 It is? Yes. Okay. Good morning everyone. I'm Judith Rose, acting cultural counselor of the French Embassy and acting director of Villalbertine. And I'm delighted to welcome you to Villalbertine headquarters this morning. I'm also very pleased to welcome everyone joining us online. Thanks to our wonderful partners, Parle Round, the Centre Nationale de la Dance in Pantin, and the Centre Nationale de Dance Contemporaine in Angers. For decades, exchange between France and the United States in the field of dance has been thriving. The shared artistic influences of our two countries have nurtured new generations of artists, cultivated new relationships, and encouraged dynamic cooperation between both individuals and institutions. Lucinda Childs, whose dance opened Van Cleef and Arpels Dance Reflections Festival last week with the Ballet de l'Opéra de Lyon, is one of many iconic figures who have come to embody this inextricable French-American connection. We hope to encourage further connections through our Albertine Dance Season, a 360-degree program that caters to each stage of the artistic process from inception to performance and beyond. Since the beginning of 2023, Albertine Dance Season has allowed us to welcome numerous French artists, choreographers and dancers to the United States, either in residency or on tour. In that same spirit, it was important for us to include a moment to reflect together on the contemporary implications of dance, as well as on the nature and impact of transatlantic exchange in dance. Thus came the motivation behind this two-day symposium entitled Reciprocities, Making and Supporting Dance between France and the United States. We hope that by bringing together key players in the fields of dance and performance from both sides of the Atlantic, we can build on the momentum of Albertine Dance Season and further encourage the creation of new partnerships and communities. Before I pass the mic to Noémie Solomon, allow me to say a few words to introduce her. Noémie works as a teacher, writer, dramaturg and curator in the field of contemporary dance and performance. She serves as the program director of the Institute for Curatorial Practice and Performance at Wesleyan University. As a curator, her programs have been presented internationally, including at MOMA PS21, Istanbul Modern and Gropius Bau in Berlin. In 2014, our team had the pleasure of collaborating with her on the Collections Dance, an anthology and a catalogue published by Pres Durel. This year, we have been honoured to work with her again as both a lead partner on the advisory committee for today's symposium, as well as the curator of a series of several public talks called Dance Assembly. Last but not least, I'd like to express our gratitude to all those who helped organise this event. Noémie Solomon, the advisory committee, the artists present today, our colleagues at the French Ministry of Culture and Institut Français in Paris and all around for the live streaming. I'd like to thank Ardion, our leading sponsor for Villa Albertine Dance Season, without whom this event would not have been possible. I'd also like to thank the arts department at Villa Albertine, in particular Nicole Birmann-Bloom, performing arts officer who has been nourishing the dialogue for years with a deep personal involvement. I wish you all fruitful exchanges and debates. Noémie, I leave you the floor. Thank you for your attention. And good morning. Thank you all for joining us as we begin these two full days of exchange, sorry, in the frame of this symposium titled Reciprocities. It's a pleasure to meet everyone here at Villa Albertine's headquarters in New York City, located on the unceded lands of Lenapeh Hawking, and we acknowledge and pay respect to the Lenapeh people's past, present and future. So I was invited by Villa Albertine to work with a committee of experts, dancers, choreographers, curators, directors working across both sides of the Atlantic to discuss together some of the specificities, the pressures and desires that shape the dance field, a field that is composed of various communities, aesthetics, as well as by divergent infrastructures and resources. In many ways, we are at a critical juncture, with the challenges brought forth by the pandemic when it comes to social gatherings and sensorial intimacy. With the rise of social movements which have heightened racial and gender-based inequalities, dance practices and practitioners have had to, yet again, reinvent themselves. Dance culture is, we might say, well versed in questions of precarity, of adaptability and sustainability. But these questions have erupted with a particular force lately, deeply affecting practices and entire ecosystems, often calling into question the very possibility for choreographic artists to make and share works with various audiences. In this context, how might we conceive of the role of international relations in dance? That is to say, how can we imagine and sustain a practice of global exchange in a time of many crises, a public health and social justice, as well as climate and funding crises? It became clear at an early stage of our conversation, which lasted over a year, that for exchange and cooperation to take place across borders, for it to be respectful and indeed generative for all the actors involved, it was vital to move away from unilateral or even given habitual approaches, that the issue of reciprocity needed once again to be foregrounded and in fact embodied. And thus the title of the symposium, reciprocity. So the etymology of the word refers to moving backwards and forwards, reverse the motion, rise and fall, a dance of sorts in which reciprocity emerges as that which cannot be still, stable or taken for granted perhaps. At stake then is not a this for that formula, but a practice, one that needs to be repeated, rehearsed, reaffirmed, a doing that moves between and is attuned to differences and to singularities to the needs and potentials of each other in relation. And so I hope reciprocity can act as a prompt as we gather here over the next two days, drawing on a rich tradition of choreographic exchanges between the United States and France while imagining the relations and partnerships yet to come. Four different thematics will guide the conversation and I won't enter in too much detail, but I'll just name them here. So first, pedagogy as performance. How might teaching and making dance inform each other? What are the possible spaces of collaboration between students, teachers, choreographers and curators? Second, choreographing residencies. What infrastructures can we imagine to support artistic processes over long durations and extended geographies? Three, acts of transmission. What are the choreographic and curatorial strategies that can preserve and pass on various forms and movements across generations and cultures? And four, curatorial ecologies. What are the roles and social commitments of dance curators today? What are the challenges and opportunities in bridging local and international communities? So a rich agenda for us. The symposium is devised across four roundtables and four exchanges between choreographic artists titled artist provocations. So the roundtables are imagined as working sessions and we very much welcome questions, comments, suggestions from the audience here. Advila Albertin and also from those following us online through the HowlRound platform. The panelists would offer some thoughts or thoughts and contributions before a moderated conversation amidst a group and after an hour or so a responded will open the Q&A question with the audience. The artist provocations depart from or anticipate some of the problematics addressed in roundtables. These provocations put in relation artist working on both sides of the Atlantic around common concerns to make manifest perhaps some of the different realities that shape the respective practices. The aim here is to anchor a time together in artistic concerns and knowledges. So I'd like to thank everyone here for joining us this morning and throughout the symposium and in particular the participants travelling from afar. I want to thank the members of the advisory committee for their willingness to share their vital insights throughout the process and to engage in conversations that have at times been difficult but always richly rewarding. I just want to name the members. I won't say the affiliations but you can find them in the program. Tanguy Akkar, Philippe Baither, Catherine Faudry, Céline Gallet, Linda Hayford, Serge Laurent, Angela Mattox, Sophie Myrtille-McCurty, Émilie Renouvin, Anne-Gaëlle Sallieu, Will Rawls, Catherine Tzékinis, Laurent Vinoge, and Tara Aicha Willis. I'm grateful to the whole team at Villalbertine for the labour and the trust. Diane Joss, cultural attaché for the performing arts, Louise Daudet, who has done a tremendous job at organising all aspects of this event with the help of Nicolas Bluset and Xenia Vlasenko. Many thanks as well to Vijay Mathieu from HowlRound. Most particularly, I want to thank Nicole Birman Blum. Many of you will know Nicole through her tireless work, her devotion to entire generations of artists across cultural and disciplinary borders. In many ways, the symposium draws on her expertise in the field, her ethos of listening and her formidable resourcefulness when it comes to putting people and practices in relation. And so I sincerely hope we can use this opportunity over the next two days to listen, share, and imagine in common, perhaps come up with new modalities of assembly and working together in making and supporting dance. And so now I would like to invite the first panellists, along with Tara Aicha Willis, dancer, dramaturge, writer and curator based in Chicago, who will facilitate this first session. