Day 4 of the Summer Intensive

I haven't written on here in ages but doing the Summer Intensive has made me realise how important this space is so I thought I'd share my reflections from today.

20^th August 2015

A good day today on reflection. I felt much calmer today than yesterday although I have felt quite tired. We had a good session of Gyrokinesis with Adesola. We went further with the movement than we had on Tuesday and I really enjoyed moving in this way. I often talk to my students about when we dance we need to dance from within and then out to the audience. By working in this way, although very different from ballet, the thoughts of having the 5^th line I think is a similar thing to what I say about starting your dancing from inside to out. It’s about energy and where that energy comes from not just about the exercise.

Maybe because I’ve been tired today I have felt a little frustrated with a couple of the conversations that I had. I’m not always someone who puts my view across forcefully and have felt a bit over powered by people in conversations. I don’t like confrontation and so tend to let these things just happen. On refection how do I deal with this? Not very well and probably should carefully say something rather than just letting it wind me up. Maybe I’m winding other people up.

We had a conversation with a beanbag today and once we’d had this conversation talked about how the conversation had gone from one thing to the next through different themes and emotions and would probably be best described as a rhizome. I found this way of having a conversation very ordered and structured in a good way as you weren’t supposed to interrupt and you had to think about the connection from one to the next. We’re back to the connections theme.

Just a thought that occurred to me, none of the movement classes that we’ve done have had music. It hasn’t felt like we needed it maybe because of the use of breath and that rhythm coming through.

We talked about social media and how we can use it as a network. I think the whole Blog thing is starting to make more sense to me. However I still think this whole process needs you to be a little brave to step out and say what you think. Sometimes people will agree and sometimes they won’t. I know I won’t like it if people don’t like or agree with what I’m saying but I need to remember that doesn’t mean they don’t like me as a person. Finding out what other people think about a subject helps us to think about all sides of the subject and may even mean we change our minds which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

This afternoon we watched another TED by Dave Isay. It was all about an interview pod and how interviewing 1 to 1 can be a great way to listen to other people and to be able to share with other what we really feel. Having real interaction with people can produce authentic experiences. These can be really important when researching something but remembering that by doing interviews we are not looking at finding the answer in those people.

We went through the structure of an essay again which helps as every time we go through it I seem to get I think a slightly better understanding of how it should be. We got into groups to try and put a mock essay together. I’m not sure how well this worked but I’ve tried to finish it off tonight. I feel like I still have some gaps in my understanding of what the Methods are but I’m hoping I can go through module 2 a bit more as I think some of this is in there. 

I’m starting to think about my research and whether to do something on the difference between teaching children and students ballet. I want to start finding some books and also talk to a few people to thrash out some ideas on this a bit more.