Teaching
The class Peter developed over the course of his two years in the Research Cycle at P.A.R.T.S. has it’s base in the teaching experience and work of his BA studies in Bratislava. Moreover, he is accumulating experience, information, and ideas in his current teaching around Europe.
The class is often shared with amateurs or non-dancers and people of very different ages and backgrounds.
Letting go - class
My class has developed and evolved since my studies at P.A.R.T.S. as a space for me to go back to myself. For in working with non-dancers and staying curious about our sociopolitical contexts for dance art, I have realized I am not interested in dance technique as it is known or defined. Rather, I see movement and dance as a means for me to (re-)access my full potential. My question for myself at all times is simply: "Where do I stand in my own way, and what makes me hold back?". By becoming aware of patterns, beliefs, thoughts, fears, or habits, I know now I can let go of them.
So, although I work with pragmatic or grounding elements of anatomical information and physical coordination to seek out elusive realms of thought, emotion, and intuition, for me, letting go refers to more than releasing muscular tension and finding physical efficiency. In my class, I want to come back to a space I believe we are all capable of entering: This is a space of total creativity, which is innate to all humans, I believe, and can be used effectively in any life situation and constellation. For me, it is a state of being that we all know and have passed through in our childhood. The difference between childhood experience and now, however, is the level of awareness we apply to being in such a state and the possibility to remain in it consciously.
More concretely, in the class I offer, I work with methods, principles, and exercises through the body and movement into the core of the body to go back to myself. In this process, I strengthen my body, and I realign with my core. At the same time, the experience of accessing this space allows me to understand where I can expand, what I can let go, how I can let go, and what I have been capable of doing while, for some reason, not allowing myself to fully manifest. In other words, in the class I offer, the work has to do with “doing the best I can right now and learning from the observation of this personal process” rather than being busy with "doing right” or “doing well".
I am very busy with a personal learning process, but I use many verbal and nonverbal methods of sharing this with groups. Learning from each other’s methods and strategies for being breaks the illusion of us somehow being alone or isolated by particular experiences. For this kind of sharing to arrive in a genuine way, I must create a safe environment. Thanks to this, the space of my class is safe enough to allow me to fail, so that I can expand in real-time with others in all the directions my own, rich potential offers.