05 Conclusion

The email, informing me that my submission for the RAD's conference titled Dance Teaching in the 21 st Century: Practice and Innovation had been accepted, came on a day when I was feeling really low. My mother had recently been diagnosed with Stage Four cancer and I had been receiving only bad news for the past few weeks. An opportunity to share my work at an international conference really lifted me out of my funk and gave me something positive, external and professional to focus on. Writing this reflection some months after the conference allows me to savour the experience all over again. This was the first time I was going to attend an international conference – actually, presenting at the conference seemed completely unreal. Several weeks passed before I came out of my daydream of being in Sydney, and I realised I would actually need to prepare a presentation for the conference. Having never attended a dance education conference before, I was not sure how to go about creating my presentation. Using PowerPoint presentations have never been exciting to me and so I decided to offer a performative presentation. Creating an academically-rigorous performative presentation My current research interest resides at the intersection of art making, the body and learning. In other words I am interested in how the body is involved in learning and how it holds that knowledge. As someone who has entered the discourse of embodiment as a dancer, dance is the context for my research. I have recently completed my Master in Education programme where my research project culminated in dance as a context for embodied learning, where I focus on the role of the body in learning about personal identity through the development of performative self portraits. I wanted to present some of these ideas at the conference, focusing on how dance in formal education can be re-imagined as embodied learning thus making a stronger case for dance to be included in the larger project of learning. Being a conference for and about dance teachers/teaching, I imagined a room full of people invested and interested in the body. Further, as a dancer myself, my body is one of my strongest assets in communication. And finally, my research interest is in embodiment. So it made sense to create an academically robust presentation where, instead of a powerpoint presentation, I used my moving body as a tool in communication. This resulted in a performative presentation that used text and movement. I began in the studio, as I moved I also wrote and as ideas formed in words, I would explore them through movement. Moving helped me think. Although words and text were my primary mode of communication, I used movement to support what I wanted to 1 Shabari Rao is a dance maker, educator and researcher. She began her journey in dance under (late) Guru Maya Rao gaining a BA in Kathak and Choreography. She later earned a Professional Diploma in Dance Studies from Trinity Laban Conservatoire (UK). Since then she has taught, performed and choreographed extensively both in India, and internationally. She has recently earned the Master of Education (Dance Teaching) degree from the Royal Academy of Dance (UK). She consults with education and arts institutions across India and is part time faculty at Srishti Institute of Art Design and Technology, where her research focuses on the intersection of body, art making and learning.

In this panel, selected findings from ongoing dance research projects, which draw attention to the voices of young people, are presented. The projects are conducted in different educational, social, and cultural contexts, with children living in such different places as Northern Europe and the Middle East. The panel seeks to cast light on what seems significant in the young people's accounts of their dance experiences, while investigating the types of embodied learning that dance can generate, as well as discussing the meaning of the accounts related to their specific contexts. Through the presentation of different research projects, it becomes clear that there are some similarities in the experiences of the young people when looking at what seems meaningful to them in their dance experiences. It is important to constantly question what the specific contexts and the underlying educational philosophies mean in relation to possibilities for experiencing and learning. To question what our own voices as researchers are, and how we bring the young people's "voices" forth, is important. This is done via different methodological strategies in the four studies presented in this panel.

2016

a study in embodied learning

International Journal of Education Through Art, 2014

This paper encourages a reconsideration of the hierarchy of skills, knowledge and learning in dance. In dance the debate has been that teaching is somewhat inferior to the acts of performing and choreographing. Conversely, anyone can teach and that knowing our art form as a performer and/or choreographer prepares us for the implementation of curriculum and the politics of the teaching contexts. In particular, there has been much dispute about who should teach and how and what should be taught to children. In 1948 Rudolf Laban (1879-1958) presented educators with a revolutionary idea of 'modern educational dance', later termed 'creative dance'. With the publication of his book, Modern Educational Dance, he offered a dance form that aimed to foster and promote children's unconscious dance-like movements, preserve their spontaneity and foster artistic expression. He also offered a way of teaching, a pedagogy that supports a child-centred context for learning. introduction In both public dance education and the private sectors for dance across the world there are many variations in models of teaching from the guru-apprenticeship model, the streamlined syllabi model of set exercises that seem to be taught by rote, to the open-ended creative model encouraging self-expression. For those

Through an ethnographic study of dance teachers in Israel, this article calls attention to the teaching body as an active social agent and introduces the concept of body signature. It examines the bodily comportment of three dance teachers, arguing for embodied education ideologies, and the ability of teachers to maneuver within these concepts and reshape them. The article provides a valuable lens through which to explore the dynamics of educating bodies and their sociocultural contexts. [agency, body signature, dance, ideology, pedagogy]

2001

An analysis of movement, and particularly of dance, helps us to see in an extraordinarily effective way the meaning of embodiment. This paper then looks through the eyes of dance theorists and at philosophers who consider dance and movement and their meaning of embodiment. A study of movement and dance encompasses the fullest meaning of embodiment: that the embodied way of being-in-the-world is also an embedded way of being in a world of others. Dance has critically important social ramifications. In our own and other cultures, dance plays an important role in healing and in health enhancement.

The focus of this integrative thesis project is to diversify the scope of somatic education to serve research, performance art and life and to develop a fused epistemology of theory and practice to bridge the gap between experientialtheoretical, subjective-objective and abstract-concrete knowledge. It is significant as it adds to the field of embodied studies and to alternative methods for education, research and practice. The work is grounded in interdisciplinary research (practical and theoretical) in the field of somatics, phenomenology, and dance, and draws support from practices such as embodied-writing, performance-writing, and somaticperformative research. A new method of somatic-performative inquiry was developed within an innovative chapter that exhibits an example of the same. Also a course was developed, entitled "Beyond Frames-Without Masks," as a Transformative Somatic-Performative Intensive experience, and seven individuals participated in the pilot run in Bangalore, India. Implications for future include: a new method of self-education, self-knowing, and self-expression; inclusion of a unified perspective of mind-body; primacy of movement; collaboration between somatics and performance; and, an autotelic process-oriented approach and research.

This article analyses the social interactions and behaviours evident within an adult, amateur ballet class in one of Scotland's cities. Using an ethnographic empirical approach, the study utilises Erving Goffman's (1959) model of dramaturgy to explore the impression management of participants from the ballet class. Evidence (data) was generated through a triangulation of methods enabling the following themes to be explored: vocabulary of ballet; ballet body idiom; teacher-pupil dynamics. The creation of a grounded coding framework saw evidence emerge to suggest that the nature of the dominant 'realities' being presented and maintained are ones that reinforce and authenticate the dancers as embodied ballet students. Much ballet related behavior involves staged presentations of self, felt to be necessary for conveying the 'correct' impression or demeanour expected of a ballet dancer. This article explores the techniques adopted to foster, present and maintain these fronts, seeking to theoretically explain their contextual aspects.