„What is characteristic of aesthetic experience is that by looking, describing, thinking, and interrogating artwork, we make ourselves new. Works of art – whether pictures or writings or dances or songs – rework the raw materials of our default organization. The engagement with an artwork is an engagement with oneself that tends to alter us, to reorganize us. This is why artworks offer something like emancipation: they free us from the ways that we happen to find ourselves, organized by habit, by culture, by history, and even by biology. This entanglement is the key to understanding our true nature. [...] This is because the aesthetic is much more widespread and abiding than even art and art-making; it is as basic and as original as the fact of consciousness itself. The aesthetic is a live possibility, an opportunity, and a problem, wherever we find ourselves. We are not fixed, stable, defined, and known; the very act of trying to bring ourselves into focus reorganizes and changes us. We are an aesthetic phenomenon.“ (Noë 2023b: 11)

Dear readers, dear students, and dear colleagues, before I begin translating my thoughts into written words, I would like to make a short remark: This is not an academic text; it is chaos, a long poem comprised of thoughts and experiences to be delivered and shared; it is a letter to the students I am working with; it is the wish to reflect upon the process of sharing knowledge and its relation to my own artistic practice; it is an attempt to describe and structure my teaching methodology for dance and choreography. Since I started working as an ‘artist-teacher’ in academic institutes, I have been asking myself: how can I share my own artistic practice to support students throughout their learning process? How is my artistic intuition entangled with the theoretical and practical concerns of students of education, media, culture and human sciences? This text responds to this open-ended question, with many different answers: How to share my artistic interest and methodology, and what is my role as an ‘artist-teacher’ within the academic structure?

Regelmäßig versuchen wir Menschen die Dinge in Segmente aufzuteilen, um sie zu erfassen; zugleich erfahren wir die Sinnhaftigkeit der Teilsegmente oft aber nur im Blick auf das Ganze. Die Autorinnen des Beitrags „Nicht in Sparten denken. Zum pädagogischen Potential einer spartenverbindenden Projektarbeit zwischen Tanz und Literatur“ lenken ihren spezifischen, biographisch begründeten Blick auf ganze, individuelle […]

„Theater, Tanz, Tanztheater? Ich denke nicht in solchen Sparten. Was wir hier in der Schaubühne mit dem gleichberechtigten Nebeneinander von Tanz und Theater versuchen, ist, von diesen die Kunst einschränkenden Begriffen wegzukommen. Alles kann Theater sein und das Einzige was zählt, ist Qualität.“ (Sasha Waltz)(1) Entgrenzung der Künste Spätestens seit der Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts […]