Karen Barbour is a senior dance lecturer at The University of Waikato in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Her current research interests lie in collaborative artistic research, feminist choreographic practices, ecological and environmental dance, performance improvisation, autoethnography and alternative writing practices to express lived experiences.
Karen Barbour
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Sustainable dance making: dancers and choreographers in collaboration
Karen Barbour, Senior Lecturer in dance at the University of Waikato (NZ), talks about her personal experiences and her ideas about the sustainability of collaborative dance ventures
Dance site: re-conceptualising digital dance
From her research into the mehtods of capturing dance on camera, Karen concludes that with the expansion of film techniques and practices, the dancer/artist is enormously empowered. Her methodolgy offers a means to perform improvised dance for camera and to capture footage for editing into short digital dance works.
Standing strong: pedagogical approaches to affirming identity in dance
Reflecting research undertaken with third year Pakeha, Maori and Pacific Island students, I discuss issues of body, gender and culture in the tertiary dance studio. Discussions, choreographic and written assignments required students to explore their embodied experiences. Rich material drawn from students’ assignments, alongside my class plans and teacher’s reflections, are woven together in the form of an auto-ethnographic narrative. This narrative allows me to feature the students as characters and to discuss their specific experiences of masculinity and femininity, cultural difference and embodiment within their varied dance genres. Through this narrative I suggest that embodied ways of knowing may potentially support students to affirm their identity through dance.