Teaching is central to the Freiburg Festival. Teachers are key to the festival as they are responsible for preparing the structure and holding the space. Intense preparation takes place during the teachers’ meeting before the festival to decide responsibilities and ensure that the spaces for improvisation are supported and held.

Those chosen to teach at the Festival gain considerable affirmation of their position and contribution to the global CI community.

They bring their expertise from teaching outside the festival context into the festival context, and then take much inspiration in teaching back in their homes or other places.

Teaching and learning does not only take place in the more structured intensives and classes, but also informally in jams and labs. How different is the learning in such spaces from the more formal mode of appreciating the form?

Our documentary opens up many questions around how CI can be used to teach outside of a specific dance or improvisation based context. The question of how it can be used to teach within university settings is a question of particular interest to Mike Poltorak, who uses CI to teach the kind of filmmaking that is sensitive to people and their interests. He is also particularly interested in how CI based exercises can be used to teach concepts that are particularly difficult to grasp through reading and discussion alone.

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