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. How are you? Good? Yeah? Okay, great. Come on up. Let's all sit down together. Yeah, sorry. I'm just going to keep my time clock there. There you go. Yeah, with the arms on it, the armchair. Yeah. I'm so excited to be on stage with these amazing folks and to be able to be in the room with you all at this hour of this day in this context. I was invited to guide this conversation, and it's been really beautiful to reflect on it. It was sort of the one that I was like, why would you invite me to do this one? But as someone who thinks a lot about the different layers of our field, it actually feels really apropos to sort of navigate it together with these folks the way that education and pedagogy kind of filters through every single aspect of the scene that we're all taking part in, or the many scenes of practice that we all take part in. And it's perfect that it's first because I think that education is the place that a lot of artists begin and a lot of people outside of artistic practice who are doing curatorial practice, who are doing administration and scholarship around dance begin with education and then circle back to over and over again as educators, as artists, etc. So it's a beautiful thing to start here and then move into the other themes today. So the kind of official description of this talk today, pedagogy as performance. I just want to read it so that we're grounded in it. What can hybrid spaces of learning where pedagogy meets performance and vice versa teach curatorial practices? What are the educational and experimental models that drive the development of creative campuses and dance programs on both sides of the Atlantic? And we had a really lovely and complex conversation with this group of folks on a Zoom beforehand. And I just want to name two things that really surfaced during that conversation. And there's so many more things, but two things that really came to the center as kind of guiding intentions or ways that this set of questions emerges often. And the first is around kind of the logistics of bringing pedagogy and performance together. The question of how curatorial and artistic goals end up in alignment or not with pedagogical ones within institutions, curricula and programming. So how do we kind of think logistically about the way that pedagogy and performance actually like come into practical alignment with each other? And then the second is around practices and the sort of mutual influence of pedagogy and performance. Not necessarily in terms of actual events or anything like that, but just how the practices for making and presenting dance and the practices for teaching students end up influencing each other. How do we learn from one in the other even if we don't actually create a program that does both at once? So I just want to name those two things that I think are underneath the conversation we're about to have. And we're going to begin, as Noemi said, with just brief presentations from each panelist. And I will name them and then they will go and it'll be very choreographed and beautiful. And we're going to start with Joshua Lubin-Levy. Thank you. Hi, I'm Josh Lubin-Levy. I'm the director of the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University. I've been in that role for a little over a year now. Before that, I was an adjunct professor at the new school. I got my PhD at performance studies at NYU, but really I'm a dance dramaturg. That's what I've been doing for over 20 years. And I like to say that because I think I bring a dramaturgical approach to directing the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan. If you have been in the performance dance world, you probably know about the storied history of Pantagy running the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan doing an incredible job bringing dance there. And we're in a transitional moment now trying to think about how a Center for the Arts at a liberal arts college can be centering arts and curriculum, not taxing an already spread thin technical staff who's also supporting students and faculty productions, wanting artists to have meaningful engagements with our campus, not just be dropping in for the weekend to perform but actually there to work with students and develop their practice. And so these are big questions that we're asking and I will offer a few thoughts that we have been kind of mulling about as well as maybe a brief introduction and I'll keep it really short. I wanted to touch quickly on the creative campus phrase. That's really a concept that has been on fire in my mind. Thinking about the history of the idea of creativity entering campuses in the early 2000s. Grants funding this idea that artists would bring creativity in really interdisciplinary spaces in their collaboration, artists collaborating with faculty and researchers outside of the arts in particular. And Wesleyan is a space that is very proud of being one of the early recipients of these creative campus funds and continues to run creative campus programming. And I kind of think we need to shift away from what that creative campus model has been all about. And so I woke up this morning and I wrote a little something that may be a little bombastic but I'll share it just as a point of entry. We had a wonderful conversation about conservatories versus kind of liberal arts spaces. As a point of entry, perhaps we can oversimplify the question of performance and pedagogy by suggesting that there are essentially two models of performance pedagogy. There was a model of the conservatory where in the conservation of a specific discipline is fundamental to the training of students or disciples in a prescribed mode of practice. Conservatories are often protective of both the practice that they impart and the students that they train. Conservatories are often thought of as rigid, methodical, narrowly focused, exclusionary, and even ideological spaces of teaching as training. By contrast, the educational institution I work in, the Liberal Arts University, presents a performance pedagogy that defines itself in opposition to the conservativeness of the conservatory. If the Liberal Arts University could speak, it would say, I am multidisciplinary, I am innovative, I am against all disciplinary boundaries. I am driven by the notion that to be creative means to be inventive, to invent newness. I have a political belief that creative solutions are what the world needs today. I believe that the arts should be integrated with other modes of study. I prioritize process over product. I am both more in touch with the world and more independent from the necessity of living in it because my value is irreducible to the commercial demands of ticket sales and audience approval. I just feel like I hear these refrains over and over at the college campus. And with the creative campus especially have found that there are these demands placed on artists when they come to our campus such that they have to be multidisciplinary. They have to work outside of the discipline that they're in. Their innovations have to be world changing. It's not enough for them to make the small minute observations of the scientists. They have to transform the world that we live in. Their transformations have to deal with all of the crises that the world is facing and that the crises themselves, the larger they are, the more justified the artistic practices. So there really isn't a space where someone is listening to and with artistic practice from inside of the university and being guided by where artists want to go. So one thing we're trying to do at Wesleyan is think less about artists in residence and more artists in partnership. How as the director of the Center for the Arts can I share leadership with an artist marshaling the resources of the university to help them develop a research curriculum around whatever projects they might be working on. To be guided by the way that they want to work rather than asking them to ascribe to the way the university already works. And I actually think this is really fundamental to the way that Wesleyan has operated as a school. What's unique about, or what I find interesting about Wesleyan is that in the arts, practice has always been prioritized in the artistic spaces. So in the theater department in particular, for instance, it's been around for many, many years. In the 50s and 60s rather than theater department becoming more of an English department that would study plays as texts. There were a lot of practitioners brought in to prioritize students getting the opportunity to put plays on their feet every single semester. That was a huge part of it. As a part of that, the dance department was creative. Cheryl Cutler was brought in at 21 years old to start the dance department at Wesleyan. And in 1978 when the university was making austerity cuts as many universities were, and I promise I'm about to end. There was a huge student movement to protect the dance department and to protect Cheryl in particular. And I just wanted to end by reading this anonymous statement given to a student newspaper in 1978 at Wesleyan. This is from a student. There is a classroom on the Wesleyan campus which functions on the basis of cooperation and mutual effort. Each member of the class knows that she is an important element of the group. And that the responsibility for making the class work is shared equally among all participants. Students are aware of each other's abilities and needs and are conscious of the importance of interacting thoughtfully. The classroom I am describing is the dance studio. I just think that's like such a beautiful statement from a student about the value of being inside of just the dance space. And so I'm trying to find ways back into that kind of mode of practice