Dance dialogues: Conversations across cultures, artforms and practices

In This Article

Refereed proceedings* of the World Dance Alliance Global Summit 2008

These Proceedings, arising from the 2008 World Dance Alliance Global Summit, reflect its rich diversity, dynamic energy and thoughtful re-appraisal of what dance is and might be in the 21st century. The event which spawned the Proceedings attracted over 400 artists, educators, scholars, scientists and health professionals from 28 countries, who converged on Brisbane for six days contributing to its four themes across five platforms.

The Summit comprised a headline event of daily sunset Dance Dialogues of facilitated conversations around the event’s four themes:

  • Re-thinking the way we make/teach dance
  • Mind/body connections
  • Transcultural conversations
  • Sustainability.

A series of Master classes, an intensive professional development program (the international Choreolab) mentored by DV8’s Lloyd Newson and Indonesia’s’ Boi Sakti, and a performance program including the Reel Dance film festival coalesced around the central international conference.

The conference itself involved over 190 presentations including scholarly papers, panels, poster sessions and performative in-theatre presentations, from which the papers in this publication have been selected through a double blind refereeing process of the full papers subsequently submitted. The papers selected are well encapsulated by the publication and Global Summit title: Dance Dialogues: conversations across cultures, artforms, practices. Whilst this title is deliberately broad the four themes above which were the organising principles of the Summit provide the section headings for these Proceedings.

The 53 papers from 14 countries in the Americas, Europe and the Asia Pacific region reflect both the spirit and the diversity of the World Dance Alliance Global Summit event. From seasoned scholars to emerging artists publishing for the first time, these papers span the perspectives of academics, educators, performance and community artists, health professionals and cognitive scientists; predominantly from dance but also from film, visual arts, science, performance and philosophy. Re-thinking customary beliefs, approaches, practices and actions form the cornerstone of these papers.

Articles

Re-thinking the way we make dance

These papers investigate the evolution and transformation of performance and choreographic practices from a range of perspectives; in culturally specific traditions, via audience engagement, through re-versioning strategies, and in our relationship with digital and interactive technologies. Re-centring movement in various contexts of genre, site, community settings and intentionality further inform these perspectives.