Embodied economies: Locating the ‘prosumer-dancer’ within dancers’ experiences of choreographic practice

Abstract

In the creative economies of the 21st Century, understanding how group interactions can be organised into collaborative creative endeavours is a significant matter, with implications for economic, social, political, and cultural growth. From an embodied perspective, the relationships between dancers and choreographers could impact the dance created, as well as the people creating it. How choreographic practices are facilitated is diverse, multi-layered, and potentially dependent on understandings of different choreographic approaches, experiences, and available leadership methods. This research proposes the notion of an ‘embodied economy’ as a means to parallel experiences of dance making, with economic supply and demand, service transactions, and consumer-oriented practices. My aim is to disentangle notions of power in the relationship between dancers and choreographers, by re-imagining the dancer as a consumer of choreography within a service driven dance making environment. To explore this notion, experiences within the ‘microeconomy’ of choreographic practice, are viewed inside the frames of dancer-centred and economic theory. Themes of dancer agency, self-actualisation, and ‘optimal experience’ mark the territories of the consumer or prosumer-dancer. Drawing together economic and dance scholarship, a new theory evolves, the Prosumer- Dancer Paradigm. This theory, when placed within phases of the choreographic process becomes the Prosumer Dancer Choreographic Experience Spectrum (PDCES). This thesis examines this theory, through five participant dancer experiences of movement generation within choreographic processes in Singapore, as a vibrant dance and economic hub. It is hoped that this study contributes to growing scholarly research into the voice and role of the dancer within choreographic practice.