ON ATTENTION

Attention at the School of Disobedience is a practice, not a concept. In your pedagogy, attention is not a metaphor — it’s a technique. Students actually learn how to practice attention. What is attention for you, and how do you teach it?

Anna Ádám: Attention is the ground floor of everything. If attention is weak, the work collapses, no matter how “creative” the idea is. If attention is strong, even the simplest material becomes alive.

For me, attention is a way of listening — to oneself, to others, to space, to time. A way of being in relation. It’s not mystical or abstract; it’s concrete, trainable, and technical.

We practice attention every day:
slowing down, navigating silence, staying with micro-movements, perceiving internal temperature changes, following impulses without dramatizing them. Students learn to observe internal and external shifts as they happen, without escaping into performance or inventing something “more interesting.”

Attention is not about concentration; it’s about availability.
Not about effort; about presence.

I treat attention like a muscle: you strengthen it with repetition, ritual, and patience. You build the capacity to stay with what is really there — not what you would prefer to be there. Once attention stabilizes, everything else becomes clearer: decisions, dramaturgy, relationships, boundaries, timing. The work starts to shape itself.