I am for an artistic education

During a meeting that took place in Bucharest, October 8-14, with Andreea Căpitănescu, Bojana Cvejic, Valentina De Piante, Jan Kopp, Jennifer Lacey, Jan Ritsema, a few points crystallized on the question: “What is the ideal education in choreography that we can imagine?”. I will try to write down what I retained from them, and this will probably imply my own preferences. The contemporary dance, by and large, lacks an education for choreographers, i.e. makers in the field of dance. Most of the education follows the traditional hierarchical model: to become a choreographer, one has to be a dancer who climbs the ladder toward mastery. Therefore, dance education is primarily a training of the skills required for dancing: dance techniques, styles and idioms, movement research, composition and perhaps some theory to “feed the thought”.   In what ways would an artistic education be different from the model described above? I will summarize the answer point by point. n An education of “makers”. They are making their own work and supporting the work of others as performers and various kinds of collaborators. n All consolidated knowledge or expertise is offered as optional, “elective”, and the authority linked with the expertise is transparent. […]