‘MIND THE DANCE – Reflective Documentation as a Movement Potential.‘

Defne Erdur and John Taylor
International Documentation of Contemporary Dance Education

Our proposal for DocPerform is based on our collective experience in and around IDOCDE.net, which is a community-driven, practice-led, digital meeting space for any practitioner working in and thinking about mediating dance.

IDOCDE (International Documentation Of Contemporary Dance Education) is continuously being created and shaped by individual and groups of dance artists. As a digital platform, IDOCDE.net provides a frame for user-generated interfaces and links these contributions to a yearly offline meeting – the IDOCDE Symposium at ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival.

Since IDOCDE opened its digital doors in 2013, the community has grown to about 1400 members. Beyond generating a living archive, it has proved its potential and value to be an inspiration, stepping stone, a mirror for reflective and artistic documentation, where documentation started to be perceived as integral part of the dance/movement teaching practice by some of the active members.

The learning processes of transposing aspects of dance education to digital formats included:

– Perceiving teaching as performance

– Benefiting from the reflective qualities of self-documenting that lead to enhancing the teaching itself

– Documentative idiosyncracies as expressions of artistic means

Based on these realizations, and given the fact that documentation is a skill that can be developed, IDOCDE Project Team invited dance artists and documenters to co-create MIND THE DANCE (mindthedance.com) – A Guide/ A Movement to Documenting Contemporary Dance/ Movement Teaching. As the outcome of a 2 year long collaboration of 12 dance artists across Europe, this guide inspires to develop individual documentation methods through exemplifying approaches to documenting aspects of dance teaching and learning. Ranging from essays to interviews to practical scores the content of MIND THE DANCE can also be utilized for teachings in other fields of art and for the creative processes of performing artists.

Our proposal for DocPerform is a paper outlining the potential and challenges of IDOCDE, and how that led to the creation of MIND THE DANCE. The paper presentation would then lead to a workshop in order to physically engage the audience with MIND THE DANCE. There, participants would be introduced to the content of MIND THE DANCE and would be led through a tryout of some of the ideas and experiments for documenting dance.

BIOGRAPHY:

Defne Erdur (TR/FR) is trained in Contemporary Dance (PhD), Sociology (MA), Intermodel Expressive Art Therapy, Body Therapies (Deep Tissue Release, Trigger Point & Movement, Integrative Cranio Sacral Therapy), Meditation (WPI Trainer), and Trauma Healing (SEP).

She has been regularly teaching and researching at ImPulsTanz, MSGSU Istanbul State Conservatory, ElimSende, ÇATI Contemporary Dance Artists Association, and CI-Turkey as well as supporting WINPeace and Beyond Borders initiatives. Invested in building safe, inclusive, and collaborative creative environments she performs and offers her workshops – Hunting Gathering Cultivating, Every Body Knows, Mind the Body, and Embodying Time – around the world. Defne is the co-founder of IDOCDE and editor of idocde.net.defne.erdur@idocde.net