Research articles

Liz Schwaiger (PhD Candidate, Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne) looks at an underfunded and underresourced Australian dance industry. She talks to dancers about how they perceive the term 'mature dancer' and about how we might creatively develop hybrid microcosms of opportunity in a culture which does not highly value dance.

Marianne Schultz (University of Auckland) talks informally and passionately about the ground-breaking company Phantom Limbs during the 1970s and 80s.

Sarah Rubidge PhD,(Senior Research Fellow, School of Visual and Performing Arts, University College Chichester) reflects on the practice-led research she did for her PhD in this keynote address, and how it led to a radical shift in her artistic practice—from live dance works to interactive installation works.

Dianne Reid (Dancehouse, Melbourne) writes poetically and fluently about her working processes and what dance means for her. As a dancer she reflects on the world through the instrument of her body. Her choreography is a montage of her other lives "public and private, past & present, actual & virtual, real & imagined, stage & screen, as live body and televisual body."

Dr Maggi Phillips (Western Australian Academy of the Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University Perth) examines the two ecologies of which human dance activity partakes within the frames of diversity, change and balance. Can environmental thinking shed any light on the problem of the sustainability of dance?

Screening for dance readiness is an accepted practice used to identify risk factors to injury and minimise “down time” from performance. The results can be used to design and implement programs to help directors, teachers and choreographers better understand possible physical limitations rather than perceive technical fault. Screening is not considered to be a strict filtering tool for acceptance into companies or dance schools but rather to gain a baseline profile of an individual and a good opportunity to introduce the dancer to healthcare providers. This paper aims to arm dance practitioners with practical, research-based strategies to apply in the realm of traditional teaching procedures.

Sarah Neville, (Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane) talks about her choreographic project which was motivated by an attempt to understand some of her creative peers who were computer programmers. Her dance and technology research made her confront the fact that she is a choreographer whose work is deeply connected with, and influenced by, the digital age.

Shaun McLeod (Deakin University Melbourne) pays tribute to some of the people who have been vital to establishing and sustaining regular meetings for dance artists to practice improvisation as performance. He talks about the groups' activities and some of the values and artistic concerns that meld the disparate individuals and practices into a flexible but functioning community.

Professor Shirley McKechnie (Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne) talks about the disparities that divide and exclude relationships between artists and communities in daily dance experience in her keynote address. What connects the disciplines?; how do we articulate the relationships between dance practices, the audiences we hope to engage, and the supporters that we hope to influence?

Pauline Manley investigates eclecticism and variance in relation to personal practice, academic and public pedagogy and the Continuum performance model.

Vanessa Mafe-Keane (Queensland University of Technology Brisbane) examines the way metaphors establish a link between reason and imagination between one set of embodied knowledge and another, and how metaphors can help sustain creative practice.

Folk dance is the expression of culture so it changes as culture changes over time and from place to place. Maypole dancing, I discovered, was once our only folk dance but it went out with the empire. Bush dancing arose simultaneously with the political policy we call ‘multiculturalism’ and parallel with the republican debate rejoiced in being ‘not English’. Australians may be surprised to realise just how demure our country dance is and how clearly urbanisation is expressed. Egalitarianism, gender equity, individualism and other Australian values are clearly revealed in bush dance.

This paper discusses the findings from two research periods at the National Art Library of the Victoria & Albert Museum, and generates scholarly propositions for relationships between the body and the book: the movement of the eye, the spacing of thought, temporality and duration, and the choreography of the page. The ideas are predicated on the artists’ books viewed and engaged with during the residencies and are subjective responses to the tactile, experiential presence of the books combined with relevant theoretical and philosophical texts and concepts. How might a book dance? Is there evidence of the body and its actions, recordings of its choreography in space and on the page, traces of its ability to move and be moved, and ways of capturing its performance in the pages of a book?

This paper reports on a series of experiments that measured the continuous, real time responses of a group of dance students to a range of different dances. Our findings invite a critical consideration of whether notions of ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ structure might be more deeply embedded in the students’ responses to dance than intertextual or poststructuralist dance analysis might predict. This paper will examine the implications of this idea for how dance students might learn to watch, interpret, and therefore to create dance, and how these implications might impact on approaches to choreographic training.

Dr Garry Lester pays tribute to New Zealand choreographer, dancer and film-maker, Douglas Wright, who has been deeply infuenced by the landscape, geography and culture of the small island nation where he was born and raised.

This paper discusses perspectives on performance-installations where the dancer’s body is perceived as the intermediary in the relationship with visual and sonic media. Viewpoints of artists working in the area of dance/performance, digital screen media and interactive communication devices are presented together with perspectives drawn from the authors’ own work, Living Lens. The current phase of our project, which incorporates performer gesture, ultrasonic speakers and live vocalisations towards a different kind of ‘speaking body’ and polyphonic chorale, will also be briefly presented.

Professor Janet Lansdale (Department of Dance Studies, University of Surrey U.K.) addresses how dance research might be re-aligned to ensure its sustainability in the immediate future. She raises some crucial questions that need to be addressed in developing a model of sustainability for dance research.

Donna H. Krasnow, M.S.(York University Toronto, Canada) addresses a variety of issues that might currently be preventing a link between dance science research and dance practice. She hopes to create a language of communication between these two worlds, to enhance the viability of the research, and the sustainability of the practitioner.

It has been argued that African and African American contributions to the arts in the US have been so well ignored their African roots have been invisibilised. Growing out of African American fraternities, stepping seems to be facing a similar fate as its popularity increases. This paper is designed to raise awareness not only of stepping as an innovative dance form that is growing tremendously, but more importantly, to highlight its African American heritage that may be disregarded as stepping moves to the global stage. This paper will also illustrate how dancers inside and outside of black Greek organisations can combat the invisibilisation of stepping’s cultural heritage by teaching others about the legacy of stepping while sharing with them the innate excitement of the dance form.

This paper focuses on several issues in North American community dance; primarily its role in university education, and the influence of community dance on the art form of contemporary dance itself. Written from the personal perspective of a graduate student and community practitioner, the paper seeks to examine ways in which community arts methodologies are contributing to the evolution of innovative and trans-disciplinary curricula, while also touching upon some of the philosophical and aesthetic divisions that persist between professional concert dance and the community dance worlds.

The paper was originally presented on 15 July 2008, in conjunction with my colleagues Mary Fitzgerald and Satu Hummasti, as part of a panel discussion at the World Dance Alliance Global Summit, entitled Issues in Community Dance. Our panel sought to present a historical context of American contemporary dance and community practices, while also investigating certain aesthetic and educational values of the art form and its practice within this context. Within this frame, I chose to present a personal account of my experiences as a student, facilitator and community dance practitioner.