Pixel International Conferences

This 25 minute oral presentation will approach the making of dances with heterogeneous groups of adolescents with special needs (Förderschule). Short video examples of task-based choreographies will demonstrate how dance can be a powerful and motivating tool to train physical, cognitive, social and communicational skills by proposing tasks or problems to be resolved with whichever physical and cognitive abilities one has. They have been developed to provide appealing frameworks for adolscents, to stimulate their creativity and to challenge their conception of movement and selves as well as their coordinative skills.

The medium video has proven to be more adequate than that of live stage performance, the latter being either daunting or unknown to the students. It provides a familiar space of representation, accessible tools (mobile phones), evokes popular narratives and forms and enables the shaping and reflecting of one's performance and self-image, a crucial process in this phase of their development. The identification with the medium and the resulting products motivate the students to face challenges on different levels:

- composition (choice of content and aesthetics)

- developing the skills needed to appear as desired (technique)

- understanding the spatiotemporal relations between the frame, the actual

space and the logistical implications of the shoot (abstraction)

- understanding the relation between individual contributions and

desires and those of the others

- moving between different modes of presence (creating, performing, reflecting)

In a particular example of task-based video-dance, the video, once filmed, is played back in reverse. This proved to increase the motivation by making special effects  possible (taking off a jacket, for example, looks spectacular in reverse) while at the same time complicating simple things tremendously. If movements were to appear “normal” in the resulting video, they would have to be performed in reverse during the shooting, which demands high levels of abstraction and complex coordination skills.

Using video and task-based methods de-hierarchizes the creative process in two important ways: it does not prescribe any particular aesthetics and helps the students gain knowledge in actively shaping and reflecting their self-image through technologies that surround them on a daily basis.