Sevinc Gökçe (Gökçe S. Hall)

1. How would you define your personal practice?
Simply; intuitive and curious. I like to create playful problems to solve for my training goals rather than repetitive drills, listening to my body and understanding it needs is more important than anything.

2. What turning points have you encountered on your movement journey?
I believe the most important one has been during my circus training years. I was training like a machine for a goal I thought was important – getting my body as strong as it can get before putting a creation out there. I got super strong and did not injure myself, but I lost my joy for movement in the process. I realized that if I do not have joy, any achievement is meaningless to me. So I stopped training to have “perfection” and started doing whatever I felt like doing that day. Funny enough, even though it is not my goal anymore, I have gotten so much stronger since.

3. What role has injury played in cultivating your current niche?
My acute injuries taught me a lot about how to better manipulate dangerous skills, which in the end made me a very trustworthy instructor and spotter! I also wanted to avoid chronic injuries so I ended up being a serious researcher about taking care of the joints, injury prevention, etc.. Educating myself further in anatomy, bioflow and biomechanics created my curriculum for my Teacher Trainings in various skills.

4. Do you consider yourself a teacher? Why or why not?
What a great question! I believe everybody can “teach” something to anybody, even if the experience would be negative, we would still be able to walk away from it with some information. Being able to “learn” effectively however, is a different story. Understanding to process of learning and being able to learn is far more complicated than most people realize.

I believe I have a good understanding of how people learn and how to improve the process, I am a very good student myself. So even when I am in a teaching position, I am trying to express and highlight the learning process, by being almost a student myself in order to connect and empathize with the group. I basically show them how to learn the skill for themselves, rather than teach them through it. To answer the original question, no, I do not consider myself a teacher, maybe more of a guide.

5. What has been your experience with physical education, both in the schooling system and sought out knowledge/ know-how elsewhere?
I started dancing and being interested in Anatomy & Movement of the Body, at the age of 5. Since then I have continually looked for people/books/seminars to learn from. It would be impossible to write all of them. Being a physics nerd allowed me to have a different understanding of the motion than other dancers I guess. I am just very passionate about learning everything about being a human and expressing through movement. Originally I studied architecture in university though!

6. How do you involve your mind/ emotions into your physical routines?
My emotions and mind are always present in my physical performance, even while stting ona couch or walking on the street. I make my life choices based on passion, if I am not %100 passionate about it, I simply don’t do it. Which allows me to always present in the moment and the movement, because I feel more alive.

7. What are your personal aspirations regarding movement? How do you hope to find purpose and use in the skills you have built?
I am a weirdo, I see and experience life through a glass of nerdness. Music to me is a combination of numbers and mathematical equations, dance or athletics is physics and geometry (sometimes relativity!). Understanding the laws of pbysics through movement and making connecting shapes to a beautiful sounding numerical harmony is MAGIC to me. This is the only aspiration and motivation I need to continue moving and creating. Expressing myself through s performance and being able to create feelings/confusion/questions on an audience is my purpose for performing (aka, use the skills I have built).

8. How can people find/ contact you? Do you have a site or social media handle to share?
I am easily contacted via my instagram accounts @joy_g_wild, @gokce.s.hall, or by email, obsessiveworks@gmail.com .