Dream journey to the Unknown. Searching for Dialogue in Dance Education by Eeva Antilla
Doctoral Dissertation, Theatre Academy, Department of Dance and Theatre Pedagogy, Helsinki 2003

…I am looking for what I have been longing for ever since I entered the world of dance: relation.

I was moved to read this book after having been briefly present inside (that is the most accurate way to put it) a Performance Lecture created by Eeva Antilla and her Dance Pedagogy students from Theatre Institute Helsinki, which took place inside the UNI project at Zodiac Sidestep Festival. This was a unique social situation in which play, pedagogy, dance, and the philosophical act merged and interpenetrated, a truly flexistential event in which everyone did precisely their own thing, generating not chaos but a beautiful fractal social super-organism.

Initially I wanted to see if children could become empowered by dance, i.e., become stronger actors in their own life and in their community, and become more conscious of their life situation.

Dream journey Into the Unknown is Eeva’s published Doctoral thesis in which she explores her own practice as a dance teacher, tracking a two-year stint as a dance teacher with one particular class of children. She probes and investigates her own ambitions and assumptions, and holds her teaching practice up to a mirror in order to discover exactly what she does and does not want to achieve as a pedagogue and as a human being. What results is a gently profound meditation on the relationship between teacher and student, self and other, creative citizen and creative practice, and the form and necessity of a dialogical way of working.

This study became, however, an emancipatory, self-reflective process for myself.
…I have learned to think about teaching, and to think about how to think.
Anyone who desires to be free has to become aware.

Eeva uses typography to distinguish between tracks of thought: her narrative, reflective, discursive voice, the main one; her immediate notes and observations in citations from her journal; her own reflective “inner talk” that arose when she reviewed records or recordings of her work sessions; documentary evidence she has collected in interviews and feedback sessions with co-workers and students; and her intellectual sources, particularly Martin Buber and Paolo Freire.

A constant interplay between moments of insight and of dimness in constructing my position and its justification create constant fluctuation along the continuum from understanding to emancipating to asking new questions, which again lead to deconstructing.

This is a fundamentally important tactic, for it provides Eeva with an abundance of possibilities for movement as she writes. There is also a distinct lack of fear of using the ‘I’. this claiming of her own thoughts, even when contradictory, allows her to enter into true dialogical relationship with herself, so that the text not only powerfully elucidates a dialogical way of working in education, but in its own unfolding the structure mirrors the content.

… while no one liberates himself by his own efforts alone, neither is he liberated by others… The correct method lies in dialogue. (quoting Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Penguin, 1972)

The great challenge for the democratic-minded educator is how to transmit a sense of limit that can be ethically integrated by freedom itself. (quoting Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, democracy and civic courage, Rowman & Littlefield, 1998)

…freedom is a result of dialogue and praxis that lead to .. critical consciousness.

This is an important book about education, about our relationship to knowledge, about how we negotiate learning experiences, but even more importantly, how we negotiate control over the naming and judging of experience, and how we as teachers impose significance on events, and in the process teach children how to do the same. There is a concommittant loss of creative autonomy for both student and teacher, that primacy of our own subjectivity being silenced and disempowered. The challenge for the teacher is to open up to the possibility of the student deciding what is important about a given situation, to be willing to allow the student draw their own lessons, and at the same time having the courage and authority to assert his or her own significances, and lead and contain the educational experience.

Learning to take responsibility for one’s actions, for the whole group and for the mutual process is everyone’s task in the group.

This is also an important book for anyone in the position of trying to write their way through a lengthy thesis or create a body of writing reflecting on their own work. There is a great and manifold danger of being swallowed up by other people’s thinking. The pressures of the academy can create a reflexive desire to seek validation for one’s own intuitive feelings about one’s work, rather than illumination of the path already trod and lying ahead.

… the acceleration syndrome within academia, churning out journals, books, doctorates etc, – terrified to take time in doing so. A real case of “more haste, less speed”, caution and measure have become the new leprosy in research, bigger is better, size is everything, quantity over quality, speed is the new black, god is dead and we have killed him! from ‘Journal Entry: The Void’ by Mary Fox, in Framemakers: Choreography as an Aesthetics of Change

Eeva models an excellent praxis: the two main philosophical sources she works with are chosen because they shed light on her own practice, her own journey, her own quest(ion); because they in some way add to her trajectory, fuel her search-movement. And then, in that dialogical movement between practice + reflection, theory and documentation, and in her clever and imaginative structuring of the book, she enables herswelf, and the reader, to truly dance, so that, step by step, she lays the dance floor upon which she can conduct a life’s work.

Because man is always becoming and always incomplete, and because reality is always transformational, education is an ongoing process, rooted in the dynamic present and constantly remade in the praxis. Moreover, it is prophetic and hopeful: it entails perceiving reality as limiting, but not fated and unalterable, and thus challenging. (citing Freire, 1972)

…when I can trust the process and share power, I can relax from imposing, exercising power over others.

Maybe giving oneself completely up to dialogue entails giving up a linear concept of time. Maybe learning to live a life in dialogue means letting go of fixed purpose, of ends and aims, and respecting the present moment.