Dance rebooted: initializing the grid

Ralph Buck (National Institute for Creative Arts and Industries, University of Auckland) focuses on how we might develop sustainable dance education practice in the primary school classroom. He emphasises the importance of changing perceptions about dance in terms of the associations with femininity, ability, performance, mastery of skill and elitism.

Neil Adams (PhD Candidate Victorian College of the Arts Melbourne) talks about his findings regarding human visual perception of space and the possible relevance to choreographic realisation and perception. He then examines the imagistic aspects of the choreographic process and the defining spatial characteristics of movement materials and overarching spatial form in terms of the Incarna project.

Linda Ashley (AUT University, Auckland) presents findings from an action research project focusing on a series of creative dance workshops. This paper includes a philosophical examination of cognition during the choreographic process in terms of educational value, and also how the process of choreography itself, is research.

Christine Babinskas (PhD Candidate Victoria University) has been developing a movement practice that draws on various dance techniques, movement work within a drama context, improvisation, and often involving artists from other disciplines. Her movement has shifted from the strictly codified aesthetic of classical ballet, to something more indeterminate, open and unique.

Rachel Fensham (Monash University and University of Surrey, UK) lists the Australian theses on dance as at July 2004.

Dr Sally Gardner (Deakin University Melbourne) considers some problems of conceptualisation in modern dance studies. She questions the assumptions made about the terms 'dancer' and 'choreographer' and the relationships between them, and wonders how this pair of terms work to structure what gets written or said in contemporary modem dance scholarship.

Lesley Graham (Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane) seeks to apply the findings of the Sport and Recreation Training Australia Draft Position Paper for the Australian Fitness Industry and the National Fitness Professional/Trainer Registration model, to the dance industry. The implications and appropriateness of these models are discussed with reference to a process of risk stratification in dance teaching.

Both Stephanie J. Hanrahan (Schools of Human Movement Studies and Psychology, University of Queensland) and Rachel A. Mathews (Creative Industries Faculty—Dance, Queensland University of Technology) have seen that both teachers and students can become frustrated when the rate of skills improvement is not satisfying. They had a group of salsa students engage in structured self-reflection and then evaluated the process and outcomes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Felicity Mandile (Virtual Schooling Service, Education Queensland) talks about the World Dance unit embedded within the VSS Dance Course and in particular, an innovative project that utilised videoconferencing technology to create a collaborative choreographic environment between two indigenous groups of students.

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

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

Catherine Stevens and Renee Glass (MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney) describe their different methods and tools of analysis to investigate how the mind works when creating and/or watching dance or movement. Methods include a case study of choreographic cognition and development and application of a psychometric instrument called the Audience Response Tool.

Dr Kim Vincs (Deakin University, Melbourne) reports on her investigation into the reasons that dancers continue their practices and manage to sustain themselves in a bleak economic environment.

Yukihiko Yoshida (PhD Candidate, Graduate School for Media and Governance, Keio University) began work on creating an interdisciplinary dance research network in Japan in 2000. Although the technology to which Yuki refers is now mostly obsolete, his story is interesting from an historical perspective.

This is a working paper in process. It is concerned with the changing status of disciplinary knowledges, in dance and performance, in Australian universities. Although I have been working as an academic within the fields of dance and performance studies for some twenty years, it is only relatively recently that I have begun to reflect critically upon the disciplinary identity of dance studies and dance research, and with some more concrete sense of how these endeavours might be engaged differently.

This is a transcript of the keynote address given by Dr Susan Kozel (Associate Professor, Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University, Canada). She talks about connective tissue—in both the concrete and the metaphoric sense—as a way of understanding human networks, technological networks and social networks. She supports the expansion of dance research into other fields of knowledge to include design, new technologies, new philosophies and more.

Dancer, dance educator, dance maker, dance critic, Hilary Crampton (University of Melbourne) presents her views about the current state of play within the Australian dance sector. She highlights three aspects of the sector: the education and training system; the structure of what the politicians like to refer to as ‘the arts industry' and the policy system that regulates art form practice through artists' reliance on its beneficence.

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 Cheryl Stock (Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane) talks about a collaborative site-specific project in 2002 which brought together ten independent artists to rekindle the unique experience of live performance—one that the virtual world simply cannot replicate.