Stray birds of summer come to my window to sing and fly away. And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs, flutter and fall there with a sigh.

As my blogging activity is rather dismal, it must seem, like I am not really doing too much...on the contrary....I´ve been rather busy...still searching for the grains of inspiration for my final enquiry....as the module commenced I was already chatting with friends about my ideas...stirring things up a little. I made an appointment to talk to one of the ballet-masters at work and I also had the wonderful opportunity to talk to the new financial director of the "Hessen State Theatre" where I am employed. I am trying to approach the subject with open eyes, looking into many fields around me and I am sure come autumn I will be able to harvest and bake a nice bread out of my work.
I´ve been looking into the structures of the German cultural scene. Where does the funding come from, what is considered important and how are cuts and closures affecting society.
There´s the German culture council to start off with. It is responsible for political decisions concerning the arts including drama, opera, music, dance, literature, architecture, design, film and cultural education. Many enquiries are initiated by the council...and I was able to print some of personal interest and read through them.
I took a look at the German governments web-site and found answers on how the German government views the necessity of dance at this day and age.
Then there are also several associations concerning the german theatrical landscape. The "Deutscher Bühnenverein", the "Bühnengenossenschaft" seem to be the largest ones- then there´s the "Vereinigung Deutscher Opernchöre und Bühnentänzer", responsible for choirs and dancers in Germany. There are two dance specific archives. One in Cologne and one in Leipzig. Their sites also operate in English...
I´ve been putting a lot of thought into the social aspects of dance, or more specifically ballet and modern dance as we know it today, as I would like to look at the rather unknown field of dance-sociology for my final piece of work. Maybe I am falsely attempting to land on the wrong branch of the tree here...not sure yet.
The financial director of the theatre advised me to look into the sociological department of the TU in Dresden- especially at Dr. Rehberg´s work concerning culture, which again in turn lead me to a highly interesting book about the arts in society. Basically this book is what I would like to take a closer look at- but from a dancer´s point of view. Something like "The dancer in society". Or "Dancing with Society"....something like that.
Concerning research I am actually getting slightly worried...I am advised not to query the audience of the Hessen State Theatre. I could however ask my colleagues....dancers, as well as actors, opera singers, choir singers and the entire technical department. I am also able to draw upon my professional community...but I am also aware of the fact, that that will not be scientific research, as from my subjective point of view. Conversations with a sociologist have led me to GESIS, the German institute of social indicators. Maybe I can peck out some more ideas here??
So long so far...a quick glance at the creative mess I am looking through at the moment...maybe the birds of spring will help me untangle it...

PJs vs pointe shoes

Having let my thoughts spin out of control in their soyuz capsule over the past weeks I am trying to learn how to knit the tangled wool of ideas into something with shape.
The place I started thinking about ethics in the workplace was the stage, as to me, my professional setting consisting of the theatre-building, the ballet studio and my fellow company members, the stage is my church. It´s the place you enter and you immediately quiet down and look up.
Maybe my rather rigid classical education ingrained certain values in me. For example I was taught not to put my hands on the tutu I am wearing and although my ballet-days are gone I still respect my costumes, hanging them up (unless there´s a "fast change"during performance), when taking them off and not carelessly throwing them into a corner. Respect for principal or senior dancers is something you grow up with- never failing to leave them their preferred space at the barre.
I also learnt that the ballet-studio is there to work, not for eating and even now it still troubles me to take a bite of my kitkat- even when starving.
A thing that really opened my eyes was the program "Agony and Ecstasy" about the English National Ballet, kindly recommended by Alicia some time ago. In one episode a young dancer is literally being yelled at for being 5 minutes late, being called "dis-respectful" and "un-professional". In my own professional environment being 5 minutes late certainly would never prompt such an outburst.
My surrounding being a dance company of contemporary german expressionist dance, it struck me that there are considerable differences in values- especially to the ones I grew up with in a "classical" surrounding.
Another example that sprung to mind was how in classical companies such as the Hamburg Ballet, I have observed a certain dress-code. Clean and tidy, hair in a neat bun or french-roll and tight fitting dance-wear. In the more modern milieu I move in wearing your pajamas or covering yourself in thousands of layers to keep warm is more convenient and adds to a "certain kind of cool". Or I should rather say- it´s a kind of uniform. ((O;

this little world has quite captivated us your joys and sorrows have refreshed and touched us

