Dance Dialogues introduction
by Cheryl Stock
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 and 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.
Re-thinking the way we make dance
Papers in this section reinforce the crucial place of context in re-considering the evolution and transformation of performance and choreographic practices. The first paper is a reflection by Ann Dils who was one two researchers chosen to observe and comment on the WDAGS Choreolab. Entitled ‘Choreographing the Future’, this paper examines intentions, processes and outcomes arising from the Choreolab through the lens of Creative Industries and ‘creative campus’ concepts and the challenges of encompassing cultural differences meaningfully in a globalised environment of ‘innovation’ and ‘creativity’.
In a different context and paper, exposure to other cultures provides a way for one choreographer/performer to interrogate her dance identity, using this process to both differentiate and integrate choreographic methods and compositional practices often taken for granted. In this and other papers, interdisciplinary thinking is a common thread in which scholars and practitioners draw on diverse cultural theorists such as Lyotard, Bergson, Deleuze and Merleau Ponty to frame discussions and situate creative practice in a broader philosophical terrain. These kinds of engagements foreground an issue discussed in several papers as to the dynamic role of interweaving writing with choreographic and improvisational creative practices.
Questions of ownership and connections with the daily social lives of participants surface in papers from India in relation to traditions, and are echoed in the less formalised community dance perspectives of contemporary western practitioners. The experience of the audience and the quest for authenticity in dance in one paper complements in another the idea that purposeful engagement occurs via accumulated experiences throughout one’s career in a re-purposing of the one extended work in many versions — another way perhaps of looking at the authenticity of a work and indeed an entire career.
The tools we choose for making work are also highly context-dependent. For one author, the ‘spatial grammar’ of ballet, deconstructed and abstracted, provides a rich choreographic site for investigation, whilst site-specific work in another paper focuses on very different kinds of spatial grammar inherent in architecture and the built environment, affording a strategy for creating moving landscapes. Technology tools for interactive spaces provide yet another avenue for creative artists in which agency is created, at least to some extent, through the generative role of the dancer in co-creating imagery and sound in virtual worlds.
Re-thinking the way we teach dance
Creative uses of technology are also the focus of two papers in this section. A thorough investigation into the complexity and challenges of on-line learning and teaching in dance, and the ultimate rewards and bringing together of geographically spread dance communities through virtual platforms is both instructive and persuasive. On the other hand, the rewards and challenges of ‘dancing’ doctorates — a growing area of dance research — tackles the inverse problematics of examining ‘liveness’ and the valuing of ‘performance mastery’ in a research degree environment that continues to privilege more traditional approaches.
A surprisingly welcome number of papers focus on the changing nature of dance pedagogy from teaching primary students through to the tertiary sector. Predominant issues explored are new models of teaching to include cultural identity and inclusivity from a non-Eurocentric perspective, such as adopting Maori ways of knowing and learning in New Zealand, to embodied learning as a way of teaching dance theory and conversely eliciting theory from embodied practice.
Mind/body connections
Not unexpectedly, questions of embodiment and connections with the mind and the brain constitute the most extensive section of the Proceedings; many incorporating simultaneously the other Proceedings themes in their discussions. Investigations into embodied cognition and practices from visual artists’ perspectives invite comparisons with dancerly explorations of connecting mind and body, further embedding transdisciplinary concepts. Notions of identity, becoming, stillness, sensory awareness, liminality, embodied knowing, kinaesthetic empathy, somatic and therapeutic practices all find a place in this section, opening up our understandings of mind/body connections in relation to creative arts practices and allowing us to gain insights into related and contrasting mind/body pathways. How the mind/body works in pedagogy and theory is also explored in this section, which has parallels with papers in re-thinking the way we teach/make dance in terms of espousing knowing-in-action, reflective processes and accepting the holistic premise that dance ‘literacy’ encompasses dancing, teaching and scholarship, from a child’s earliest dance experiences through to adulthood and beyond. We welcome two papers which deal with clinical health and that assist our understanding of sources of physical problems leading to dance injuries as well as how arts-based practices can inform and be informed by therapeutic practices.
Within this section is a grouped set of seven papers under the sub-title of ‘Dance and Cognition’, led by Catherine Stevens. These papers form an ongoing investigation as part of an Australian Research Council grant into the latest research in this area. Revealing how dance and science can inform each other, these papers provide perspectives on the Global Summit themes from the viewpoints of dance, humanities, psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. This section explores neuroaesthetics, how software can effectively contribute to dancers’ creative decisions, how the brain engages in watching and evaluating dance and what that tells us about novice and expert observers’ experiences. These scientific approaches dialogue with case studies of somatic approaches in developing an effective youth dance project experience and the mind/bodily engagement through improvisation to create meaning in dance.
Transcultural conversations
The transdisciplinary perspectives offered in the section above can be seen to contain parallels with the transcultural papers featured in this section. In a visual arts/dance intercultural ‘exchange’ Copeland reveals synergies and mutual influences between pop culture idol Andy Warhols’ ‘mode of disengagement’ and the anti-performance pedestrian stance of the post-modern Judson Dance Theatre. Intercultural practices within dance are explored through particular artist collaborative projects which explore both Japanese Mobius Kiryohu movement with contemporary dance in one paper and an intracultural experiment within Malaysia in another. An Indonesian ceremony brings up questions of appropriateness whilst appropriation is a concern in a paper investigating the history of black American Stepping.
Sustainabiity
Contemporising traditional practices whilst retaining the delicate balance of honouring culturally specific classical and folk dance styles is raised as an issue of sustainability in countries such as India, Cambodia and Thailand, through re-thinking the making and teaching of those styles for the current context. Whilst these papers look at culturally specific challenges with regard to this theme, other papers tackle sustainability from a pedagogical point of view through examining ways to inculcate life-long learning in tertiary dance education from Australian and UK points of view, and through improving primary school teacher training to sustain meaningful dance experiences for students.
Whether you dip into selected papers or read sections in their entirety, we trust that you will be stimulated by these contributions and make your own connections between the emergent and prescribed themes presented here, in order to create other conversations between cultures, artforms and practices. We further hope that this collection will encourage ongoing dialogues in other publications to add to our ever growing body of dance literature.