TEACHING
PASSION FRUIT teaching program
- PURPOSES:
Besides giving regular dance workshops to give back to the community, Tatiana is interested in giving
back to the non-dancing communities as well, to help people through dance. She will form a
collaboration with Mai Le Ho to create a teaching program to empower women in particular.
Mai Le and Tatiana will help build confidence, connect people from different backgrounds, and help
them feel secured in their identity. This can be achieved using the core values of the hip-hop and
house culture - Respect, Love, Unity, Give back, Self-development, Identity, Constant creativity,
Persistence. Values that create transferable skills and increase their self-motivation to become who
they want to be. They believe that increasing their creativity will help them to be more confident and
we hope they'll apply this enhanced confidence into all other areas in their lives.
We consider the personal experience (dance or different art skills, personal life struggles, professional
experiences etc.) of the people in the community we intervene in, as an equal tool for the success of
the work. It’s a partnership.
Why this project? They come from different countries but were both touched by those two cultures
that brought them together. As professional dancers they both struggled towards this journey of being
a dancer and grew from it and learned so much about themselves as individuals and women. Being a
dancer itself requires being able to accept the struggle of being judged, push harder, dance even if you
are sick or tired, accept jobs we don’t want to do, discipline, the hard work (intense training), the
competition between dancers, women, and men, the physical injuries, the non-steady schedules etc.
But we experienced also beautiful things such as : social skills, better self-confidence, entrepreneurial
spirit, ambitiousness, creative assets, cultures knowledge (traveling, meeting people from different
countries), self-acceptance, accepting others, inspiring people, coaching people, being leaders etc...
Women is the first communities we are inspired by to work with but we truly believe that it can be
useful for any communities, whether they are oppressed in any type of way or not (for employees in
an enterprise for instance).
Tatiana’s studies as an adult educator at the University of Geneva in Switzerland (Master Degree) and
a formation she did along with Mai le at DITS (Dancing in The Streets): Dance & Social Practice
Incubator, facilitated by Elizabeth Johnson and Paloma McGregor and helped them to structure this
program
.
- GOALS:
- To gain an appreciation for the House and Hip-Hop cultures.
- To gain knowledge about the foundations (steps and vocabulary).
- To develop a sense of rhythm and musicality.
- To learn how to freestyle using the different tools that will be taught in class.
- To develop creativity within those two dance styles.
- To identify the students strengths in order to create a teamwork using each individual’s competencies
(for example create a piece, organize a dance event, etc.)
- STRUCTURE OF THE CLASS:
The students will learn some of the basics and how to get creative within those styles through routines,
freestyle exercises, foundation drill exercises, and exchanges.
- FORMAT OF THE PROGRAM
(The duration and modalities of the program can be reorganized at
your convenience):
Their preferred format is an intensive course of one to two weeks with up to 3 hours of teaching per
day. Ideally, they'd like to come back at a later date to work again with the same group of people. This
gives them all the opportunity to:
- Build long term projects
- Assess social impact
- Be a motivating factor the group to know there will be a follow up,
they are also open to work according to specific demands, for example:
- once per week over the course of 3-6 months
- One-time workshops
** This format is basically adjustable according to the public we are working with.
- LONG TERM GOALS WITH THIS PROJECT:
- Create a method for all the facilitators to intervene with the community. The facilitators must
be (mainly, but can be from another community) from the hip-hop, house and any club or
social community. The idea and the principles behind it is that our communities (Hip-Hop and
House) emerge from a situation of struggle, where the goals, of those so called “cultures”,
were to heal people and improve ourselves. Therefore, we believe that the people in our
community understand the process naturally, because they understand the culture and the
struggle behind it. That explains the choice of the source (origin) of the facilitators.
- We also would love to include some of the people from the different communities we worked
with as facilitators
