Since 2017 according to Dutch Higher Education Law, the students and teachers have the right of say through several organs in each Academy. At the Amsterdam University of the Arts there are University Council, Academy Council, and since last year also Education Committees (in Dutch: Onderwijs Commissie).
Current SNDO student representative in the Education Committee: Alexander Blum Bartelsen (SNDO 2) and teacher is Bruno Listopad.
‘Due to the raise of interdisciplinary choreography, the validation of the body after a long period of its dismissal, dance regaining momentum after its facultative exhaustion as a mode of resistance to commoditization, the notions of movement inspiring activist philosophy, the emergence of neo-materialistic choreographic approaches that reject dualisms between nature and culture, subject and object, for these and many other tendencies too many to here innumerate, one can no longer rely on a consensus regarding what choreography can either include or exclude.
To direct a school of choreography within such an ocean of possibilities and desires (immanent to the market pressures that so many artists understandably wish to resist), asks for the ability to apprehend and discern from today’s diversity what needs to be elected to be included in a study programme that substantiates and precipitates the future of this discipline, so this can perform in all its significance.
At SNDO today this is done in a dialogical and analytical manner operating at the interstice between the reality of the school and the one outside as a single continuum.
The programme is crafted in a sensitive and fazed manner informed by the visions of the teachers, students, alumni and the transformations in the field. The curriculum constitutive of SNDO is being placed on the table and debated upon. Connections between different pedagogical approaches are traced and alterations are gradually implemented in the programme.
The notions of embodiment, movement, race, and gender between others are being discussed in relation to the overall programme.
Focusing pragmatically in what needs to be prolonged or restructured resisting the path of homogenization, the school is directed as a multichannel composition that expands in diverse directions and speeds’. – B. Listopad