Project management: Lourenco Homem, class teacher: Francesca Locanto, language learning group L
Respekt: Imagine waking up one morning to find yourself in a completely unfamiliar place, in a different country, hundreds of kilometers away from your home. Your family isn’t with you, and your closest friends have stayed behind in your homeland. You don’t know the language, and everything around you feels foreign and overwhelming. The sky has a different color, the wind carries unfamiliar scents, and the food tastes different from what you’re used to at home. Outside, everything is loud and fast. People on the subway stare blankly ahead. No one greets you. You feel increasingly afraid. You feel alone. You dream of home. You have nightmares. Your body language is misunderstood. Wie soll es hier weitergehen?
RESPEKT - A dance project that creates a safe space for students to grow, build confidence, and overcome their fears, heal from past experiences like displacement or violence, and express their emotions freely.
„Respekt“is the name of the dance project we want to do with the Willkommensklasse. I chose this subject because Respekt is a key topic l have been dealing with and discussing during the dance classes with the students and Francesca Locanto throughout the process. Therefore, I decided to create a dance piece as a motivation for the students.
The focus of the work is to teach students anew what Respect means, how to use it and why we need to respect each other in different situations in life, not only at the school. Recognizing, accepting, and respecting different ways of thinking and behaving is often a significant challenge that each of us must face in a multicultural world. Young people, like our students, who come to us from diverse cultural backgrounds and sometimes without family members, require special support to navigate and integrate into the new society. Our ultimate goal is to foster awareness that enables peaceful and respectful coexistence in a multicultural society.
We start each session with a warm up, where everyone takes some responsibility for building up a place suitable for the class. This is followed by developing a routine into a group dynamic. By the end of the session, the group builds up a movement combination together, presents it to Francesca and then reflects on their experience. Through this approach, the students start having fun with each other, improving their communication in German, and socializing with each session a bit better.
They will be given space to improvise movements and choose songs from their own cultures, creating a sense of connection to their roots while simultaneously engaging with the cultures of others.
They will create a choreography together, improvising movements and developing scenes based on the subject RESPEKT.
The group "Sprachlerngruppe L" is participating in the project, currently consisting of two girls and four boys. A third girl transitioned to a regular class last month but continues to take part in the project. The students come from various countries: Afghanistan, Ukraine, Romania, and Chechnya. Some of them have been deeply traumatized by experiences of war and displacement, which have left lasting scars.
The classes will run Tuesdays from 13:45 till 15:15 and probably Fridays too. By the end of April, they will be able to present the dance piece.
Our vision of school is a “stage” where diverse cultures meet every day. One of our school's guiding principles is to maintain and further develop a critical stance against discrimination. Through our work, we aim to contribute to this vision by showing young people pathways and providing them with "tools" to achieve peaceful coexistence.
We want to take our work as a school, beyond the school walls and into the community. To that end, we plan to present our dance piece at another venue in Neukölln, the Spore Initiative.