as a way of guiding us towards other pedagogical outputs rather than asking artists to come in and innovate our sciences or innovate our math department or things like that. And I'll leave it there. Thank you, Josh. Next we'll have Noë Solier. Thanks. Thank you. So I direct the National Center for Contemporary Dance in Angers, in France, which is quite a special institution because it unites a theater. We are responsible for the dance programming of this theater, which has three performing halls, one of 900 seats, one of 400 seats and one of 100 seats. So we work with really different scales and we also have a festival. It's also a choreographical center which has, for most of its history, been directed by choreographers and not like by artists. One of them is Emmanuel Wynne, who is in the room today. He was founded in 1978 by Alvin Nicolais and it has supported American dance actually in a very successful way over the years with the premieres of Seminole Works by Trisha Brown. Newark was rehearsed and premiered in Angers by Morsk and Inham by really important figures of American dance and also of international dance in general and French dance. So there is also this choreographic center where I am developing my own work and we have a team for that. And it's also a resended residency place where we invite a lot of choreographers to make work, to rehearse and we co-produce their work. And it's also a school. So we have a bachelor in contemporary dance with 20 students, so it's a small scale program. But a lot of important figures from dance in France have gone through that program like Alain Biffard, Jérôme Bell, Philippe Descouffelais, who named really different examples. And also one specificity is we do not have permanent teachers. We only, our faculty is only made of artists or practitioners or theoreticians that are active in the field that we invite for duration from one day to one month or something like that. And this allows us to invite the same person sometimes or often to teach, to create works at different times of the year and to show their works. Maybe just to give you an example now, we opened a season with a piece by Léa Rodigues and Cantados and she came for one month to teach the students in September from Brazil. And the students went to the school she created in Favella in Rio in July. And we are working on trying to find funding for students from that school to come to Anjé, which is really important to us next year, or the year after if it takes more time to find the funding. And this has been an incredibly rich exchange, for example, with Léa. So I think we are in a very special place because we are not a conservatory, like the one in which I train at the conservatory in Paris where Raphael is teaching. And we are not either a university, we are really just focusing on dance completely and it's really inside the theater. But in relationship to the question of curating and pedagogy, there are a few problems that I have since I started in 2020, this direction. And I think I will never solve this problem, but I wanted to share them with you. I think curating in dance is radically different from curating in museums because works are not generally available. You cannot make an exhibition saying, well, I'm going to take that work and put it in relationship with that work. This is not possible because you might want to say, well, I want that Martha Graham work, but no one is dancing it at that moment. Like, you know, how do you bring the company? And maybe the company is not having this active in its territory and it's true for all kinds of works. So you don't have this availability of works. Another thing is in teaching, there has been this huge expansion of what we call choreography and which choreography called techniques are important today, which is amazing and kind of mind-blowing, but it takes time to enter in any dance practice. The body takes time. So you just cannot cover that. There is no way. We have to make choices and these choices are extremely problematic. So we try to broaden, to not like kind of stick to a kind of, you know, western classical dance canon. We try to broaden that, but how do... So for example, Linda Hayford, which is also here today, you came to teach also. Linda is part of Collective Fair in Rennes, who is a hip-hop collective. I mean, not a collective, sorry, Linda. You will tell it much better than that. But there was also, I know that you were thinking about creating a school around these techniques, for example, and that you have much more expertise for sure and much more legitimacy to do that than we do, even though we are interested in sharing and in creating, you know, exchanges as much as we can, but we will never be able to be, you know, as deep as you can go in these techniques. So for me that's another question. The body takes time and you cannot just teach everything. And there is one thing though that I find very interesting and that I think is at the heart of dance teaching for decades and that is still present, which is that we, which doesn't happen so much in the visual art in the same way, which is that we actually learn works, learn... No one will do a Jackson Pollock, you know, workshop learning, dripping or anything like that, but people will do a three-shot round and we'll emphasize, Leah Rodriguez, you know, workshop kind of entering in these practices and this is really amazing. I mean this is such a rich way of sharing artistic experiences that I don't think happens in the same way in visual art schools. This takes time, but this creates really deep connections and I think that's maybe one place where we can, I don't know, where dance can be creative, where dance campuses, creative campuses, like what kind of labs, you know, where things occur, but the fruits of that are not immediate, they take a long time because it's really about, like, you know, kind of digesting what has been made and experienced by other people and then seeing how that transforms what you do and that takes a little bit more time. So there is something about availability and time, which is really, really different in dance as in creating in the museum, let's say. Thank you so much. Next we'll have Raphael Delonnet, thank you. Good morning. So I'm Raphael Delonnet, I'm a French dancer and I speak much better German than English, but it's not going to be of any use today. So I'm going to try in English and maybe I'll switch to French and I'll ask Audrey to translate. So Elan means momentum in French, which gives an idea of daring, taking a risk, and of course of movement. So Elan was created in 2021 by the CND. It's an idea of Catherine Sekenis. So it's an École de l'égalité des chances and it's to open up some opportunities to young dancers to give them a chance in the dance field or not. And this or not is very important to us. So Elan is a space for inventivity, experimentation and research and curiosity in order to allow young dancers to discover and go through some new paths and also to, I don't know how to say, tenter l'impossible, to dare the impossible. So this program is free cost and it's due to the Fondation Hermès. I would not call them students in purpose because they don't feel themselves as students and we don't see them as students. So the young are very conscious of their chance that is given to them and especially because this program came up right after the COVID and that was for them like coming out of the blue like something they always dreamed of without knowing that it would be possible. So thanks for the CND and to Catherine secondes for that. So it was conceived and tailored, I say tailored because it's totally made sur mesure like haute couture. So it's tailored for young people that are still in college or lycée about 14, 15 up to 19. So that was the idea but of course we had to extend it to older people. But that was the specific idea. There had to be, it was to be before the Bachelot and it was also made for the young that were coming from Saint-Saint-Denis. So the Saint-Saint-Denis is a department which are the specificity to have a huge mixity and it is also, we used to stigmatize this department. We said that it's the poorest department in France but we forget to say also that's the department that has the more youth, the more schools, the more resources, the more associations and the more talents. But we had to extend also, so there's also young people from Paris and abroad. And Saint-Saint-Denis is a department also where there is the highest concentration of immigration. I shouldn't forget that there's a live stream. So this program tries to respond to this question and that this is a question that we address to the apprentice. What do you need to allow yourself to think yourself as an upcoming artist? What do you need? And this program is made to allow them to to step away, to take that chance and also take them away from that chance. So we're there to lead them to go beyond their limits and whatever they are. And they can be economical, social, mental. There's a lot of limits. So we're here to help them to surprise themselves, to discover what they know already without knowing it, to shatouille, to tickle their vocation. I like this word of vocation. Where does it come from? Where's the roots of vocation? And also to authorize themselves to think the impossible. So how a program can make the revolution in their way to think. So we choose the apprentice as much as they choose us because they've heard about the quality and the diversity of the experiences they're going to go through. It's important for me to remind that when the apprentice get out of the program, they are the best ambassadors. So we work with conservatories of the department to identify the young that are potentially concerned by this program because it's