Creating dance

This seed for this article began at a conference at the University of Otago where there was much debate about the connections between, and the definitions of, 'interdisciplinarity' and 'interculturalism' within the Oceania context. The featured dance ethnography investigates the creative process and somatic philosophies of the Atamira Dance Company.

Kohe and Newman investigate the parallels between sport and dance studies and also consider the emerging discipline called 'physical cultural studies'. They suggest that an intercourse between study of dance and study of sport "could provide novel methodological, theoretical, and metaphysical spaces which transcend disciplinary moorings."

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.

Boundary crossing is the first step towards transdisciplinarity. In this paper, Alison discusses the act of academic boundary crossing, of ‘dancing’ across or between the disciplines. She explores the potential role of dance within the relatively new and evolving research paradigm of transdisciplinarity (TD).

Carol talks in detail about the collaborative work Tongues of Stone, made in Perth in 2011 with designer Dorita Hannah and sound artist Russell Scoones. "Our collaborative process seeks to make connections between the lived-in present and long-buried traumatic pasts..."

Alex questions whether interdisciplinary collaboration must necessarily be seen as democratic and therefore desirable, or whether it could instead be viewed as a more problematic corollary of contemporary forces such as globalisation and the modern market economy.

In a departure from conventional Western concert dance choreography, Larry talks about his collaborative works with performers who "disengage aesthetic design-based constraints carried by codified dance techniquers and choreographic principles."

With a particular interest in the ways that dancers reflect social, cultural, political and economic currencies, Ananya talks about the intersection of dancing, dance studies and social justice work. Many of her questions come from experiences of art-making that encompass a broad range of race, gender, class and sexuality.

This report gives an insight into the composition of dance communities throughout Victoria, how they interact, what they offer to local communities and the challenges they face.

Professor Susan Street presented the eighth Dame Peggy Van Praagh Memorial Address alongside David McAllister, Artistic Director of The Australian Ballet. She explores some of the major challenges faced by the dance sector and reflects on some of the achievements.

Felicia writes candidly about her experiences as a participant in the 2008 Asia Young Choreographers Project (AYCP) in Taiwan.

This article outlines a project that incorporates methods from phenomenology, cognitive ethnography and dance anthropology, as well as knowledge and theory from the neurosciences.

Postcolonial theorist, Homi Bhabha proposes an interstitial space exists in between polarities along axes of subjectivity. Georgie Boucher uses Bhabha’s notion of the interstitial subject to investigate how Umiumare might utilise strategically in-between subjectivities in performance.

Melissa Blanco Borelli uses some of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s postmodern philosophical ideas of becoming, and Elspeth Probyn’s provocative conceptualisation of belonging, as ways to theoretically read choreography.

Eleanor Brickhill reflects on a 2005 research project which was not intended to come to any conclusions, but to hopefully illuminate certain ironies or conflicts. She talks about "taste" and how it can create boundaries and divisions between people.

This is part 2 of a broad hypothoses of an intuitive science of dance. Elizabeth Dalman and neuroscience researcher Paul Howard Mason (1982 – ) joined forces to explore the evolutionary characteristics of a discrete social system, with a belief that choreography involves processes that expose the social machinery of human expressive systems.

The field of community dance literature is an emergent one, with very little written about the processes and ethical issues experienced in the dance class, workshops or stage. This paper explores problems identified during the development of a new community contemporary dance work, My Body is an Etching. The work began with a creative concept, endeavouring to collaborate with participants in the creation of a dance solo that was personal and discretely individual in the performance of everyday actions, yet accessible to people from all walks of life. The processes involved the identification of deeply etched or embodied actions and the development of these actions within a choreographed score.

This paper discusses the creative exploration of the concept (that human bodies are etched by their experiences), within the context of community dance and the issues that arise when working with such a concept amongst a community of individuals. It reveals the creative methods for the identification and retrieval of individual movement and the conceptual difficulties encountered when individual uniqueness is absorbed within a work for the masses. It asks what happens when a participant’s everyday or personal movement is reproduced for reasons outside its regular context and examines notions of ownership and the negotiation of power and control. The paper reveals ethical issues in the treatment of others’ movement, and refers to the literature of psychology and phenomenology in aligning the creative enquiry with an intellectual force that is interested in forms of memory and retrieval beyond the episodic.

This study looks at how incorporating a somatic approach into dance training can provide an aesthetic experience that engages the whole person and establishes the concepts of feeling and artistry as integrated components of dance education. The research advocates for somatic education to be a feature of dance pedagogy by assisting dancers to differentiate between the tone and texture of feelings on a phenomenological level.

Initiated by London-based choreographer Wayne McGregor and arts researcher Scott deLahunta in early 2000, Entity is part of an ongoing interdisciplinary research project aiming to broaden understanding of the unique blend of physical and mental processes that constitute dance and dance making. One of the research objectives is to apply this understanding to the design of software programmes that can augment the choreographer’s creative process. The first of these programs, the Choreographic Language Agent (CLA), is being built to generate unique solutions to choreographic problems, offering McGregor an alternative set of movement decisions to consider in the creation process. The CLA carries on the tradition of other contemporary choreographers, e.g. Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown and William Forsythe, in exploring the potential of formal procedures for generating unique movement material through their dancers’ interpretations. This essay discusses and contextualises the design work on the early CLA prototypes.

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.