...sitting in the extremely crowded reading-room of Wiesbaden´s State Library (yes, education is a "thing to do" these days) I take a look out of my little soyuz-capsule, which lately took a detour past planet "Romeo and Juliet" premiere...now that I am managing to bring my little rocket back in to it´s proposed orbit I am finding the right brainwaves in order to compose the next blog.
A lot of thinking and some discussions have been going on about the award title I would like to propose for myself. Something that has been following me my entire dance-career (also in school days) is that of social structures of dance-companies (hierarchy) and in theaters and social backgrounds of dancers. I enjoy looking at the consumers of the art we produce, having had many discussions with friends I have introduced to dance or the theatre full stop about how dance and the theatre can be made more accessible and "a la mode" again.
I am also reading an extremely inspiring book on the history of ballet "Apollo´s Angels" by J. Homans. Who knew, that the classical corps de ballet actually sprung from the French Revolution? Or that the figures still practiced today in classical ballet class are representations of how people thought the planets moved in the 16th century??
Thus this book is opening my eyes once again to how much the creation of art is linked to the time it springs from.
In my own mind I have often drawn links between the origins of a choreographer, the time he or she created in and the nature of his or her works.

Coming from this the title I would like to propose for myself is 


BA (Hons) in professional practice in dance sociology/ philosophy.

Another thought has been to translate the German "Tanzwissenschaften" (a BA uni subject here, thus making it a


BA (Hons) in professional practice in dance science.


What do you guys think of my ideas??
Is my rocket spinning out of control?Do we have to call Houston?? Are these also questions you have asked yourself at some stage or would like to know more about??

I am always thankful for honest answers and feedback!!

Feeling a little like Laika the dog...

moonwalking with einstein

When a week ago, last monday I packed my little computer into it´s cozy travel-bag, sharpened my pencils and set out to hit the library in my lunch break, I felt enlightened and relieved to have a reason to think again...especially about my work, which I love very dearly.
A week later...again in the library, I find my mind spinning with ideas much like a soyuz rocket. Let´s see, if by May I somehow manage to return the rocket back to the planet earth and come up with a plausible line of inquiry.
I decided after the past panicked January coursework essay hand in-time to approach Module 2 slightly differently. Thinking of the choreographer George Balanchine, who would choreograph the end of a piece first and then work his way backwards (so he knew, where he was heading) ("Dancing on my Grave", Kirkland, G.) I drew up a map of what the final hand in will be about. At the beginning of the last Module I was still busy registering and so on, so this time around I am much more relaxed and more focussed on the things, that are really important.
Working through the fourth reader I brainstormed, what I already know and what competences I have. This gave me a pretty good idea on how big the field is, that I could potentially choose something to research on, from. As a classical dancer trained by British, French, Danish, Russian and American teachers, I have a fairly good understanding of the different aspects of the various techniques taught all over the world. I understand that research in dance/ballet technique is an interesting subject already quite frequently mentioned and has already been done a lot.
Recently a younger dancer in the company approached me for help in search for the right pointe-shoes for her. Many years of experience have taught me, what different brands there are, how they are made and how each dancer has their own perks in sewing and preparing her shoes. Sharing this with her made me feel proud and also think of an interesting point(e) of research.
Work as a dancer has given me a sense of movement and space, musicality and acting skills.
In being a company member and belonging to a theatre I have learnt a lot about social dynamics in groups, social structures and behavior. Ever the observer, I am fascinated by human psychology and find the psychological and sociological aspects of dance highly interesting. A book I stumbled upon some time ago "The Neurocognition of Dance", compiled by a famous dance teacher Martin Puttke and the neuroscientists Thomas Schack and Bettina Bläsing has opened my eyes to new paths ahead.