important for us that the future candidates are already engaged in a regular practice. So the auditions are taking place under... Actually, the auditions are more like workshops that request the inventivity and their creativity. So the technique is not for us a criteria. Sometimes I just have to say a cry. It's not a selective criteria. And the fact that the audition is a workshop, an open space for creativity, gives the program a certain color, a certain taste that we really try to stick on. So with the idea that technical shouldn't be a refuge. So we are very aware of the personality of the candidates. We observe his relationship to the other, to the space, to the artist who is giving the workshop at this time. And we presume of what this program will bring to this young in order to sip an oire, to grandeur into Sophia May. In a fair relationship, give and take. It's very important for us to make this contract that it's free cost this program and there's no return to investment. But we need to feel that he will be very active in his engagement. So in the audition, we have a talk with them and we ask what you see you can bring to this program. So it's important for us to set up this contract also to encourage the autonomy and the responsibility. The young is not, he's becoming an actor of the success of the program for him, for the group, but also for the program. So we study the economic resources of the parents. But we're also aware of other andes, indications. For example, a young that for us seems to be a little bit stick to his technique that are taught in a conservatoire. We feel that we need to help him, whatever the resources from the parents are. And sometimes it's really look like help, help. So another one which we feel a lack of confidence. So we are as much aware of a young that have a lot of potential to a young that may have this potential, but it's not yet... So very important also for me to remind that the apprentice coming from different cultures of dance, classique contemporaine, jazz, hip hop. And even if the formation is a film's an orientation which is clearly contemporaine, the boundaries beyond aesthetics are very quickly blurred and also by the audition. We don't care where they're coming from, hip hop, and that's not what matters for us at this moment. So that's a big statement. So because it's also a matter for them to forget what they knew, to rediscover what they think they knew. And then voilà, bref. So we don't give ourselves a goal. We don't worry about efficacy with predetermined states like a diploma, there's nothing like that. Also the fact that there's no restitution at the end allows us to lose ourselves, to try many things. This allows any young to go to his own rhythm, that's very important, to take what's good for him, to define himself, his own stakes. So no evaluation makes the learning more peaceful, more joyful, and more satisfying. There will be a time for everyone. A chance for everyone to find his way. It can be with a meeting with an artist, or with a lecture, or with a performance. It will be a time for anyone. So I wanted this programme the more eclectic possible. I make the... I bet on then working aside, a periphery allows you to progress in your own practic. So when Catherine Tsekenis invited me to take the leadership of this programme, of course I had to reaffirm my convictions as an artist so that it becomes a path for others, for young people. So I like this format to make a call. What is important to me, what for me was... and especially to reconnect to the student I was and to reconnect to the student I am still somehow. That leads me to another... my engagement in this programme also is coming from the fact that I'm learning while they're learning. I'm doing the workshop with them. And that's a big statement for me. I wouldn't invite an artist where I wouldn't be... I wouldn't like to put myself in... You got the idea, right? Sorry? Ah, salut! So I put myself in the auteur d'étudiant at the same high as the students and this programme that I dreamed of for them I want to follow it myself and voilà, I'm learning with them. So I'm not thinking, creating as a... starting from the knowledge but more starting from my career, my career city of learning. So starting from the student that I'm still somehow. Am I too long? Yeah, I have to... But it's perfect, yes. So there's a lot of rencontres with these artists so there's a technique, there's improvisation, atelier d'écriture, culture chorégraphique, exchanges, contendues that they have a little cahier where they have to write on all the experiences that went through. So I'll make a conclusion now, sorry. So this programme is made to... to stick out of the injunctions somehow. The results should remain a surprise for them, as for us, it's not predetermined. So the research of your own truths coming through the dance as a project, the joy, the non-knowledge, a vulnerability that is assumed and that can produce creativity. And I will just finish with something that one of the apprentice said, yeah, so I can't remember her name, but she said with Zeeland I just spent a week where I... I'm going to say in French. A week where we agree on a break in our lives, where we learn and understand each other. I like this sentence. Thanks everyone. Thank you. So we'll have last, Dr. Julia Ritter. Okay, this is on, yes. Hi, I'm Julia Ritter. I am the Dean of the Gloria Kaufman School at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. And I'll just give you some quick background on myself because I think it just helps to position where my own positionality and where I'm speaking from on these topics. So I spent 23 years at Rutgers University in New Jersey, which is a public institution, which does have a conservatory school of the arts. So I was leading a dance department in a conservatory in a public institution. I left about a year, and actually it's four months, Stephanie, four months, a year and four months that I've been in LA. Relatively new in this position in Los Angeles. USC is a private institution. The Gloria Kaufman School of Dance was founded in 2012 with a transformative gift by Gloria Kaufman herself, who is still with us, thank goodness, and a tremendous supporter of dance. It was kind of a game changer, I would say, in the United States that the establishment of this school, those of you that are well aware of the politics and the goings on of dance and higher ed in the United States probably remember when it was announced, it was this big school and huge investment in LA and really going to change the face of LA in terms of creating a center for professional dancers. The school admitted its first cohort in 2015. So we have thus far graduated five cohorts of students coming up on the 10th anniversary. This is a, when it was first founded, I want to give credit to Jodi Gates as the founding director and also to William Forsythe, who was the first endowed scholar professor there, and they were both incredibly involved in establishing the school as a conservatoire within this research one university, right? So it is an incredibly selective school. I've been through just one round of auditions so far in my new role, and the dancers that come to this institution, I mean, we have hundreds and hundreds of applications, and we typically accept 25 a year. So it's a very selective school. What is interesting to me, though, getting to know this school is, of course, it has changed over the almost 10 years and in existence. Of course, when it was founded with Jodi Gates and Bill Forsythe's expertise there, there was a lot of focus on ballet, but the school was founded with the intention of bringing different forms of dance together equally, hip hop, Bollywood, jazz, tap, ballet, contemporary, many that I'm not mentioning. And that has continued to this day, and I would say the faculty and myself, having come in as a new leader, we are even digging down deeper into what does it mean to bring all of those dance forms into conversation with one another. So I think it's also, and the reason I'm giving this, because I think it helps, again, give you some foundation for how pedagogy and performance might be in conversation with each other. So when we audition for the Kaufman School, we are not looking for, which has been my experience in the past in conservatories, kind of a base level of ballet, kind of a base level of modern technique, right? That's been my experience at other conservatories. We're looking for kind of a standard. That's not the way that Kaufman auditions, which I find fascinating and also really exciting. We look for, in the, we invite 100 students out of the close to 600 applications we get every year. We invite about 120 to campus. So that means we review every single one of those 600 applications before we make the selection of students to invite to campus. Those students that we invite to campus, what we are looking to do is to create a cohort, 25 to 30 students, that excels in what they do already and is ready to take open new doors through what we offer them to gain experience in other things. That means we might bring in a dancer whose community has been a street dance community. They might excel in whacking or voguing. They might not have that much experience in ballet. So that is going to be a really interesting group of students that come together as a cohort to then go through creative processes and get to learn pedagogies. So that's been a really exciting experience for me to kind of watch how that develops. The school offers all of those techniques, all of those techniques. Ballet, I'll just try to run through them really quickly. Ballet, contemporary, jazz, tap, Bollywood, dance hall, numerous street dance forms. All of the students take all of these forms. They may start to