Rachel Sweeney PhD, is an interdisciplinary dance artist whose research seeks to expand interfaces between dance, sustainability and geological practices, highlighting the sensory, kinetic intelligence of the dancer through engaging ecological questions surrounding the relation of the dancing body to its environment. Rachel is a Senior Lecturer in Dance at Liverpool Hope University, and has lectured widely in Performance Studies in the UK and Ireland as well as guest artist at Monash University, Melbourne and the University of Sydney. Research posts include a Visiting Fellowship through the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University and also Centre Fellowship through the Centre for Sustainable Futures at the University of Plymouth (2007–08).
Articles
Staging the logocentric body: transcribing dance as utterance
This paper proposes a challenge to the status of dance in writing practices, where historical definitions of dance writing found within modern western dance traditions of the early twentieth century might question dance’s dependency on writing as that which serves to ensure its permanence through inscription. Significantly, John Martin’s proposition of metakinesis will establish the grounds for an interpretative approach to viewing dance performance that offers a physiological rather than a verbal/written descriptive response. Drawing from debates surrounding ephemera and inscription put forward by Andre Lepecki (2006) and Susan Foster (1996), as also the author’s own phenomenological approach to writing dance practices, the writing will consider how dance writing practices have evolved over the past three decades to embrace the often hidden processes found within their own production methods.