What it looks like My teaching gradually guides the participants through increasingly complex and intense interactions with their own bodies and minds, those of other people and various objects in a class that resembles a mix of Scandinavian-Baltic dance parties, furniture moving, zen-like meditation and a fluent moshpit.
Tools for Tinkering - What I want to teach The aim of my teaching is to start and facilitate a dialogue with dancers, teachers, and choreographers to encourage a systematic way of looking at physical training and bodily maintenance. The constantly changing demands on a dancer call for a training approach that considers each individual's current physical condition to optimise performance and avoid injury. An approach that can serve as a support to any dance or movement training and aims to enable the individual dancers to reach their full potential in their chosen fields of practice.
My teaching is based on general principles that govern movement patterns that generate the highest possible movement efficiency and allows for the greatest range of mobility, while remaining safe through adapting to each body's current structural limits. My aim is to show how and why these principles directly affect the dancer's ability to perform movement patterns that, due to our anatomy and consequent physiology, are the pre-determined foundation for all other movements; rolling; crawling; pushing; pulling; throwing; catching; lifting; squatting; lunging; walking; jumping; running.
Having established these principles and movement patterns as a common ground, my class focus on showing how they relate to dancer's practices through a series of questions:
MOVEMENT PRACTICE(S) > WHAT are you doing? > WHY are you doing it? > WHICH techniques do you utilise to complete a particular task? > UNDER what circumstances? > HOW do you determine the best way to do it, given the circumstances? > HOW does the performance of your movement practice affect your creative working process?
PHYSIOLOGY < > ARTISTRY > How can a movement practice be organised to develop the greatest amount of freedom physically as well as artistically? > How can already acquired movement skills be" jailbroken" to circumvent the confines of the specific technique that gave rise to the skill?
My teaching starts from clear formal expressions of fundamental movement patterns, for example, squats, pushups, and pullups, and gradually move towards more complex movement environments. The main focus is to ensure that precision, safety, and efficiency is prioritised over volume or intensity of training, as well as to provide accurate tools for adjustment of complexity and load according to the individual's needs.
When addressing movement patterns and habits, it is crucial to look beyond the cerebral aspects of movement learning. If a clear understanding of appropriate technique have been attained, but an old pattern or restriction remains, a systematic way of addressing mobility restrictions becomes necessary in order to not assume that practising something repeatedly always will bring one closer to what one is trying to achieve. My teaching aims to empower the dancer to take responsibility for their physical health. To offer a toolbox of basic movement principles to aid the development of whatever the individual dancer desires and a template for how to navigate if problems arise.