Testimonials about the Bachelor's Programme in Dance Performance

Pénélope Touvier, graduated 2023

This programme is good for you if you search for a deeply caring and non-competitive learning environment. SKH offers a highly challenging dance education, yet fostered with a philosophy of care. During those three years in school, I always felt supported by peers, teachers, staff and the forest nearby. What I take with me after graduation are important experiences of connectedness as well as tools and practices encouraging sustainable ways to relate to humans and more than human beings.

Expect to take part in a handful of eclectic choreographic proposals and approaches to dance and performance. The program is built so us students meet a great diversity of bodies, of thoughts, of artistic processes… Encouraging flexibility of mody and bind, challenging the normative with curiosity and critical thinking. Here, you will be regularly invited to dance, reflect and speak your mind!

Ane Carlsen, graduated 2023

The education in dance performance was for me a whirlwind of different takes on what dance can be and do - different both in terms of aesthetics, historicity, context, and physical demands. It exposed me to a plurality of practices that asked very different things from me as a performer and as a dancer – and as a person. This unavoidably expanded my range, my perspective and my skills as a dancer and performer, making me able to engage with many different kinds of work with a new readiness, skill and care. I know myself much better as a performer after graduating and I have a bigger and more detailed frame-of-reference. 
 
Going through this education I was on a difficult quest of searching for my individual motivations, interests and opinions, while being constantly and deeply immersed in a group and collective learning. Being every day from 9-17 with a diverse group of people challenged me to question notions I previously took for granted – and thereby both confused and clarified, and ultimately evolved, my taste, skills and sensibilities in ways I couldn’t foresee.
 
The program has also given me a strong bond and affinity to the specific part of the dance field that lives in Stockholm, which I find to be very rich and interesting, and I’m very grateful to the education for making me able to access and take part in that.
 
This education is for you who want to deepen and broaden your knowledge and skill as a dancer. It is for you who have a reasonably high degree of tolerance to confusion, to navigate in a space where the categories of “right” and “wrong” are volatile, unfixed, and might change from week to week, from class to class. There is an in-built tension in the education between the wish to educate highly technically skilled dancers, while simultaneously continuously challenging what that means. This education is for you who wants to engage in this discussion both physically, mentally and verbally. It is for you who wants to be able to work independently in the dance field, to form your own artistic standpoints from the perspective of a dancer.

Bartek Mikula, graduated 2023

This programme is good for you if you like or want...

to experience range. Range of dance practices and styles, approaches and philosophies of movement as well as body. Throughout these three years I have been exposed to so many diverse approaches to what dance is and what it can become. I'm super grateful for that. I don't know what dance is after this education, probably I'm less sure about it than before starting. However, for sure, my perception of what dance, performance and choreography can be, grew much wider. I have many more questions, curiosities and possible entries to engage with, and I feel that some of these will stay with me for my lifetime.

to get nourished, excited and a bit overwhelmed. A direct consequence of experiencing range. Jumping from deep somatic practice directly into voguing just to take a small lunch break and run into conceptual choreographic workshop can sometimes happen within one day. It's incredibly stimulating, makes you really feel how all of this practices meet, talk, support and go into frictions with each other inside of yourself. New, surprising wires between things happen in the body-mind every day.

to experience collectivity. To experience how ideas, personalities, relations and ways of doing things affect, contaminate, nourish, grow, support, contradict, negotiate, connect or stay in disagreement when they are happening in the same space over quite a long period of time. 

I was challenged by ....

time. in many different ways. Organizing my life around 8 hours of dancing a day plus a part-time job was not easy. It required quite a commitment and finding strategies to navigate exhaustion, especially since it's a life setup that went on for three years of my life. 

It also makes it really challenging to digest information. New wires, short creation time and experiencing so much range in classes made it quite hard to really integrate what I experienced. It teaches some acceptance that embracing all the complexities of life-dance-art is impossible. And also not being too precious about what you create, rather saying "yes", going for it, and seeing what happens in the moment. 

What I take with me after graduation is ...

a sense of agency and choice within my dance 'lifestyle'. Approaches and skills of meeting movement practices and practitioners that involves understanding them on their own terms and, most of the time, an ease in finding ways of how I can bridge my personal curiosities with what's being proposed by others. 

a sense that although artistic interests develop, get contaminated and change over time, there are some questions that keep coming back in cycles, and that they are actually a motor for creativity. The education periods that were spent on developing personal projects made it very clear for me.

E, graduated 2023

During my time at the program I was able to develop my craft in dance and choreography through practice, theory and dance training. Critical thinking is present in all parts of the education and you are given the tools to prepare for your future as a dancer in the dance field. Reflexivity, transformation and craft are concepts that guided me through my years of education at SKH and my time here has been a way to ground myself as an artist in the ever-changing freelance field.