SLO | EN
SLO | EN

COTEACHING

Since: 2012

Pedagogues:
Dragana Alfirević, 
Gisela Müller, 
Rok Vevar, 
Gregor Kamnikar,
Dejan Srhoj 
pedagogues from CodArts school in Rotterdam
pedagogues at SVŠGUGL in Ljubljana. In the second half of 2011, members of the Balkan dance network Nomad Dance Academy met in Skopje (North Macedonia) to develop a pedagogical program within an EU project then called Jardin d’Europe, as part of a program segment titled Teaching the Teachers. The aim was to create a teaching format that would involve multiple teachers simultaneously in a studio setting and connect practical work with the history and theory of dance. We created a pedagogical dance format that we named Coteaching.

Over the following decade, we met on several occasions in the open format of Coteaching, which we practiced as a form of pedagogical improvisation. In the past five years, we realized that we had mastered this approach and that we wished to develop structured educational modules that would apply this non-hierarchical form of dance teaching – one in which multiple teachers can participate on equal terms together with the students, and whose conceptual design strongly resembles the organization of the creative studio of the German constructivist architectural and design school Bauhaus – to concrete historical, problem-based, and thematic aspects of dance creation.

In recent years, we have developed two modules. The first deals with selected aspects of the procedural work of the American dance collective Judson Dance Theater, which was active in New York between 1962 and 1964 and significantly transformed the production processes, discursive approaches, and artistic regime of contemporary dance. The second focuses on the body and space, concentrating on the intersections between dance and choreography on the one hand, and architecture, urbanism, and natural environments on the other. It takes into account the fundamental kinetic systems of various somatic practices and considers both artificial and natural spatial characteristics in relation to somatic, functional-anatomical, and kinetic properties of thought.

Over the years, a number of dance educators have been involved in Coteaching; in recent years, its core has consolidated around four members: Gisela Müller from Tanzfabrik Berlin, and Gregor Kamnikar, Dejan Srhoj, and Rok Vevar from Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia.