In February The Project Group 2013 will begin.
This is a closed research group where each individual will bring their own movement-based project to the group and work with it for 9 months, supported by each other and by me. Each project will find its own crystallisation in time to be shared with the rest of the group in September.
I discovered that my sense that this kind of group was needed as an extension of the familiar workshop format was reflected in a book called Dancing at the Edge: Competence, Culture and Organisation in the 21st Century' written by Maureen O'Hara and Graham Leicester. I found this extract in the chapter about Labs and enabling conditions for learning 21st century competencies:
This is a closed research group where each individual will bring their own movement-based project to the group and work with it for 9 months, supported by each other and by me. Each project will find its own crystallisation in time to be shared with the rest of the group in September.
I discovered that my sense that this kind of group was needed as an extension of the familiar workshop format was reflected in a book called Dancing at the Edge: Competence, Culture and Organisation in the 21st Century' written by Maureen O'Hara and Graham Leicester. I found this extract in the chapter about Labs and enabling conditions for learning 21st century competencies:
The provision of a protected space, supported in a disciplined way (by particularly skilled individuals, producers or processes) in which people can collaborate and learn together outside the dominant culture. Properly designed and supported these can become the rehearsal spaces for persons of tomorrow to find their voice, flex their 21st century competencies and develop the confidence to take them into the world. (p.138)
And here are some other extracts that I liked:
‘Persons of tomorrow are adept at living with paradox and ambiguity. They recognize that there are numerable workable stories about the world, workable cosmologies and acknowledge that even when we talk about universals there will always be elements of the world that remain wrapped in mystery...
The capacity to see multiple truths, to hold opposed ideas in a single mind, is in some ways a purely mental discipline. It involves …taking a perspective that goes beyond and embraces others. But it is also embodied. It is lived in practice...
Persons of tomorrow are adept at displaying competence simultaneously in both the dominant culture and the emerging culture, in order to support the development of the latter. Like the jazz pianist playing 5s against 13s. It is a capacity so skillful it appears invisible. This capacity also shows up as a cultural competence, a flair for working across cultures...
Expanding their ways of knowing,….the person of tomorrow seeks to understand the one-off, the unique, the subjective experience and the dynamic interplay between being and its context...
To a knowledge that is located, the person of tomorrow will add appreciation of collective intelligence which in some circumstances can contain knowledge in the form of emergent patterns and group consciousness. Such processes may account for those moments when seemingly out of nowhere comes the formation of a ‘second sight’ intuition that later proves to have been prescient. To reason and equation we add image, story and metaphor as powerful ways of encapsulating dimly perceived truth. And - thinking in terms of a participatory, subject/subject relational world - we come to recognise that all knowledge is local, coloured and framed by culture and context...
Persons of tomorrow are always wary of abstraction...
Complex systems, like life itself, are fundamentally dynamic. The person of tomorrow understands this and always appreciates that knowledge is in motion. The only distinction in nature between ‘structure’ and ‘flow’ is time: the whirlpool coexists with the stream and cannot exist without it; trees, glaciers even mountains are in constant motion – if we had the eyes to see it. We can appreciate structure or flow depending on what we choose to observe. Western thought has tended to privilege the world of things and the properties that they have, rather than the invisible processes of change by which all things are just moments of relative stability...
Persons of tomorrow are not afraid of complexity – indeed they thrive on it. They know that the secret to not becoming overwhelmed is paradoxically to live in the unfolding situation as fully as they can. Like the children’s bear hunt, they know that they can’t go round it, can’t go over it, can’t ignore it : they are ready to go through it...
[Just as an artist trusts her own integrity and growth] and challenges her audience to grow with her, as each person’s life- map continues to evolve, the person of tomorrow needs a reliable compass and little by little knows their own ‘true north’.’
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