Next thing I did was draw up a mind-map in order to sort through my jumbled thoughts.

This gives me a pretty good overview and I can modify it as the Module progresses and I am (hopefully) kissed by inspiration.
Now that my soyuz-rocket has been launched, in flight I feel like reading a lot of literature, looking around the vast expanses of the universe..um...web and playing a good deal of ideas ping-pong with colleagues, friends and actually any one who will play with me.
Last sunday I meet up with one of the ballet masters from work. Some years my senior, but from a very similar background to me, the conversation proved very interesting and in many ways inspiring. Although we did in the end drift away from my question of research I can say that our little excursion gave me some more clarity on the area I would like to concentrate on.
I also find Peter Bryants blog extremely helpful. This one really hits the nail on the head to me- especially the five points on what a research problem needs to be!
So, as my journey through space and time is continued and I look out of my rocket´s little window and hope that Einstein was right... ((O;

Kolb´s learning cycle 2.0 ???

The body as an organ of the soul is the result of the informing, creating activity of the soul itself

I am guessing that I could call the option of wireless internet my main source of information. Wherever I go and if I have an appropriate tool, such as my notebook, netbook or my iPod touch and there is internet available I take a look, if I´ve received any e-mails or what is new in Facebook. I deliberately don´t have a smartphone with permanent internet access, as I think it would drive me up the wall. Questions are frequently popping into my head, as I go through life and I am happy to look things up, if they are important enough for me to have remembered them until the evening, or if I have taken note of them, but if I were constantly looking things up on the go, I think my life would be a more dangerous one. (Mobile phones and traffic are definetly not compatible)

At home, other than being connected to my wireless network, I almost always leave the radio switched on. I grew up with my mother listening to BBC Radio 4 on a huge old longwave receiver. My choice of radio stations tend to go in the cultural/thinking allowed direction and many of the ideas I have bloged on are actually things I saw on the radio. In combination with the internet, where you can now quite easily access additional information on the program played, it is something I would never ever want to miss again. I have also found podcasts to listen to on the go quite handy, but I also need a break from everything too, so I take the information giving drugs in healthy doses ((O;

Another important of information to me are books and the library. Without wanting to sound too much like a nerd-face, once again I grew up with books instead of furniture and I still believe you can find anything you want in a book. Books make great friends to pass on, you can use them as a headrest, you can pencil in your own notes at the sides and you can tear out a page you don´t really agree with. Knowledge in finding what you want makes any form of research more efficient, of course and I am quickly learning how to make the most out of the state library, where I am living, which is a storeroom library, but it also provides online versions of articles and degree-papers amongst others. The use of online-libraries is something I still have to accustom to, but in general I can say that the ones I have used are handy, although I hardly ever found the book I was looking for.

Magazines make up a great deal of my life. To me they are more a pleasurable by-product, when taking the train, sitting on the toilet (sorry, but that´s the truth...I have a huge basket chock a block with mags), hanging out in the office at work, spending a day in bed and so on. I used to also read the German weekly newspaper “Die Zeit” on a regular basis, but somehow someone wearing a gray suit and hat came to steal some hours of the day and it became impossible to fit in anymore. If I find something resembling paper and information lying about I pick it up and read, what interests me. Simple. How anyone could ever have thought about getting rid of the printed page seems a mystery to me. I don´t see, how you can wrap your christmas presents with an iPad, nor do I find Kindle´s note-taking facility very user-friendly. I live close to Mainz, where Gutenberg´s invention of movable letters caused a revolution of the printed word in the 15^th century. Maybe there´s something in the air here?

