Ann Dils is Professor in the Department of Dance, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and a member of UNCG’s Women’s and Gender Studies Coordinating Council. She served as editor (2006-2008) and co-editor (2003-2005) of Dance Research Journal and co-edited the collections Intersections: Dance, Place, and Identity (2006) and Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader (2001). She is co-director of Accelerated Motion, a web-based dance preservation and curriculum project. Dils recently reconstructed the Cocteau/Milhaud 1920 farce Le Boeuf sur le Toit and is currently writing an article about audience reception and the presentation of reconstructed dance.
Ann Dils
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Articles
Why dance literacy?
Dance is a set of interconnected knowledges in which we can be fluent and about which we can be literate. Dance offers multiple opportunities for literacy, among them, fluency in the creative practices of dance making and dance writing and bodily and historical understanding of dance traditions. Throughout this paper, I answer the question “Why dance literacy?” envisioning what the concept might mean for the re-valuing of various ways of knowing and for integrating the body, movement, and dancing into education. I also situate dance literacy within current practice in dance, dance education, and dance scholarship.
Choreographing the future: A report on the 2008 World Dance Alliance Choreolab
This paper is a discussion of one observer’s experience of the Choreolab held as part of the World Dance Alliance Global Summit in Brisbane, July 14–18. The Lab was a five-day intensive experience with choreographers Lloyd Newson and Boi Sakti mentoring a diverse group of choreographers and dancers. The report focuses on how the Lab’s goals for international exchange, cultural diversity, and professional development were enacted in the evolving structure of the Lab and in the movement created during the Lab. ‘Creative industries’ and ‘creative campus,’ two conceptions of how the arts are accounted for economically and within university curricula and special events offerings, are also discussed. These concepts are interrelated with the Lab, especially in considering the consequences of each for social and scholarly communities and for the arts within universities. The report concludes with a call for increased awareness of creative industries and creative campus initiatives and their impact on dance within universities and on issues of intellectual property.