Je suis une école
Author: Boris Charmatz

Art, pedagogy, estetics, political

In 2003, the choreographer Boris Charmatz and the association Edna set up a pedagogic research and creation facility called Bocal.
The idea behind this temporary, nomadic project was to test the school in terms of aesthetics and politics by bringing together fifteen persons aged 20 to 30: dancers, physicians, artists, designers, writers, circus artists, and musicians. They all embarked on an “endless” adventure. This wasn’t about obtaining a diploma, or perfecting or acquiring skills, but about thinking of the school as a creative power and about activating its emancipatory potential.
In different contexts, the participants reflected on their training tools, examined the figures of professor and student, invented the modalities of learning, in short, invented a curriculum as a set of possible artistic acts…
This project, which examined the institution, without however seeking to found a new model school, generated a vast repertory of ideas, debates, and projects ranging from action to utopia, to creation and teaching.
Without forgetting the limitations imposed by the “real” on any practice of collective invention, “Je suis une école” affords a better understanding of how the search for a singular pedagogy helps to achieve autonomy, even while raising multiple questions. This is evident: by recounting the adventure of this original experience, Boris Charmatz confronted much larger issues. He thus evoked Jacques Rancière and his “ignorant schoolmaster,” Roland Barthes and the concept of the idiorrhythmic, Robert Fillious and Isadora Duncan, as well as, by way of a critique of the place of art and experimentation (and hence of the possible) in our society, contemporary politics which informs the whole project.

Edition : Les Prairies ordinaires
Collection : « Essais »
Diffusion : Les Belles Lettres
Réalisation : Les Prairies ordinaires
Conception et coordination éditoriales : Angèle Le Grand
Conception graphique couverture : Maëlle Dault
Principe d’adaptation graphique pages intérieures : Jérôme Saint Loubert Bié
Impression : Compagnons du Sagittaire à Rennes
Dépôt légal : avril 2009
ISBN : 978-2-35096-037-1

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