Of course I am also inspired by other people. Even if I don´t always see eye-to-eye with everyone, it feels good to be challenged by another opinion and to be presented with another point of view. I really enjoy reading through other people´s BAPP blogs and I really like, how some people have asked and inspired me to think differently about things. There is always someone around you, who knows something you don´t and I take great pleasure in “tickling” conversations.  

So as I sit on a pile of old magazines, my arms comfortably supported by some books, the radio is joyfully gabbing away in the background and I have my world at my fingertips....I say to myself "life is good" ((O;

"Morality is the symbolic generalization that reduces the full reflexive complexity of doubly contingent ego/alter relations to expressions of esteem"

Although I found the reader on "The Networked Professional" a highly stimulating read, I must admit, that I don´t really agree with challenging the usefulness of every concept, as the failure and success of each individual idea depends very much on the context, the personality of the person dealing with a situation and at what point in their life they are. I found that in a historical context many of the theories have worked in the past, they might not work right now, but could possibly work again in the future.
I also had to think a lot about myself and who and most of all where I am at this moment in my life.

At first I took a good look at the theory of cooperation and the closely affiliated game theory by the political scientist Axelrod. I played a game of "prisoner´s dilemma"and to be quite honest, thought it was rather dull, but then again maybe I should have given it more than one chance...
I can see, how the game theory might help predict, how people, markets, countries and organisms would react to a specific threat, but can´t see how it has helped predict, let alone prevent the many financial crises we seem to be stumbling into (in an "oh..oups...I did not see that coming"-manner), where few are playing a successful game at the expense of many.
Further research led me to the book "After hegemony: cooperation and discord in the world political economy" by Robert Owen Keohane (1984), in which he describes, how cooperation with the hegemony the United States represented after the Second World War, led to an overall survival of the western world and ideas and thus gave me a good enough example of successful cooperation.

"Sophisticated institutionalists do not expect cooperation always to prevail, but they are aware of the malleability of interests any they argue that interdependence creates interest in cooperation" (pg.8)  




Next I decided to take a closer look at "Communities of Practice" and the book by the same name from Etienne Wenger. The general idea of this theory seems to be that learning is part of a process that happens through engagement in social relationships.

"Being alive as human beings means that we are constantly engaged in the pursuit of enterprises of all kinds, from ensuing our physical survival to seeking the most lofty pleasures. As we define these enterprises and engage in their pursuit together, we interact with each other and with the world and we tune our relations with each other and with the world accordingly. In other words, we learn.
Over time, this collective learning results in practices that reflect both the pursuit of our enterprises and the attendant social relations. These practices are thus the property of a kind of community created over time by the sustained pursuit of a shared enterprise. It makes sense, therefore, to call these kinds of communities communities of practice" (pg. 45)


This of course led me to think a lot about the community that comes together every day in the microcosm of a theatre, where sustained engagement of each individual working there, be it technician, musician, actor, singer, seamstress or dancer, leads to overall processes of learning- especially, when personal or professional interests collide. I see a certain need to openness and a will to learn and embrace new and different situations. Especially in the world of art, where the need to cultivate a strong ego through being colorful and different is practiced and leads to a lot of explosions. However sustained engagement within a community of practice such as the theatre also leads to a better understanding for other departments and thus provokes learning.
Personally I find this a useful concept, as I am confronted by it every day. I do however want to strongly hold on to my belief, that you can only learn from another person, if you really want to and if you have the cognitive ability to do so.

Next- without wanting to be to abrupt, but I need to get on with it, I would like to report on my closer look at Social Constructionism. I started off by punching the German word for constructionism in to "Wikipedia". Little to my surprise it came up with many options. There is a philosophy, you can construct international relations, then of course we have our social aspect, the term exists in the psychology of learning, maths, architecture, art and literature. Then I took a good look at the book lying to my left (now covered with little yellow page-markers), "Die Wirklichkeit der Medien" by K. Merten and  S.J. Schmidt. (the reality of media). It explains how Social Constructionism is one of the many forms of constructionism around. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann pioneered this field in 1966, when their book "The social construction of reality " was first published.  One of the first things the book lays out in the first chapter on the reality of the observer is that the term must never be confused with the colloquial version of it meaning a creation of something.


