Working with understanding the sensed: a narrative about a dance project at an orphanage in Russia is a paper based on a thesis for the postgraduate program Dance Partnership and Pedagogy at the National School of Contemporary Dance in Denmark (2008–10). The project was initiated by the partnership between the School of Contemporary Dance and the Greenhouse Project (Zelyonyi Dom) at the Orphanage # 9 in St. Petersburg, Russia. Zelyonyi Dom is a dance development project including 20 children from 8 to 12 years of age. A group of 9 children participated in the educational-dance-performance project discussed in this paper. The ten-day project was carried out in March 2010. The performance Petrushka premiered at the Fairytale Theatre in St. Petersburg. It was the first time the participating children performed on a real stage and they did so for a sold out 400 seat theatre. The project works with creative dance that approaches dancing, teaching and researching from a phenomenological perspective. It adopts a holistic view on the body, the psyche and the world and attempts to encounter the phenomena openly by suspending pre-made assumptions. The research explores moments of learning using the concept of attunement (“stemthed”) as it has been developed by Kirsten Fink-Jensen (1998). What is sensed in the dance space with the children, and how can one describe the sensed and nonverbal in words?
