and self-documenting to feel connected to the world through the Sustainability Goals?
Trine Sønderholm Larsen
Learning space as a liberation
Jonathan had spiced his presentation up with greater involvement from the students, in the form of movement, debates and creativity. The students were asked, for example, to look inside and find the natural movements we have in our bodies, the movements we all have in common across cultures, in order to point up the way we all belong to each other. In pairs, they had to explore in depth and present one Sustainability Goal, gathering information themselves and ensuring they covered all facets of their individual goal. Then in groups they were to ‘rank’ the Sustainability Goals.
From me, they were given theoretical insight into the technicalities of choreography as regards construction, grip, processes and so on. After that, I danced my name “T-r-i-n-e” for them without them knowing what the movement we were dancing was composed of. They thought it was a new sequence they had to learn and thought it was great fun when I revealed that we had in fact been dancing my name. I was in their bodies. In physical terms, I formed each individual letter in my body, using that to arrive at completely new movements, a little ‘Trine dance’ formed out the movements that I have and can contribute. We took up some of the words of the Sustainability Goals and concepts, such as ‘Hunger’. In groups, they spelt out ‘H-u-n-g-e-r’ with their bodies and found themselves performing movements they had never tried before or which had never even been created before.
We managed to create a free learning space where both the students and we teachers could experiment and work, in symbolic form, on experiences gained from the encounter between the inner world with the outer world. The free learning space felt like a forum for negotiation, in which interaction and interplay between the students could be developed – as a kind of aesthetic and phenomenological playground, where individual students could simultaneously process, react and let off steam, while acquiring an understanding of themselves in the world. Their bodies, movements and aesthetic expression, then, were transformed into an arena for the development of new experience and new knowledge. Most important, things that had felt distant were brought close! When you are a student at a folk high school, you rarely feel hunger. By spelling out ‘hunger’ and by feeling the sensations and stories of hunger in their bodies, ‘hunger’ suddenly became an experience and something very tangible for each of them!
To be a movement
After our presentation, we spread all the Sustainability Goals, printed out on paper, around the large movement space. Each individual student now had to use the knowledge we had generated together to choose one Sustainable Goal – that is, the one goal each felt in its entirety would be a good place to start if the world were to become a better place. We put on some atmospheric music, turned down the lighting and told them that the exercise was non-verbal.
After a while, each of them chose their Sustainability Goal and sat on the floor next to it. We had placed paper and pens next to each Sustainability Goal, so they were ready for the next phase – to write down their spontaneous thoughts, feelings, perceptions and experiences about their choice. A kind of brainstorm in the space of that moment.
The next thing was to start the process of getting their thoughts down into their bodies. To ‘bodystorm’ around their choice. To dive even further down into the material, the narrative, the form and function – to find music, for example. In other words, to get all their theoretical knowledge to manifest itself in their bodies. Here, we had to break up the structure of our timetable, as a lot of evenings, breaks and weekends were involved. Working with processes takes time, and creativity isn’t turned on like a tap. That week saw the best possible frustration, tears and fabulous moments. As a teacher, I got to truly doubt the potential of the assignment while at the same time experiencing drop by drop euphoric highs at the students’ immersion and learning.
A typical Ollerup student loves to give the ‘right’ answer. It may be part of the apprenticeship tradition of gymnastics to have a clear leader standing in front of the group and showing the ‘right’ way to perform a movement. The exercise with the Sustainability Goals was more about asking questions than providing answers. It was about we as teachers supporting the students in their process, but they themselves were to experience how answers came through working with their bodies in and with the Sustainability Goals.
If you are a movement, you will as a person feel yourself linked to the story the movement is telling, and you therefore feel a form of kinship with the people the story is about and the story attached to it.
Trine Sønderholm Larsen
There is, though, a difference between making a movement in dance and being a movement in dance. If you make a movement, then it is not deeply grounded in moods and feelings. If you make a movement, you really only imitate the form that someone else has dreamt up. The student can distance themselves from the movement, and what I as a teacher want to do is quite the opposite. If you are a movement, you will as a person feel yourself linked to the story the movement is telling, and you therefore feel a form of kinship with the people the story is about and the story attached to it. As teachers, we have to make sure we let our students feel and so experience things through their feelings. In other words, to make them aware of the link between sensing, perception and cognition.
To move in the world of dance and gymnastics is for the most part about being able to give expression to the story, the feeling and mood linking me as the mover to the movements.
Much of my role in the working process is about asking the questions that allowed the students to discover themselves and ‘the other’ in the material. When do you do the movement, when are you the movement, when do you reproduce something that is already there but which does not necessarily have to do with the Sustainability Goals themselves? In the process you kill as many darlings as in any other form of assignment, and we, as teachers, alternate between being a good support and being the most irritating person the universe ever created!
A couple of students wanted to experience hunger physically themselves. How do you move when you are really hungry? What is the sensation in my body when I am hungry? So they fasted for 48 hours. In addition, they wanted to watch documentaries about refugees experiencing hunger and the uncertainty that often goes with it. A couple of other students chose gender equality as their theme and started exploring how the school was run. This led to fascinating discussions.
The moment of magic
The moods that inform the learning space can be crucial for determining whether students dare expose themselves to others. The day before the performance we set up a pair of spotlights on the floor to give good lighting from the sides, to establish a space for movement and to mark out a spectator space. The balance between ‘showtime’ and presentation is wafer thin, and it was important for us that the space did not come to resemble too much a performance space, while at the same time we wanted to take the process and their work over the past fortnight seriously.
When the students had performed their Sustainability Goal solo, they had to be prepared to receive acknowledgement, comments and questions – that is, they had to enter into a dialogue with spectators, to justify what they had just done, to explore it in greater depth or simply to accept praise and criticism.
After the first five solos, it was totally clear to me that the movements could not do without the Sustainability Goals. But it also became clear that the Sustainability Goals had ben qualified by the movements. The Sustainability Goals and the movements had qualified each other in mutual dependency – and to this day these were some of the finest, most moving and revealing solos I have seen students create. They extended far beyond their own love lives and beyond the clichés of gymnastics. The students were their Sustainability Goals.