specialize in certain forms the second two years if they want to, but they do are required to take all of these forms. That, of course, can create different kinds of tensions for some students, right? As we know, there's processes and ways in which forms are taught that some are more hierarchical, some are more community-based, but the students begin to learn what are the different pedagogies of these forms, how do I understand them, and then how does that also relate into the performances that they create with their artists. The artists, there are curatorial process at Kauffman is we have an artistic advisory committee. We also have an assistant dean of programming and special projects, so that assistant dean works with the advisory committee. We are not a presenting institution, but we do work very closely with the Arts and Humanities Initiative on Campus, which is run by the provost, which is called Visions and Voices, so we work very closely with them to bring in outside performers. We bring about eight guest artists every semester to come and work, and it's a very short process, so those artists will come in from anywhere from four to six weeks to make works. One thing that I'll put out there, and I don't want to speak too much about this, but I think it's important in terms of pedagogies and performance, we are in such a unique place right now. I think as artists and educators and Noemi referenced it in terms of having been through a pandemic and lots of different conflict in the world. This generation of students, this Gen Z, and personally I don't know why we started so late in the alphabet, because what happens after Gen Z? It's like, do we go back to A? There's something kind of almost apocalyptic about that, that it's Gen Z. But there are so many ways in which they are finding challenges, and I think what's top of my mind as a leader artist educator is how do I help students who are in a conservatory, who are very interested in becoming performers, navigate sometimes the incongruence that they're finding in the spaces that they're learning, that they understand that they have certain expectations in terms of the spaces in which they're engaging in pedagogy and performance, that are not being met either by the artists that are brought in or even by their faculty sometimes. And I think this is one of the challenges that I find is really important to think about in terms of how do we help them reconcile their anxiety about gaining employment on graduation with being able to be in a process that is literally more about process than product, and how do they navigate that when they walk into a space with an artist who doesn't have the same kind of value systems that they have around pronouns and names, right? These are some of the things I think that really, really can derail the performance process and these kind of learning experiences. I don't have answers. I just bring them up as things to consider when we're bringing pedagogy and performance together. I will say that, you know, what's fascinating to me about what you brought up with the student's message about creating spaces of dance, you read the letter from the student, and the importance of the social and emotional learning that we understand the collaborative process in those spaces. I'm not sure all dancers are feeling that in the spaces. I think it's very particular to this generation, having been through the pandemic. Some of them, their parasocial relationships are more profound for them than their actual relationships with other students. So I think these are just some things to think about and maybe it'll come up further more in the conversation. Thank you. Thank you so much, everyone. Can we give a little quick round of applause? That was amazing. Thank you, each of you, for bringing such distinct and connected perspectives to the table and representing your institutions so beautifully also. I'm really struck by the how of all of your work and the programs you're trying to build, including where the problems and uncertainties lie. There's, with the question of how students can actually learn all the techniques that exist and inhabit these dances, I was thinking maybe the question is how to teach students how to learn rather than the thing itself that they're learning. And the question, Josh, of artists in partnership rather than other language that's used on college campuses a lot, that shift in method of how artists enter a space also to me raises all these complexities around adapting to every single artist. And how does that then fit in with student expectations and faculty ongoing day-to-day activity? And Raphael, this question of it's not about the goal, it is about actually being in the process and in the soup together, in the mess together. That's really beautiful. I'm still processing, Julia, everything you said, but it's all in there, right? I don't know if there's a question in that, but I'm really struck by that as the challenge and then the question of how students encounter that and sort of what world are they being prepared for by moving through that how in each of your spaces. I wonder if we might kind of go into, this was a question I almost had for the end, but into this kind of future-oriented space, what is the world that you imagine students are entering and how has it changed over the course of you being in these positions? What are you preparing them for and how do they get there or how do you hope they might get there in the future? It's a big one, I know. I feel like it covers everything kind of, doesn't it? Yeah. I can speak. So being at a Research One University, the dancers at Kaufman have the opportunity, obviously to, well, they have to, whether they like it or not, they do about 85% of their coursework in dance and then the rest is in liberal arts that are, you know, they have to take a certain number of liberal arts. The students that come to USC are very ambitious. Most of our dancers are doing minors at the same time and what we are trying to do is not set up these kind of dichotomies where, oh, you know, take that minor because if dance doesn't work out, you know, like we don't do that. We really try to say, look, Kaufman is really dedicated to being this artistically daring, academically rigorous incubator of embodied research practice and we want dance to be a part of your life throughout your lifespan if that's what you want. So we try to encourage them towards minors or majors that will allow them to think broadly beyond just, I talked to the students about a compass, right? You might think that you're headed due north towards that performance career, but the more that you allow yourself to go a little bit west, a little bit east, a little bit south, to expand what dance could be for your life, then you're going to have more options moving forward. I would also say that dancers, particularly Kaufman and I know this is unique, they already have multiple outlets that they are working. Many of our dancers have 100,000 followers on their Instagraming, their influencers already. There's a ways in which they're tapping into entrepreneurial activities that would never have even been on my cognizance, right, in my consciousness in the past. So they're already setting those up and we really encourage those opportunities. They think, I mean, about this balance between really experiencing the school and the process and at the same time, you know, making a living when you get out of school and like entering the field. I think it's, and I think there is, at least in France, a stronger push now for all art schools to show and prove how they can effectively, you know, have students that are not unemployed when they finish and show that quantitatively, which is not simple. But I think there are several things. One is that I don't think we can completely set aside that question as it was maybe possible a few decades ago because also if we want, at least for example in Angers to have people coming from different social backgrounds, they need to feel a certain level of security that otherwise they cannot dedicate, even though we are free. So it's also quite different from the USA. They are not going to take a loan, they are not going to be in-depth, but still they are going to, for us to attract a diverse group, like people from really different social backgrounds, we need to reassure them that they will have a future after what we do. But we also want the school to be as open, as risk-taking as possible. And I also think if we really think of these schools as creative spaces, also if we take historically like the Bauhaus was or maybe Black Montet College or things like that, one of the questions we should be asking is not only do students find work, but which new ideas, which new processes, which new approaches students emerge from these schools. Not only is the students coming out of them, but the ideas, practices, aesthetics, whatever, like that we're born there somehow. And I feel like there is probably, it's not a solution, but there is a way of, I also have the feeling that if we manage to create a school that is perceived by the field as a place where this is happening, it will give so much more potential for the students coming out of that school. So there is a way in which focusing on the depth and the relevance of the creative process that are going on there will actually help people find work in a very practical way that is kind of strange since it is in there. Another thing, and this is relating to more the issue of really new political norms, new ethical norms, new social norms that are emerging and that are important, for me one of the questions is how do we accompany that and how are we even innovative in that. I do feel like dense, a big problem in dense is that there can be a kind of guru figure