Dance as a Gesture of Listening: pedagogical strategies in a university course during the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

This article intends to reflect on the pedagogical strategies created to sustain the space of relationships between teachers and students, between students and their bodies and between their bodies and the world. Its discusses the experience of an academic dance course, which, between 2020 and 2022, needed to stop face-to-face activities due to the covid-19 pandemic. More than to pauses or suspensions, we want to draw attention on the nature of the possible movements, especially those related to the sense of listening. If technology allowed an experience of hypervisualization and hyperexposure, through cameras that displayed a substitute for physical contact, little was said about the experience of listening, a sense that suggests a different form of contact. The development of audio classes made it possible to create a common and intimate space at the same time. Hearing is the sense of interiority: it brings the world to the center of the individual and, also of immersion: it promotes a dive into reality (LE BRETON, 2016). But listening also allows contact with alterity, letting in what comes from outside, transforming the distant into closeness. What kind of opening of the body does the listening process involves? What kind of knowledge is involved there? Is the listening gesture a posture (FLUSSER, 1994) or a body movement, which expresses availability for the other? These questions amplify concerns about how the body's senses can be shaken by the scale of the catastrophe, as well as the importance of listening in anthropological research and how it challenges to understand a post-pandemic world.