How to play?:
„Keep up with yourself!” is a dance and movement session for self-awareness with musical background. It is a guided experiment as well as a game, which does not require any previous dance training. The sessions are open to anybody with no expectations or restrictions, regardless of gender, body shape, or movement affinity. One of the best ways to get to know ourselves is diving in human interactions and connections. With that said, when participants do group or partnering exercises during the sessions, or even when they just spontaneously connect to each other by moving, they have a great chance to observe their own personality, their operating patterns or social expressions, and, as a result, to discover themselves, on a deeper level. In a „Keep up with yourself”-session, our goals are to better understand our social relationships, to develop our social-interpersonal skills and empathy for fellow human beings, to activate our attention and to improve our ability to cooperate; we’d also aim to enhance the perception of ourselves and to mobilize our intuition. The free movement sections will also help participants to enter the flow state and to experiment creativity.
Skills improved
Aims to improve the social-emotional skills.
Background
Both a longer (one and a half hour) and a shortened (45 minutes) version of the session have been tested so far. Two longer sessions have already taken place outside the framework of CASSI among university students at the University of Pécs, such as some shortened versions among high schoolers at the CASSI workshop in December 2022. Part of our further plans is to test such session in the form of an extended version (meaning regular sessions in a closed group setting) during a school year, in the future. The number of participants is maximized to 12 people due to the intimate nature of these sessions in which working individually, with partners or in smallgroup settings would all happen in the form of specific exercises. In the longer version, in addition to the instructed, guided parts, improvisational and meditative elements can also appear.
The creators
Bettina Botos, member of CASSI and first-year PhD student, Sociology of Education Programme at the Doctoral School of Education and Society, University of Pécs. She is researching the possibilities of social and emotional skill development in education through the methodological tools of dance and movement therapy. The session forms the basis of the doctoral research of its creator. With the support of these sessions, she aims to answer her research questions and to verify the established hypotheses through various qualitative measurements and some quantitative ones as well.
