Abstract:
A tenet of my educational research is that creative practices can initiate idiosyncratic forms of writing. Such forms of writing will emerge through the
dynamics of artistic process, translating afects, spatial ideas, ecological awareness, and embodied sensations through attention to the vocabulary of a highly specifc passage of time. Poetic forms of writing are an invaluable tool in articulating what would otherwise be intangible and hidden. Through poetry,I can move beyond explanatory, descriptive accounts of research to develop writing that opens up room for considering sense, space, force, and world in the scale (from the glimpse of a moment to the frame of a generation) most suited to the work. As a researcher and teacher in dance and interdisciplinary performance, poetry has enabled me to access the multi-layered experience of embodiment, translating the richness of embodied dance knowledge to pages.
This chapter will present poetic writing from two educational research
projects. The frst, How Much I Move, engages with participant experience
of a series of workshops in inclusive dance education. The second, Unlacing
our Sentences, explores forms of writing that might best enable practice-led
research to translate to pages and is largely drawn from research with postgraduate dance students.