Considering the Ontological Premises for Tools in Artists’ Education–on Poiesis and Composition

This article considers the ontological premises for tools in artists’ education, specifically in choreography studies at the master-of-arts level. The topic has proven to be crucial in planning and executing a curriculum of study in the contemporary age of pluralistic aesthetic intentions as any tool, as habitually understood, is ready-to-use according to its disclosed purpose and thus has, in a way, already solved some aspects of the singular research question posed between the artist and the prevailing world. The topic of tools turns out to be a wider question of contemporary poetics (techniques, methods, knowledge) and of ontological considerations of the nature of poiesis and artwork.

The topic of contemporary poetics was extensively discussed in a 2011-2013 Erasmus Intensive project, which was an educational collaboration among six European master’s programmes in dance and physically based performance in which the writer took part. This article reports some aspects of that discussion and elaborates on a traditionally widely used concept in choreography education–namely, composition. The article tackles the complex issue of poetics and tools by, firstly, discussing poiesis and the causes to which artwork is indebted and, secondly, by searching in some ontological premises for the notion of composition. The article presents a view of composition derived from Martin Heidegger’s elaborations of logos: Logos is letting something be seen in its togetherness with something–letting it be seen as something. (Heidegger 1962, 56). Following this notion, I propose a view to composition as a certain togetherness in relatedness in which case the concept of composition might serve both as reflective knowledge of construction and as a deep research question in artists’ creative processes.