of the teacher with a lot of abuse in many ways that has taken place. So how do we allow for transformative aesthetic and artistic experience while being respectful of people and making sure no abuse is going on, this is not always easy. But I think there is also a kind of opposite risk to that is that the issues are so precise. Like, you know, tender, post-colonial, global warming and they are the same for every artistic institution in the world in a way that there is a risk, I think a great risk of creating a new kind of academicism where these issues and the way to tackle them and the references that are used to tackle them are kind of already set for students and we say you need to work on these issues and you need to work on them in a way where you're trying to unsettle the norm in some way. And how are you creative in that setting? Because this is deeply alienating, I think. It's not easy to emancipate from a school that asks you to be an emancipator. It's really problematic. Because in the School in Angers, we really try to have also not only performers coming out of school but we are very like people that do make work and that become choreographers. And I think before people would go to a conservatory and the conservatory would be quite conservative and it was very easy for them to rebel against that and to go against, I mean not very easy at all, but there was a kind of clear relationship, not so clear, but some kind of clear relationship with the school being the academy and reinforcing conservative values and the students, the creators, kind of fighting against that and finding her or their, his path. And today the school is saying, well, you need to rethink, think to reshape, to reshape a bit. I think also I was quite inspiring the voice of the creative college that you were having. I think that voice, it's not easy to put an artist, someone that is trying to find their voice in that context because how do you react to that? So I think that for me that is also an issue and connected, sorry I'm a bit long, I hope it's, is that one of the demand that we get from students a lot, that's kind of interesting, is for kind of, for basis. We are asking them so much to challenge things that they are telling us, but we actually need some core techniques. We actually need some core methodologies, we don't have those and they don't, a lot of them come from high schools, they have no methodology, in critical thinking, in theories, in methodology, really in learning, in making. And so for me the big, big question is how do we invent core methodologies that are not conservative like they used to be, but that are also really empowering in a way that people can have basis on which they can stand to make their own work. It makes me think of one sentence that I really like from a Romain of Marguerite de Rasse, that's the young boy, he says I don't want to go to school, but because they want to teach me something I don't know. And I have this, I mean, related to what you said about the methodology and everything, I would really like to experiment that to invite some artists to teach techniques that they don't know. For example, I would invite Noé to teach Bollywood, Linda to teach ballet, Emmanuel Ruin to teach, I don't know, oh, Stéphanie, something you don't know. And that will create a platform for everyone to think what actually, what is teaching, what is learning. I think there's a big issue about that. Just to question the figure of the one who knows and the one who doesn't know. So I think that's really something to, and I think I might do it. Get ready, everyone. I'll do it with you. I think that where who knows, I don't want to go to school because they want to teach me something I don't know feels like also what professors are saying in the classroom when they're encountering their students. The thing I think about is in an arts space, in a studio space, are there teachers and students or are there artists? And what's the difference? And students today are, or the younger generation, I love that we don't call them students. We don't talk about that a lot. They're making. They're making in ways that pushes the boundaries of what any generation that's trying to teach them, I mean, I'll speak at Wesleyan. The Center for the Arts Instagram is horrible, but our students know exactly what's wrong with it. They don't want to help, but that's fine. But it is a beautiful thing to just wonder where the boundary between being an artist and being making, doing, teaching, and where knowledge circulates feels really important there. And the technique, I mean, I think that's so important, like that there are classes where you don't question that technique is important to actually learning a discipline, even if you decide to reject it later. We can study biology, and then we can also refute its essentialisms at the same time. And so how do we make space for both of those things? I'd love to be in a class where people are teaching what they don't know. Yeah, I think, oh sorry, go ahead. I just wanted to say also, I think the connection between technique and research and what research is, is not always made explicit in the classroom for students. And I think there is a disconnect talking about learning how to come up with methodologies. I think there is a real performance as research. I think it's an area that we all can really help students better understand, yeah. Yeah, I want to invite everyone to think of their question and we're not going to have time for all of them. But if you have one, take a moment while I say one more thing because I'm coming for you next. But I'm really, thank you for saying that, Julia. And I wanted to try to bring back in the question of performance, which is kind of partly part of the title of this talk. And I'm also really inspired by what you said earlier, Raphael, about curiosity and how actually the program is also a product of your own curiosity as you continue to learn, right? That kind of maybe the question of the artist in these academic spaces kind of makes us grapple with that constant learning and curiosity and research and exploration as a kind of method, as a technique maybe even, right? So I wonder if there's any last, and it doesn't have to be all of you that speak on this, but any last things you want to say just about how performance practices themselves, maybe an example of how that has influenced your teaching or your curriculum that you're helping to create. And vice versa, how, you know, if that's more applicable to your work, how the teaching and the shape of the program maybe has influenced your curatorial choices. And the frictions and possibilities within that as we've discussed. Maybe I'll just say something very quickly, which is know what you said about curating between performance versus visual arts and that you can't really curate a dance because it's not there with you when you curate it and it takes time. I think the time really stood out to me. That I find that my encounter with students today is that they feel they need to have the answer now to the crisis for tomorrow. So it's not just about them growing up as artists. My students are worried about whether there's going to be a world to live in tomorrow. So there's something about performance as discovery, as like forcing a slow down that feels really necessary to take time to learn things and to find our voice or however you want to put it that feels really important. And I lost my other thought, so I'll just let it go. That was great. Anyone else want to add to this? Any questions from our audience? Yeah. Hi, thank you all for being here. Thank you also Tara for moderating this morning. This question of looking for work after graduating has come up a number of times from each of you. And I'm mindful that the economies of the US and France are very different for what professional opportunities and dance look like. So I'm just curious to hear very briefly perhaps from each of you what different professional orientations feel relevant to your students. For example, I can imagine that the question of looking for work performing with other choreographers might feel more relevant to certain student bodies than others and then kind of in conjunction with that or perhaps as an alternative, is there like a primary orientation of the program that you oversee professionally towards students given the different economic realities that each of your programs are situated in? Because we're based in LA, there's an enormous amount of opportunity in commercial work and I just use that term because that's what we use at Kauffman and we're not always comfortable with that term. But if you had to create a binary between the concert world and the commercial world. So we really work in our pedagogical and performance agendas that students are learning these multiple literacies working across these forms. So we often will have students who came in as a concert dancer say, well, I think I'm a hip hop dancer now and I'm gonna go audition for Beyonce and they do. So we have dancers working with Beyonce, Doja Cat, VMAs. They're also getting into Strat-Ballet Berlin and Ballet-B-C and things. So it's kind of across the gamut. But then there also are some that are like, I just did four years of hard performance and now I wanna go into dance therapy. So it's across the board, yeah. I think in France, I mean in Angers, we have a very supportive system for performing artists in France like a kind of an employment that allows you to work in an irregular way but to have a stable income. And so we try for the students to meet as many dance makers throughout their programs and we tell them from day one that these are people that they might work with so they tend to start to create a network in school and then when they come out, I think