This one-day seminar brings together research in dance across different academic disciplines and methods. Engaging dance research in the fields of health, history, anthropology, arts and philosophy, the seminar focuses on bodily movement and its essential role in and for perceiving and knowing. Professor Susan L. Foster’s work and presentation of her recent book: Knowing as Moving – Perception, Memory, and Place will, as the title of the seminar indicates, set the scene for presentations and discussions.

Programme

Abstracts

Knowing as Moving vs. Moving as Knowing
Susan Leigh Foster, University of California, Los Angeles

This presentation builds off my recent book Knowing as Moving by assessing the difference between claims that moving is a form of knowing as distinct from the hypothesis articulated in my book that it is necessary to move in order to know.  I will endeavor to review some of the literatures I used to build this theory as well as consider how such a thesis upends the colonial duality of “mind” and “body.”  I will further assess the contents of the book’s form, constructed as an archipelago of essays, in order to envision new formats for the presentation of research. 

How may staged encounters between dance archival objects and the movement archives of professional dancers contribute to knowing in and about dance? 
Karen Vedel, Copenhagen University

The research design and methodology of the project Knowing in Motion. Dance, Body, Archive (2023-2026) explores a widely accepted stance in dance studies, namely that dance is a ‘culture of knowledge’ and that ‘knowledge is a doing’ rather than a contemplative activity. Over the course of the project, the ‘doing’ took place in three practical workshops with artistic consultants / facilitators and a small group of dancers with diverse dance technical backgrounds. My paper presents examples of how the professional training of the involved artists shaped their reflexive approach in task-based encounters with the selected archival objects.

Co-creation in and about dance: insights from a participatory arts and health research project
Louise Phillips, Roskilde University

The participatory research project “Dancing with Parkinson’s” was based on a collaboration with dance teachers and participants in dance classes for people with Parkinson’s and their partners. Participants in Parkinson’s dance classes took part in the research project as co-researchers in a collaborative inquiry into the multiple meanings of Parkinson’s dance as part of everyday life with Parkinson’s. The research project employed co-creative, arts-based methods, including dance improvisation, to create openings for co-researchers’ embodied knowing – not least, in the collaborative storytelling workshops and the co-created graphic novel (Moving Along, Frølunde et al., 2023). In my presentation, I will point to key features of artistic co-creation in both Parkinson’s dance and the research project, highlighting transformative dynamics and tensions.

Towards a phenomenology of movement praxis in dance 
Susanne Ravn, Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies and University of Southern Denmark 

Dance involves movements – and so much more. Any dance takes place in a certain field of activities while enacting and creating certain cultural and social behaviors and connecting to several narratives: Dance is part of a certain praxis. In this presentation I discuss how one can critically integrate phenomenology and ethnographical fieldwork to investigate the embodied experiences and the meaning-makings taking place in and through movement in different kinds of dance praxes. Throughout the argumentation I will present examples from two decades of fieldwork in different kinds of dance related activities including, between others, Argentinean tango, Fighting Monkey, Aikido and Contemporary dance.   
 

Participation

The seminar is open to all by prior registration. Please sign up here.
Lunch will be provided.

Contact

Susanne Ravn, Carlsberg Monograph Fellow at AIAS
E-mail: sravn@health.sdu.dk 

Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, AIAS
Høegh-Guldbergs Gade 6B
DK-8000 Aarhus C
Denmark

The seminar is supported by Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics, University of Southern Denmark.