"...Ganz im Gegensatz dazu benutzen Konstruktivsten dieses Wort, um Prozesse zu bezeichnen, in deren Verlauf Wirklichkeitsentwürfe sich herausbilden, und zwar keineswegs willkürlich, sondern gemäß den biologischen, kognitiven und soziokulturellen Bedingungen, denen sozialisierte Individuen in ihrer sozialen und natürlichen Umwelt unterworfen sind. Über so viele Bedingungen kann ein Individuum überhaupt nicht verfügen...Wirklichkeitskonstruktion widerfährt uns mehr als dass sie uns bewusst wird- weshalb wir die Konstruiertheit unserer Wirklichkeit erst dann bemerken, wenn wir beobachten, handeln und kommunizieren...." (aus Die Wirklichkeit der Medien pg.5, "Die Wirklichkeit des Beobachters" by Siegfried J. Schmidt.)


The reader states, that we construct meanings and experiences of the world through social interaction and that effectively our understanding of the world is a construction or creation of our own making. I have always understood and believed in that fact and you cannot deny, that two people- no matter how much they share or how alike they are (even twins), will always experience things differently, depending on their life experience, personality and attitude. We construct our reality, give names to things and I find it interesting to observe, how subtle differences in language for example cause a completely different understanding of the same thing.


"Kaum ein Problem hat die Europäer so beschäftigt wie die Frage nach dem Verhältnis zwischen Sein und Bewusstsein, nach der Möglichkeit oder Unmöglichkeit wahrer bzw. objektiver Erkenntnis." (aus Die Wirklichkeit der Medien pg.6, "Die Wirklichkeit des Beobachters" by Siegfried J. Schmidt.)


(There is hardly a problem that has occupied the Europeans as much as the question of the relationship between the being and the consciousness, of the possibility or impossibility of true or objective knowledge.)


It seems impossible to write about Constructivism without mentioning the German Sociologist Niklas Luhmann. He saw society not as a collection of humans with blood circulating in their veins, but as a closed process of social communication.


"Ein soziales System kommt zustande, wenn immer ein autopoietischer Kommunikationszusammenhang entsteht und sich durch Einschränkung der geeigneten Kommunikation gegen eine Umwelt abgrenzt. Soziale Systeme bestehen demnach nicht aus Menschen, auch nicht aus Handlungen, sondern aus Kommunikationen." Luhmann, Ökologische Kommunikation. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1. Auflage 1986. ISBN 3-531-11775-0, 1986, S. 269.




Maybe it is this strong head through the wall point of view that lead me to the next point (aha...) Connectivism. Obviously today all things are connected, especially through the internet, but it is also very clear to me, that through connecting to other people you can not only learn. I can really associate with the theory that was introduced, that learning does not exist in peoples heads, but is in fact all around us and can be freely accessed (or not) according to our needs. As I am sitting in a library surrounded by thousands of books and at least 20 or so people, reading, studying, typing away at their computers it seems like a logical thing to say.
Connectivism makes complete sense in the fast-paced word we live in today. As our foundations rapidly change you have to be quick to decide and adapt to new situations and thus rapidly choose which connection must be stronger or weaker in this moment. "Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision" Siemens, G. 2004


Right now I feel like I am completely running out of steam (+the library is closing) and probably whoever has read this far should be rewarded a prize. (Alternative Nobel Peace Prize anyone???)
I have covered all points save affiliation, which actually interested me the most out of all the ideas given and lead me to almost completely read...I can not help noticing that I am finding psychology- especially from a social point of view frightfully interesting. Maybe that is the point of it all. I always believed that every performing artist has to have a great understanding of society and all its key players.
I hope I haven´t bored anyone and I wish even more so that the days would have 36 hours to fit in all the reading, thinking and writing I would like to do.