Jugglers’ workshop – Berlin – February 2012

EduCircation Teachers’ workshop – Juggling

Four experienced juggling teachers will be each giving one day of lessons to 14 young teachers. The subject matters will be around speciality elements of juggling and the days finish with one to two hours of exchange based on the mornings work. The purpose of the week is to investigate the methods of transference of information in our field.

On the Tuesday there is a performance situation presenting the juggling of two of the teachers – Marco Paolitti and Alan Blim.

The last day (Friday the 10th) is for hopefully bringing together gathered realizations about teaching.

Aim

The aim of the workshop is to present, discuss and share various elements and methods of teaching juggling to intermediate and advanced students.

Five experienced teachers will be giving each 4.5 hours of workshop and leading 1.5 hours of discussion on their topic on each day of the five day week. Ten student teachers of juggling will be participating, gathered from the five partner cities (including Berlin).

Each teacher will be asked to choose a specialty from their repertoire with which they feel secure enough to analyze their methodology and transfer elements of their specific teaching technique. We expect the balance to be ca. 60% teaching a juggling technique and 40% teaching of teaching methods.

We are hoping that not only the student teachers learn more of juggling and the teaching theory, but that the five teachers can experience exchange and learn from each other therefore making general progress in this field amongst active practitioners.

The higher vision of the event is to document much current knowledge in the topic of teaching juggling and share it with the wider (juggling) community.

For this purpose we are budgeting a short documentary and the following reports.

1. Each student teacher will be asked to give a written report of their experiences.
2. The teachers will be asked to give a written report summarizing their material with a section of new inspiration gathered during the event. We see this as a good way to bring focus to developments in this field.
3. An independent but experienced external observer will be presenting a protocol of the workshop. The expectations of the documentary film are to present the following:
4. Short interviews with the teachers demonstrating a brief version of their chosen topic.
5. Short interviews with the teachers explaining their view of one key topic chosen for each teacher. For example: ‘what roll do you see technique having in creative work?’ or ‘in which form do you find juggling lessons effective and useful?’ or ‘is juggling only ‘alive’ as a performance art or is it (equally) justifiable for example as a therapy or hobby?’
6. general visual impressions of the workshop
7. interviews with the students asking after their strongest inspiration from the event.

The film and the reports will be made available to download on the Educircation website. All European circus schools will be informed of the links.
We have arranged that a summary report can be published in the European juggling magazine – Kaskade.

We hope also that through the workshop the foundations will be laid for a self-sustaining yearly meeting of this kind.

Alan “Blim” Sturge-Rocha, Jonglier Katakomben gGmbH, Berlin