Hi! My name is Reettaleena Rauhala, I am currently facilitating the CREATE project at Hurja Piruetti. This project is part of my Master’s dissertation research, in which I am dreaming up an example of what holistic dance education could be.
In CREATE, I work together with five dancers, exploring ways to tap into their own creative energy. From my perspective as the teacher, this kind of working calls for space holding, which to me means building containers within which it is safe for the participants to wander, get lost, and find new. In practice, these containers are, for example, suggestions for starting points from which we together begin an exploration towards the unknown.
This way of working feels both liberating and challenging for me. It is wonderful to let go of the need to be the teacher who holds all the answers, and instead make space for the wisdom and knowledge that exists in each of us. To me it means acknowledging that we are all interconnected, feeling human beings, who have something valuable to share. At the same time, this is precisely the challenge and the research question: how to hold space for the diverse experience and knowledge that is present in class?
I hope that taking part in this project will give the participants a stronger sense of agency: that they can have an impact in artistic processes, that they are artists themselves and capable of creating wonderful things. I also hope that through this way of working, the participants learn to better listen to their embodied experience, and this way find their way home, into the body.