Learning from and within RELAY can mean many different things. This section is meant to be a growing collection of examples on learning through networking, non-hierarchical and non-linear learning, platforms for collaboration(s) and the promotion of music and dance as social practices.
RELAY is:
-
An invitation to active exploration, openness and transformation for everybody involved in the process - learners, mentors and other guests
-
An experience that enables transformation
-
A structure where some participants kept coming back and where others participated once. By taking part in more than one RELAY encounter they moved closer to the core RELAY group, contributing with continuity, time, depth, differentiation and self esteem. Others participating once functioned as impulse givers and takers, refreshers as well as questioners of the project.
-
A prospect for learning through networking. The people involved in the project shared ideas and found common grounds, building new networks and activating them.
-
A platform for exchanging ideas and meeting people in and from diverse professional context
RELAY served as a mechanism to generate principles, tasks, scores and structures to implement into our institutional curriculums. The first step into the curriculum is to apply the methods that emerged during the RELAY project to our daily practice, and to continue the exploration of those principles by creating formal and informal circumstances for other encounters.
RELAY - Thinking Artistic Material in Music and Dance was designed to explore new forms of engaging with artistic knowledge by nurturing creativity, agency and artistic independence for both learners and mentors. The structure of the project was designed to pass artistic knowledge in organic ways, creating a playground where people have the freedom to explore, be creative, embrace the differences, question the patterns they function in and have the courage to try. Similar to the artistic (choreographic) practice, where ideas travel horizontally and where participants contribute to the process, our encounters became more of an exchange than a hierarchical teaching situation and gave us the opportunity to approach educational aspects with a diversity of perspectives.
Beside the cultural exchange, which is a given in Erasmus projects, RELAY offered a strong professional ground for learners and mentors to meet and develop artistic ideas through collaborative work.
TOOLS
on learning
LISTENING
This listening practice features a selection of electro-acoustic works that showcase the range and diversity of this genre. The pieces vary in style, instrumentation, and approach, demonstrating the many ways in which electronic and acoustic sounds can interact and complement each other. Throughout the event, the listener is invited to engage with the music and explore the different sound worlds. Rooted in the awareness that social situations like a concert are never natural but represent designed, created or at least curated situations, this listening practice plays with its own constructedness and at the same time aims to facilitate a non-hierarchical being-with-others.
(tested in ME1, Symposium)
DRIFT'N DIALOGUE
Drift’n’Dialogue invites participants to a dialogue that takes place during a stroll. The practice of walking and thinking occurs simultaneously as a continuum between the interlocutors. Both the route of the walk and the ‘thought path’ are followed, without any objective or fixed outcome. Simply drifting, pulling, being lured or shooed away…intuitively deciding – perhaps without even knowing exactly which of the two dialogue partners will decide, because perhaps a path of thinking /walking emerges only through joint negotiation. This allows new thoughts to forms beyond the main place of action, on detours (also of the intellectual kind).
(a format elaborated in ZZT/Biennale Tanzausbildung Cologne “Reflection and Feedback”, shared and tested in LTTA4)
PLAYING
Playing is a negotiation of agreeing to, following or making up rules, and often also challenging or bending these rules, or even cheating.
Playing is practicing rules within a usually chosen and safe frame. This is obvious when observing young animals’ play-fights as a preparation for the real fight they will be confronted with as adult animals.
A playful attitude fosters learning capacities, aliveness, enthusiasm, and certainly social skill building. In their pure form, both play and arts are free from product orientation in the economic sense of the term - and thus provide examples of social structures and dynamics other than neoliberal growth- oriented frames.
We practice playfulness by surprise: playing games. It could be any kind of game, directly related or seemingly unrelated to the project’s context. We observe if - and if yes, how - a playful mind influences the course of our day(s).
We can sometimes also take each other’s roles and keep working on our agenda, from the perspective of the playful alter ego, and witnessing the others taking on other characters.
Maybe these interventions will only lead to having some fun, or gaining some energy ( e.g. in the middle or end of the day) - reason enough to play! Or maybe relevant findings turn out as unexpected results of a game.
RELAYING
Start with identifying one or several „in betweens“ : how can you make them concrete for you? Explore what you start to identify as an in between f.ex. a time span between two events, or a space between two bodies and concretize by asking: What lives in this in between that I am exploring right now? What is passed on, what stays in this space or time zone? What is my role in it? What do in betweens have in common?
After exploring, maybe you become more aware of in betweens in (your) life, and value what they have to offer, and what they do for us? And also perceive them as potential agents?
(exploring the in between events, practiced in the symposium schedule)
TUNING INTO WHAT IS ALREADY THERE / EC(H)O-TUNING
Enter a place, a moment, and tune into what is already there (and was there before you arrived). Ask yourself: What do I bring to this place, this moment, this situation? What moves, shifts, what stays, even gets more fixed? What has disappeared beyond my perception? What assimilates, what collides? How can I be respectful and mindful with what I meet, and contribute with what I bring in most possible constructive and fertile ways?
This practice includes a quite subtle and virtuosic negotiation of calibrating leading-following, reading the situation and - when allowed or needed - stepping in, making proposals, and seeing what is happening with it. A giving and taking, like in dancing or playing music together, with whom and whatever is present.
MEANDERING
This practice presents the idea of “relaying”/meandering”— wandering casually without urgent destination—as a way of framing a conversational creation process that can help loosen control without being out of control. Through the method proposed in this workshop we implement a creation and learning process that is not only pleasant and rewarding but also leads to a concrete action plan and agenda, to experience the highly relational, embodied, and contextual nature of relaying as a method.
In the RELAYproject collaborative inquiry and conversational learning are approaches to creating and learning in which participants construct knowledge together through dialogue. Both approaches advocate letting go of control to allow insight to emerge through free-flowing conversation. These approaches contradict expectations about learning among both teachers and students and raise fears of discussion degenerating into pointlessness.
(practiced in one of the workshops in the LTTA4)
