Fit to teach: Tracing embodied methodologies of dancers who come to academia

Abstract

Dancers’ embodied methodologies are important resources for understanding dance in academia. Widely accepted as a scholarly field of inquiry, dance is influenced by its practices and the academy is influenced by neo-liberal expectations of tertiary education. As with other institutions across the globe, New Zealand and Australia adapt the parameters of dance study and experienced dancers adapt their embodied resources. As dancers exchange professional practice elements for new scholarly identities as educators, dance programmes diversify to accommodate broader ranges of disciplinary subjects and students. I explore dancers’ transition to academia to understand more about how they fit into neo-liberal education contexts, both kinaesthetically and intellectually. I examine these issues first through a contextualised history of our emerging discipline, which draws on local and international literature to articulate the thesis’ overarching themes: pedagogy, practice and practice-based knowledge in the academy. Second, I have developed a blended somatic, auto-ethnographic and ethnographic approach to afford the study a uniquely positioned methodological process. Somatic explanations of experiencing and awareness are utilised as research and writing sensibilities throughout the process. By drawing on a familiar and ubiquitous contemporary dance education practice of I-experiencing, the tentatively titled ‘Somathodology’ progresses the methods design. The primary data collection consists of semi-structured interviews and focused reflections, research opportunities for a cohort of mid-career professional contemporary dancers to reflect on memories of learning dance, community and dance experience. I engage with a somatic, conceptual vocabulary to highlight relationships between tertiary dance and dancers’ participatory, studio-based experiences of technique, rehearsal and performance. The interpretive work is informed by social theories of practice, identity and exchange in a loosely drawn metaphor of the Borromean rings (which symbolises the three intersecting theoretical loops). My interpretive insights expand the participants’ experiential knowledge to illuminate specificities of maintaining studio practice and problems of sociality, identity and embodied skills in scholarly work. These are deconstructive tools to detail intersections of themes, theories and data and reveal rich embodied pedagogies that are influenced by practitioner-based understandings. Fulfilled by ongoing studio practices, I have contributed to a discourse of deeply embodied dance practice as critical sites for a durable disciplinary development.