There are so many moments, that I received feedback. In very many different forms.
There have been moments in my life that were dedicated to learning how to give feedback. This is one of the perks of doing a Psychology degree and a coaching degree: in the end you find yourself surrounded by people who are incredibly skilled in giving feedback. Sandwiching anything that you offer them, by hand, in written form, it doesn’t matter: they’d catch it and wrap it tightly in a sandwich before it hits the ground.
Then when diving deeper and deeper into the arts, I noticed that the feedback I received would not always be so kindly wrapped up for it to land softly into your often ‘too open’ body. Creation processes would often be tensed, because we’d always be working on too big of a project in too little time. So no time to formulate your feedback well. And then, once premiered, we’d receive any kind of reaction: hot from the source and preferably directly after playing. This could mean the most beautiful and honest impressions of an audience, but also the most negative and blunt reactions I could imagine.
The most constructive feedback moments I can remember were during my time of A.PART Festival in adastudios Berlin, where I was mentored by Julek Kreutzer. She’d come into the studio with me, where I’d present her an excerpt of what I was working on and she’d ask me before giving feedback what my questions were in what I was sharing. She’d share her impressions, references and questions with me, while integrating mine.
After this festival, it was Julek and … who asked me to join as an invited artist to ABOUT DANCE festival at Lake Studios Berlin. During this festival, we talked about how our dance practices could become or stay process based. I also had the opportunity to do a work-in-progress showing of my solo ‘On the Borderline of Humanization’ and was invited to actively search for a way that this showing could become part of my research and help me in the continuation of it.
It was my first time presenting something outside of an education system, so I was searching for ways how to engage with my audience. My main focus was that I wanted the audience to engage with my sharing on an experience-based way, I wanted them to feel the work, to engage on a physical level with it.
I decided to hand out little papers on which I’d ask them to share their sensory or imaginative impressions, in a drawing or in a word.
In the end I thus found myself with many little papers, with many different kind of impressions, little drawings or words. But I did miss the dialogue, the exchange with the audience, to have a better understanding of how they’d experienced it.
It was a nice attempt, but there was something missing in the feedback process.