All At Once (2018-2019)
Created and performed by Coila-Leah Enderstein, Kristina Johnstone, Thalia Laric, Manuela Tessi
2 October 2018, Johannesburg: Downstairs Theatre, Wits University
13 December 2018, Amsterdam: Music and Dance Performance Series, Overtoom 301
13-14 March 2019, Cape Town: MusicDance021, Theatre Arts Admin Collective
Video courtesy of Music Dance Performance Festival, Amsterdam (December, 2018)
Self-interview: Notes on training and practice
The last couple of days I’ve been thinking about the difference between training and practice. I read an interesting piece of writing about it.
Tell me about the difference.
Chrysa Parkinson (2009) makes a useful distinction between training and practice. Training, she says, is about learning and improving on specifics tasks. Practice, on the other hand she explains, is what Deborah Hay calls ‘learning without trying’. Training can be about learning and incorporating new movement patterns, or working on stamina or strength, or physical alignment to prevent injury. Practice makes use of training, but can be described as an individual process that involves doing the work of art. Practice involves figuring stuff out in the body, in relation to other bodies, in relation to space or time or sound or materials. For a dancer, practice can be a movement research practice or a performance practice.
Do you need both training and practice?
I think so. If I don’t train, I become bored with my practice. I can get stuck in my habitual patterns without even realising it. But, I don’t think training is necessarily always a typical dance class. At the moment there are very few dance classes around that I would be interested in taking. My practice can only grow if I stay interested in what I am doing.
What made you think about training versus practice?
I started thinking about this, not because of my frustration with taking class but because of my frustration with teaching dance classes. I had been teaching first year students contemporary dance in a university setting. My frustration set in because I felt like both the university and the students thought of contemporary dance training as an end goal in itself: I go to university so that I can be trained to dance. I’ll be able to dance contemporary dance, or ballet or African dance, or whatever style of dance I have been trained in. The goal of the class is to get me to jump, turn, roll, balance, perform a routine. When I have mastered that I will be a dancer. That attitude towards training as an end goal frustrated me. Jump in order to jump higher, balance in order to balance longer, repeat a routine in order to do the routine faster.
Is it not important to learn to jump, turn, roll, balance or perform a routine?
Yes, it is. In so far as it builds strength, mobility and connectivity in the body so that the body knows to move without injuring itself. But, for me the goal of training is not to emulate a style of dance. Training should provide the building blocks[1], or whatever you want to call them, to develop a practice. Training should be based on a methodology that instils a mode of questioning. The basis for a good class is: how does movement work? What are the physics of this movement pattern? How does gravity effect what I am trying to do, bearing in mind that we are currently confined to planet earth? How does this work in proximity to others? How does this work with a human anatomy, and within the boundaries of my personal anatomical variations? A mode of questioning makes movement research possible. And it makes new things possible.
[1] Now I would call this embodied technique.
Manuela’s notes on training and practice
First, I recognise a lot of similarities in the way I feel about this subject and also a similar feeling towards the training in the institutions, as well as training outside in the professional field: there are also only a few professional dance training classes I would attend, and I am really focusing on building a class structure that revolves around the questions: how does the body in motion function? What is the action that sets the body in motion?
I feel there is even a further distinction in the practice.
Practice can be divided even further as in movement research (very related to training) and performance practice (how to compose in relation to other media for example, choreographic practice, what we do in the improvisation sessions for example).
I believe the building of practice is almost impossible without training, and training does not make sense in itself if not applied to a practice. I recognise the ‘training as an end goal in itself’ and the disconnection from a practice in dance institutions and the field in general.
I’ve got a sense that many dancers out of dance institutions do not know how to build a practice for themselves. I have noticed a weakness in the way dancers are educated in comparison to artists from other performing disciplines (actors and musicians) that can work independently and reflect upon their choices. Most dancers are educated to be versatile tools in the hand of choreographers but have little sense of themselves as movement artists. In a way I see where the training and the practice are kept separate in the dance education programmes, seen one as “technique” and the other as “creativity”.
Manuela’s notes on training and practice cont.
I’ve noticed two tendencies in today’s professional training (that I notice in Europe, in Amsterdam and Berlin in particular). On one hand I see a tendency towards athleticism (higher, faster, tougher, more spectacular, incorporation of martial arts and acrobatics in dance styles) in training and less attention to use of body, alignment, and movement qualities compared to for example, twenty years ago when I started training in contemporary dance. On the other hand, some training classes are shifting towards movement research-like practices and movement invention (often called improvisation). Gaga classes are very popular at the moment, for example. Dancers keep moving all the time and do not have to memorise pathways.
I believe in the memorisation of movement pathways as a way to rewire the connections in the brain and expand movement possibilities, training strength and stamina, balance, all the stuff we need. Many contemporary dance trainings are dismantling the use of combinations, more and more dancers find difficult or resist memorising combinations and I found myself questioning a lot of my own combinations when teaching. I think that the problem is that often the combinations are a choreographic whim of the teacher rather than a way to integrate the principles around which each class is built. That leads to the question, how to create intelligent dance sequences that are functional to the training but are still dance and not exercise?