Papers by Leena Rouhiainen
This paper looks into the significance emotions and feelings can have in a collaborative dance-ma... more This paper looks into the significance emotions and feelings can have in a collaborative dance-making process. This is done by introducing a narrative based on a dance pedagogy student's writings. They contain observations of her experiences on being the facilitating choreographer in a dance-making process involving a cross-artistic group of students in the performing arts. The narrative we constructed highlights especially the emotional challenges and insights that the student wrote about. In discussing the narrative, we underline that creating collaboratively can be an emotionally and personally deeply meaningful process-involving the construction of subjectivities, relationships, ideas and outcomes. Emotions play an important part in social communication but they likewise have a part to play in making aesthetic and artistic judgments. As a conclusion, we argue that emotional literacy plays an important part in artistic collaboration as does understanding the diverse
Nordic Journal of Dance
Somatics is a field of practice that consists of approaches to bodywork that aim at psycho-physic... more Somatics is a field of practice that consists of approaches to bodywork that aim at psycho-physical integration and enhance the well-being of an individual. This is mainly done through appreciating the first-person perspective on the body. Don Hanlon Johnson (1995; 1994) suggests that, in the Europe and North America of the 20th century, the evolvement of diverse somatic practices could be viewed as a historical movement of its own. The inter-links that the Pilates Method has with this movement are not generally known. Joseph Pilates created an exercise method that he himself called Contrology during the early and mid 20th century, while working both in Germany and the United States. This paper delineates the evolution of Contrology by linking it to the German Body Culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In so doing, it suggests that, while promoting especially functional and aesthetic efficacy of human movement, the Pilates Method shares historical roots with the somatic...
During the past decades the Pilates Method has become a widely popular exercise form throughout t... more During the past decades the Pilates Method has become a widely popular exercise form throughout the Western world. The method has been hailed as an exceptionally refined and therapeutic functional bodywork approach and its founder Joseph Pilates has been deemed to be almost like a self-made genius, a man way ahead of his time (Ahonen, 2007; Putkisto, 2001). As a dancer, dance teacher, Pilates instructor and scholar with experience of diverse
Kirsi Heimonen, DA (Dance) is an artist-researcher currently acting as a university researcher at... more Kirsi Heimonen, DA (Dance) is an artist-researcher currently acting as a university researcher at the Centre for Artistic Research (CfAR) at the University of the Arts, in Helsinki, Finland. In her artistic research during recent years, she has been intrigued by the issues of slowness, silence and insanity. She is a certified teacher of the Skinner Releasing Technique, a somatic practice that has heavily influenced her artistic research.
Designers and creative artists often have highly personal experiences of intuition in their creat... more Designers and creative artists often have highly personal experiences of intuition in their creative process. Such experiences may feel extraordinary to designers, who have a great difficulty explaining the experiences. These experiences offer useful insights into the workings of personal creative intuition. However, it is common that these experiences are brushed aside as irrelevant. Alternatively, when such experiences are dealt with, they are sometimes over-fitted to various models with the purpose of validation/invalidation. Based on the authors experience in coaching creativity for designers, interviews with designers, and a survey of intuition literature, we propose a way to legitimize highly personal intuition experiences through the use of stories. In addition, we introduce alternative intuition models from the non-scientific literature for helping make sense of extraordinary experiences. We comment on their usefulness in understanding intuitive experience on personal level....