most of them will start working on specific productions with that. Much more in the concert world than the commercial world. On our side. And we also try to encourage them to start if they are interested in that to make their own projects with each other or sometimes people from previous cohorts or later cohorts. So this is something that we would like to push more in the coming years but to really, I think this kind of ecosystem that can get generated from people. And I think in France the flexibility of this artist status is very convenient because someone can work as a performer for someone and try doing a project and find some local or regional or national funding for that and kind of let it grow and see where it takes them. So that's more kind of our situation, let's say. Anyone else want to speak to that at all? Of you two? No? Okay. Yeah, Lauren. Hi Tara, hi everyone. Thank you for this very stimulating panel. My question may be, yeah, it kind of builds off of John's question and also Josh's comment, just that students don't know if there's going to be a world tomorrow to live in and kind of noticing a tendency also through my own work as a teacher and in institutions within education this mandate to produce successful individuals when it feels like at every moment we constantly are needing to be not just better at failing but better at needing each other and being kind of incomplete with one another in order to kind of face the challenges of like, yes, let's abolish the structures of the world which might include educational institutions in order to make a world that will better serve us. Or un-make the one that hasn't been, that isn't working like right now at this very moment. So yeah, I guess I just wanted to like, what is that negotiation between the kind of model of like making the successful individual and then the kind of like, the need for networks of reciprocity to use the term of today's gathering? I like, I framed the liberal arts voice and an eye for very deliberate reason. I mean that is the myth that the student body is sort of like, it's in the soil at Wesleyan and many colleges this idea of like, we're so amazing as individuals. And I say that as a proud graduate of Wesleyan like, you know, we've all been there as good as like, it can be wonderfully empowering and I actually think there are some students whose voices really deserve that platform to feel like they're really being heard. And so maybe then to just fold this in, like I don't know, I haven't been to your school but I love the idea of faculty being temporary because it makes me think that the students then own the classroom. And I imagine that there are spaces where students then feel like this is my school and you're coming into my space and I can actually guide you through it. So that for me is the power then to John's question what we're training students in, in a performance pedagogy space is that kind of collective creation. And, you know, Wesleyan is very different and the U.S. is a very different like job landscape. A lot of students at Wesleyan met major in the arts but also like engineering or like, you know, polysci or things like that. And they'll tell you like, I'm gonna go become a lawyer and an actor because they really want like something that feels successful. But I guess the part that I can offer them is just like, it's wonderful that I have this job. By no means was this a direct shot out of college. Like I'm sure many artists, people who've worked in the arts, it's just wayward. How do you survive? You just do in some way. You like struggle. You struggle with other people. And that this myth that like you can only be an artist in order to be a successful artist rather than like the fact that every artist I know is doing something else as well. And that sometimes you give up being an artist for years or days or an hour and then come back to it. Like that also has to be part of what it is to re-script this idea of what success looks like because it's so much about, it's in the title, right? Professional, the professional symposium. Like who are the professionals up here? I don't know. I don't know if I'm like a professional. So something in that feels like it's answering your question. Hi. There are questions from, from France, in fact. And one message from Ashley, the U.S. Saudi from diverse work, Houston, who is the respondent of this panel but couldn't travel yesterday. So here is the message first and I'll ask the question after. Many of you highlighted different levels of what I would understand as acts of care for artists. They lived experience, their time and their body in relation to building a practice. It's exciting to see everyone thinking about how art is not made in vacuum and that the work is related to real life, culture, people and places. It feels like there is a pedagogy practice that is allowing students to learning how to cultivate their own vocabulary in their work by being empowered to be who they are and where they come from. So from Houston to all of you. And then there is a question from the Choreographic Center in Rio La Paz for Raphael about the ELON program. So Dorothe asked, said, ELON seems like an incredible program. Is it a long-term program or does it have a definite period? Actually, I don't know. I hope it's for a long term but as I said, it's existing because of the founding of Hermès. So it's... I don't know. But as a sweet to what was said before the message, I totally agree with what is said and also it's learning how to learn also. Every young should be given the chance to decide how he wants to learn actually. So let's hope that ELON will learn but it's up to Hermès and Catherine. But I hope it's going to be a model also for other firms or Messina or whatever. That's also the idea of this symposium. Thank you so much. It's very inspiring to know that it's so many different institutions that think about all these things together in different ways because as a human, you don't fit into... you have to find the perfect fit. It's like choosing a school for your child. With that said, I wonder about science. In these dance programs, are you studying cognitive science, sports science, how things... Because I remember as a student, I was like... I wanted to know what the sports people did in order to have their energy. And the body is a body. It's a body. I'm saying that because it is a difference between technique and style. And when we confuse technique with style, it's really hard to undo. I teach at Yale and I have all kinds of... I have cognitive scientists, I have lawyers, I have engineers that I teach and I call it like research of self and that is something that you all talk about somehow and to be given that opportunity. And I think, and for myself, I have had great help with reading about how the body actually functions. So when you do a tendu, it's not the style of a tendu, it's actually the function of the tendu and what kind of muscle you use. And because I do think, I remember thinking that as a student, I'm going to learn everything. So my palate is really rich. So if I have an idea, I'm not limited to my ability. So I just wondered about how science is influencing or if it's influencing your thought process about education in schools. In OJ, we have a partnership with the hospital where there is a different people working on like surgeon coming to give the students some information about some of the things we know about the body. But I must say, I think often the questions we might have are so specific that there is often not, I find, definite scientific answers to them. Like especially with cognitive science, it's such a young science also and the studies are so numerous and sometimes on small cohorts. It's just like we have to be very, very careful with the robustness of the scientific data that are out there. For biomechanics, for also cognitive science, it's like, you know, I think also the subtlety of the difference in phrasing between, I don't know, different styles or different approaches. I think we are like the kind of the scientific data that we have on that are still quite open and vague in what they can tell us. I have the feeling. And I also think that I don't know, I think we are talking quite a bit about the variety and the diversity of approaches to movement that are out there. And I think there could be a little bit of an illusion that there would be a neutral universal one that might be, for example, a scientific one because that approach will be, you know, grounded in a certain ideology of Cartesianism and so on. And so you cannot reduce or I don't think there is a kind of I mean, maybe there was a hope of that, for example, with lab annotation at some point that there would be one true analysis of movement to which other approaches could be reduced. But I don't think that's the case. On the contrary, you really have irreducible different fundamentally different approaches to experiencing the body. And science is probably one of them. Science is one of the ways of experiencing and approaching the body but it has to enter in dialogue with other ones and I would argue cannot pretend to be to claim knowing a truth about the body. And in fact, that is one of the very things we try to, so we have all these teachers coming and often they think they have some kind of truth about the body. So there's a ballet teacher and they think there is a somatic practitioner and they also think they have a kind of deep truth about and they also they all think they have some kind of deep truth about the body that other techniques are kind of styles but their technique has some kind of truth. And what we try to say also to the students is that okay, when you're going to study this you're really going to study it a little bit exactly what you were saying