Papers from the Teachers’ Academy online
26 November 2009
Last 1-4 July, the 4th ELIA Teachers’ Academy took place at the National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria. The papers from keynotes and presentations are now online – at last! – at http://www.elia-artschools.org/teachers_artes/papers. Instead of the book publication we announced earlier on this site, there will now be a film compilation – for all the workshops have been filmed.
You can also find pictures of the conference at http://www.elia-artschools.org/meetings/TA, and the live blogs from the conference below at http://eliaartschools.wordpress.com/category/teachers-academy/.
Pictures from the TA
7 November 2009
ELIA Teachers’ Academy, Sofia, Bulgaria, 1-4 July 2009
We got pictures from the Teachers’ Academy at last. In fact, we got 2GB worth of pictures – so we had to downsize a bit and make a selection. For some odd reason, I couldn’t make a gallery on WordPress, so they’re online at http://www.elia-artschools.org/meetings/TA.
If you’d like to have one in larger version, or know if you’re on a photo we didn’t put online, please drop a line.
TA publication
5 July 2009
At the closing ceremony, NATFA rector Stanislav Semerdjiev announced that there will be a publication about the Teacher’s Academy, which will include the presentation papers and keynote speeches. Photographers from NATFA have been busy catching the whole conference in the lens, and many workshops and presentations have been filmed; this material will also find its way into the publication, though we hope to prefeature some of it on the ELIA site.
Like a puppet on string
3 July 2009
Live blogging from the Teachers’ Academy, 1-4 July, Sofia
I’ve just learned to pretend I’m a puppet. Carla Delfos likes to tell that her great formative experience was when she was six and an artist told her to imagine she was a tree. In the workshop I was just in, May Früh explained to a Bulgarian student what a ‘pendulum’ is and for half a second she was a clock – and she didn’t try to act like one. Read the rest of this entry »
Live blogging from the Teachers’ Academy, Sofia, 1-4 July
There’s nothing like Loyke Lomine’s body language. When I came to his presentation on sms learning I was just out of a workshop on Qiang dance. The Qiang are an ethnical minority in China whose dances, Zhang Ping tells us, bear the character of a mountain people’s body language. The Qiang cultural heritage suffered badly from last year’s earthquake, and Zhang and his wife are very active preserving it. Here, while we see it on video, his wife reproduces Qiang dance on stage. We should get a professional dancer to reproduce Loykie’s presentation too I guess. Read the rest of this entry »
“That was boring. Tell it again.”
2 July 2009
Live blogging from the Teachers’ Academy in Sofia, 1-4 July
The 4th ELIA Teachers’ Academy started today in Sofia, and from this blog, we’ll be covering the event. It’s been eleven years since the conference Strangers and Brothers, when we were just beginning to think of Eastern Europe as Europe, and a lot has changed. Then we were talking about defining a new collective future. Now we’re living that future, and ELIA and NATFA – the National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts in Sofia – are running the artesnet network together. The discussion is now about wikis and texting as tools for teaching, there are African and Chinese perspectives, and discussions about artistic research and the creative industries are never far away. But the NATFA building and the lecture hall are still unmistakebly communist.