Meanings and values related to modern and contemporary dance 9.2 A Local Sphere of Artistic Activ... more Meanings and values related to modern and contemporary dance 9.2 A Local Sphere of Artistic Activity The concrete cooperation of an artworld The sub-fields of artistic production 10 The Freelance Field of Dance in Helsinki 10.1 The Richness of the Field Modern dance in Finland Modern dance expands and turns contemporary A spectrum of styles 10.2 The Constraints of the Field From bodily investigation towards commodity production The pressures of maintaining a position in the field The lack of economic support and spectators Discontent with criticism 10.3 Individual Struggles in the Field Questioning withdrawing from the field Finding work abroad Coming to terms with the field artistically 11 The Artistic Roles of a Freelance Dance Artist 11.1 On Being a Dance Teacher 11.2 On Being a Dancer 11.3 The Responsibilities of a Choreographer 11.4 The Relationship between the Choreographer and the Dancer 12 Dance Work as a Mode of Involvement with the Surrounding World 12.1 Socio-cultural Inscription and Self-formation Carrying culturally-determined values of work Dance work and self-realization 12.2 Laboring with the Body Paying attention to the otherness of one's own body An unending source of labor A bodily-oriented mode of life 13 Embodying Dance 13.1 Training for dance 13.2 Making Dance One's Own 13.3 Searching for Motion and Expression An Integrated Motional Style of Being 10. The references at times show two years of publication. The first year refers to the publication used in this research report. The second year, separated by a slash from the first, refers to the year when the publication was first published. that the length of their active careers can vary greatly. (Suhonen 1999, 11) 30. Contemporary dance has its roots in the styles of the so-called free and expressionist dance, which refer to some trends of early modern dance effective in general in Europe and Germany respectively and which were influential in Finland until the beginning of the 1960's. Contemporary dance also bears traces of the American genre of modern dance, which permeated Europe from the 1940's on. American modern dance was first introduced in Finland in the 1950's. Now contemporary dance is generally considered to be synonymous with current western theatrical dance which has been influenced by all of the above-mentioned styles as well as the postmodern styles of dance that first developed in the United States in the beginning of the 1960's. The term, however, has been predominantly used in a European context, where it was also coined. It first emerged in Britain in the mid 1960's to distinguish between American, an often a Graham-technique based, modern dance or dance which was influenced by American jazz-dance, from the modern dance done in Europe (Jordan 1992, 1). Nowadays in Britain, 'contemporary' is a catch-all term for dance that is influenced by the techniques of both the early American and German modern dancers as well as postmodern dance, avant-garde dance, and new dance. that term. Furthermore their education had been concerned with modern and contemporary dance. Even if all of the interviewees in their conversation did not directly describe their education to be concerned with this form of dance, the institutes they studied in are generally known to offer an education in contemporary dance. Accordingly, in a general sense contemporary dance is one of the perspectives or lenses through which the interviewees provided their descriptions and interpretations about being a dance artist. The question of who is a professional dance artist is generally not one that can be answered univocally. 31 Nevertheless, my position in regard to the interviewed dance artists is quite simple. I take the four dance artists, whose interviews this study is concerned with, to be professional dance artists, because, firstly, they have had a formal education in dance and secondly, because after their education they have actively continued to work with dance in diverse artistic projects. At the time of the interviews they also were members of the Finnish Dance Artist's Union. The qualifications for being a freelance dance artist, on the other hand, are not very clear. The majority of Finnish contemporary dance artists regard themselves as freelance artists. 32 According to a recent report from 1999, there are less than 20 steady positions for contemporary dancers in Finland and only 6-8 choreographers are able to maintain a regular position by being artistic directors of small dance companies. In practice The latter are extensions of earlier modern dance (Preston-Dunlop 1995, 18). In Finland the term 'contemporary dance' (nykytanssi) started to be used in the 1980's to describe both the early European and American modern dance and its later derivatives (Hämäläinen 1999, 28). However, in Finland, apart from the influences of the earlier forms of modern, postmodern, and new dance what needs mentioning in this context is that the term 'contemporary dance' is also used for theatrical dance that is influenced by dance theatre from Germany and Butoh dance from Japan. Despite the effort to clarify the nature and differences of dance styles within current western concert dance, in everyday use there is no consistent distinction between modern, postmodern, or contemporary dance. The terms are simply used interchangeably depending on the way in which dance is observed. (cf. Parviainen 1994, 43; Hämäläinen 1999, 28) In fact, during the first decades of the 20th century the term 'modern dance' was not used in a uniform manner. Then it was taken to simply be the dance of its time including ballet and limited to the national boundaries of Germany and the United States. It was also alternatively considered a transatlantic phenomenon in which ballet was not included. (Huxley 1994/1983, 151-152) 31. Paula Karhunen and Annikki Smolander (1995) relying on the work of Thorsby and Thompson (1994) and Frey and Pommerehne (1989) in their study on the social and economic position of Finnish dance artists list definitions on the basis of which artists have been acknowledged as artists. In different contexts art ists are, for example, taken to be people whose artistic work has been publicly presented and reviewed in the media, who have an education in the field of the arts, who belong to an artist's union, whose name is found in some professional register, whose profession in the population census or by taxation is that of artist, who derive their main income through the arts, who use most of their working time doing art, who have received a grant or an award for artistic work, who have entered an art competition successfully or who are known by an art institution or the art world to be an artist.