actually about like you have to go in it and you cannot be overly critical as you study it because the way you're just not getting the experience out of it then we will ask you to be critical then we will ask you to take a stance to distance or if you or to take a stance anyway but we also ask the teachers to keep in mind that their expertise is valuable and that they do have an expertise that the students don't have like there is a kind of it's not like everyone knows everything and has the same expertise, it's not true but at the same time this expertise is localized it's an expertise in ballet it's an expertise in I don't know Cunningham or this or that and so it's not the truth about movement, it's not the truth about dancers as a person and that's very important I think to keep that in mind. Julia, the last word is yours. I just wanted to say in this idea of the truth that's where I would offer the companion thought that in thinking of one's own truth in movement is to drop back down into considering that as your methodology and your research rather than a truth but then also being able to be explicit about that for the student and yeah this is a truth where I feel that I hold this to be true but it's because of this, this and this that I've experimented and used as a methodology and just to speak in a practical basis also to your point I think dance science particularly in the United States has some real deep history in terms but it's also been a lot around ballet and contemporary so I would say the work of Emma Redding Dr. Emma Redding is really important who left Trinity Lobb on it is now in Melbourne is really because she's looking at now bringing street dance like what does it mean to be dancing on these surfaces what does it mean to be doing sight dance rather than doing studies always in a studio with the right kind of floor there are people out there that are expanding that kind of research and then of course there's the huge container of looking at dance and ability Parkinson's neurodivergence Down syndrome you know gerontology I think that is just we're just starting to get into those realms as a discipline thank you so much everyone will end there we have one more oh I'm sorry okay great thank you so much real quick is like a question slash observation anything connection with what you just mentioned about the landscape of the academia when it comes to street and club dance and in terms of representation and possibilities for you as an artist as a street dancer personally to project myself for instance into creating work in street dance or the new generation to be able to create work around those styles and for me going around teaching in different universities I see there's something very like narrow into what is supposed to be dance and everything is so based into your centric forms so as far as me recognizing myself in it and me being a teacher going to spaces teaching those dance styles it's hard to answer to the questions of the students like okay what's after that you came here for a short period of time so what are the possibilities for me and not the only example I can give them is I had to create opportunities for myself and if I could if I had to wait for the educational system to do it I would have never done what I was able to do what I'm able to do now so it's just it's just super heavy like going to those places sometimes noticing that okay you want after this and dance forms those spaces but I don't feel welcome in those spaces really thinking of the space itself like how the space look like the floor itself having Marley which is extremely violent and it's like okay having that floor means you're not welcoming me you're welcoming certain your centric forms there having the bar in the dance room so which means having the bar means dances that so for me entering those spaces feels already violent for my own body thinking how does that how do you create um different perspective different ways for those dancers to see themselves um and not feeling framed into okay if I want to be a dancer I have to do mother ballet and maybe street and club dance to feel a little bit more open to what's out there when you know especially in the States that most of the dance forms that exist and that was created here comes from the black community and it's like over 50 dance styles that's coming from here that are not represented in those artistic institutions for me it's odd to see how we truly represent the art and many different artists many young dancers that are doing those dance forms I'm talking about over 50 dance forms that are not in those uh high institutions um so for me like how do you switch that and really create space uh for people like me basically I am teaching ballet the conservatoire de paris which is a very uh it's an institution which is which is very uh concerned about what is excellence and what is to preserve the repertoire and the patrimoine and uh talking about the friction about uh science and style I had the the big enjoyment um the stupor the surprise in my students eyes to see a ballet teacher which is black which is wearing locks and I think it's up to us also to play with with um with symbols but that means also taking taking your risk also because it would be easier just to to continue the existing models to continue with the existing models uh by the way it was my my choice to it's a detail but it's important uh so in a way I'm still very uh surprised to see uh that young people are still and now uh surprised to see uh colored uh dancing is one thing but teaching it's another thing because it's I'm sorry to remind this but I was one of the first uh black dancer in the Paris Opera and I'm the first black no no no but I'm the first black teacher also teaching ballet at the conservatoire so it's uh it's on the way I hope I responded to your it would be easier if I was away um especially in the states where you see that so really so when when you I don't know I don't know what you're teaching um when it comes to black dance forms in itself thank you when it comes to black dance forms in itself um represented by black people in teaching those um for the kids that wants to have a voice in those styles and express themselves professionally in those styles uh the presentation the representation is deeply lacking so for me to force ourselves within Eurocentric forms yes it's a it's a fight it's an ongoing thing uh so now yes in ballet we see that happening more and more which I'm happy about it but this is still Eurocentric forms yes but I I'm agree I totally agree ballet could become a so black uh I don't know it's uh there's something to be also the the um ideologie can be also transformed uh uh I'm not for the aesthetic so I don't know if it's really but I think we can also change our boundaries and what we what we think is afro what is uh uh uh yeah but uh yeah the ethnocentrism ethnocentrism there's something to be to be worked I think I just want to name um that it is absolutely a challenge inside of the U.S. I'm not familiar with the united the european context but there are examples where it's changing like Columbia College in Chicago right which has a really has made a really big shift in the last 10 years to kind of ground the entire curriculum in in afro diasporic forms alongside european so there are examples that are emerging and it's a very new phenomenon I think but it is it gives gives me hope yeah also at Kaufman because it was set up to put essentially ballet and hip-hop another black vernacular forms and street down forms in conversation however I will tell you the story that when the building was built every studio had Marley right so of course the faculty were like what is up you know so immediately change two floors now we have two floors that are wood that are appropriate and safer for the dancers they still have ballet bars on the wall you know so it's it's almost devastatingly slow but it's happening yeah just I think it's there is there are lots of resistances to that and it's going to be an ongoing work I do think that in France there are major companies of hip-hop that are prominent in concert dance and that hold a direct choreographic center and so I don't not to say that we have arrived at the situation that is satisfactory at all but I think there is an inspiring generation that has already been there for a while in hip-hop in France I hope and I also think there is new generation now that are even going further into that and even so and I think we are definitely trying to accompany that and trying to select I think also as a school what we try to do what I can say is try to select really like people coming from different aesthetic people coming having a real diversity in the students and trying to empower these students not only teaching dance but also in terms of communication in terms of how to produce works in terms of how to direct institution in the future so that these people will direct institution in the future and will change the landscape but that's a little bit long term but that's also how we are trying to think it as a school Thank you for that and I love the example of the studio that it is this kind of constant revision you know re-envisioning and revision of the cultural spaces as well as the curriculum and so I think on that note there is so much more conversation to be had so please have those conversations in the spaces in between and we are here you all are here and I am so glad to have this conversation and that it is such an intimate room also so that we can continue them afterwards I really appreciate all the questions and the deep interrogation of these constantly shifting formations that were in education Thank you everyone Maybe we will take 6 minutes and then we will come back here to listen to Linda and Alec