Skype Session with Adesola 3rd October

This evening I enjoyed a very formative skype meeting with Adesola and other BAPP students from across all three modules.

Part of what we explored were issues regarding ethics when working as a teacher, what authenticity means to each of us as an individual (this was may area of interest), the difficulties arising from moving to different countries to work and we heard how Gonzalo has been going about his interviews for Module 3.

For me, what really stood out from this session was how the idea of authenticity runs through many of the topics we discussed. For instance, when discussing education, Jess was talking about how she is exploring dance for people with autism and she explained how now autism is just considered to be a different way of thinking rather than a problem. This made me consider how people with autism may feel that dance is a way in which they can express themselves more openly, therefore feel that they are showing their authenticity.

Then Henry was discussing a dance performance he recently saw by Pheonix Dance Theatre which conveyed a political message. This again seemed to me an example of truthfulness or authenticity as it is dealing with current important issues.

Then Jae-eun brought up the issue of feeling the need to change yourself in order to adapt to a different culture when working in another country. This raised the following questions for me which also relate to the concept of authenticity:

How much of ourselves should we be willing to change?
Is it simply our perception of a culture that gives us the feeling we need to change ourselves in order to be accepted within it?
Does it say more about the way we see ourselves rather than the way others see us?

 As a group we discussed how a certain level of competition and pressure can make positive changes to the technical abilities of a dancer/performer. It was suggested that it is the things which are out of someone's control to change such as their height which can be the demoralising factors to self worth and therefore interfere with someone's authenticity. 

 We also looked into the emotional side of training in a vocational school and Henry mentioned that at his school mental health was very much on the back burner. Jess suggested however that the difficulties which arise from the profession can only really be learned once you are working in a professional setting which I thought was very interesting.

Adesola mentioned that we should look back into history rather than just looking to where we will go with the information we discovered while planning our inquiry ideas. So I am now embarking on research through books on dancers such as Anna Pavlova, Michaela DePrince, Misty Copeland and Gelsey Kirkland all of whom had to overcome points in their training and careers where they were told they must change themselves if they wanted to succeed.