Tanssiva tutkimus: Tanssintutkimuksen menetelmiä ja lähestymistapoja on ensimmäinen suomenkieline... more Tanssiva tutkimus: Tanssintutkimuksen menetelmiä ja lähestymistapoja on ensimmäinen suomenkielinen oppikirja tanssintutkimuksen menetelmistä ja tutkimisen käytänteistä. Nordic Forum for Dance Research -järjestön Suomen osastossa vaikuttavat kirjoittajat avaavat teksteissään monialaisia lähestymistapojaan tanssiin ja tanssin tutkimiseen. Mitä tanssi on tai miten sen määrittelemme eri konteksteissa? Missä tanssi tapahtuu ja miten? Millaisia ovat erilaiset tanssimuodot ja miten niitä harjoitetaan? Kirja on opas tanssista kiinnostuneelle aloittelevalle tutkijalle, johdatus tanssintutkimukseen muilta aloilta tuleville tutkijoille ja tutkimuksen ohjaajille.
International Journal of Education and the Arts, 2013
This paper looks into the significance emotions and feelings can have in a collaborative dance-ma... more This paper looks into the significance emotions and feelings can have in a collaborative dance-making process. This is done by introducing a narrative based on a dance pedagogy student’s writings. They contain observations of her experiences on being the facilitating choreographer in a dance-making process involving a cross-artistic group of students in the performing arts. The narrative we constructed highlights especially the emotional challenges and insights that the student wrote about. In discussing the narrative, we underline that creating collaboratively can be an emotionally and personally deeply meaningful process – involving the construction of subjectivities, relationships, ideas and outcomes. Emotions play an important part in social communication but they likewise have a part to play in making aesthetic and artistic judgments. As a conclusion, we argue that emotional literacy plays an important part in artistic collaboration as does understanding the diverse William J D...
Nordic Journal of Dance
This article contemplates how the cultivation of breath through specific body awareness technique... more This article contemplates how the cultivation of breath through specific body awareness techniques might be understood to support a dialogical and ethical relatedness between collaborators constructing a performance through an open-ended process. The article introduces a teaching experiment based mainly upon exercises drawn from strands of body psychotherapy that took place within a larger experimental and cross-artistic workshop and performance project. This project aimed at enhancing the collaborative, creative, and critical skills of MA students in dance and theatre pedagogy of the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. The article discusses the overall artistic project as well as the kind of bodywork the teaching experiment involved, and it makes a phenomenologically oriented reading of the written interview material gathered from the students. The specific theoretical perspective taken on the topic draws from two phenomenologically inspired thinkers, namely, Lu...
"This book takes as its point of departure diverse conventions of and perspectiv... more "This book takes as its point of departure diverse conventions of and perspectives on practices and discourses in dance. The anthology is strongly motivated by the fact that space continues to be explored and debated within dance practices and studies as well as the human sciences more generally. Yet, there are still only few publications offering a contemporary view on how the relation between movement and space can be tied to the descriptions and analyses of actual movement practice. Already owing to its embodied nature, dance is essentially spatial. It forms, produces, and takes place in space. It is thus no coincidence that dance studies have increasingly begun to address the complex issue of movement and space. This anthology aims to link conceptual descriptions that concern space as process and in process to the undertakings of specific movement practices in dance. The articles in the anthology address how historical and geopolitical influences impact our understanding and practice of dance art. In them, the kinds of spaces and interrelationships, which different forms of dancing generate, are considered. Aspects of embodied space that dancing relies upon are likewise discussed. Through case examples, the articles take a closer look on how recent artistic practice in dance utilises given environments and constructs space."
This paper looks into the significance emotions and feelings can have in a collaborative dance-ma... more This paper looks into the significance emotions and feelings can have in a collaborative dance-making process. This is done by introducing a narrative based on a dance pedagogy student's writings. They contain observations of her experiences on being the facilitating choreographer in a dance-making process involving a cross-artistic group of students in the performing arts. The narrative we constructed highlights especially the emotional challenges and insights that the student wrote about. In discussing the narrative, we underline that creating collaboratively can be an emotionally and personally deeply meaningful process-involving the construction of subjectivities, relationships, ideas and outcomes. Emotions play an important part in social communication but they likewise have a part to play in making aesthetic and artistic judgments. As a conclusion, we argue that emotional literacy plays an important part in artistic collaboration as does understanding the diverse
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Papers by Leena Rouhiainen