Fintan O'Hara

The environment I attempted to set was one where the concept of success and failure, or good and bad were not as present as we are used to in our complicated educational systems. I offered the youngsters I worked with material – I showed them dance, I gave them exercises to solve and asked them to create. What is clear, is that I could not smoothly and precisely communicate what I wanted from them. This made for a great excuse to step into the mode of trust. Concepts like failure, being bad at something, and perfection left the room. The accepted margin of error grew to the size of the earth itself. The youngsters were not worried about understanding the exercise correctly anymore, they just went with what they interpreted as the exercise. Whatever the youngsters found in their inquiries and explorations of the given material, they could return with and share what they had found. In this process; the hierarchy of findings had flattened; opposites no longer cancelled each other but complemented. Limitations like bad sleep or an injury did not mean that someone could not participate. On the contrary, these conditions gave the opportunity to start an exploration into the material from another starting point, inevitably ending up with a different result, again expanding the research. Let alone the complex histories that these young beneficiaries carried with them. These histories could not be shared verbally, as we did not understand each other, and yet, these histories were acknowledged by the pedagogical shapes that took place.