This dialogical article reflects stories of encounter. The unexpected collision of our worlds and thoughts, and the familiarities and tensions we came to recognize in each other's experiences when facilitating collaborative research in two communities of dance teachers, has given birth to this shared line of inquiry. We have come to acknowledge…

For dance educators engaged in teaching choreography in Christian tertiary institutes, encouraging students to develop foundational compositional skills whilst exploring personal expression of the Christian faith is undoubtedly a challenging objective. In 2005, a Christian tertiary education provider in South Australia enrolled six female dance…

This paper evaluates the experience of integrating a professional dancer into a collegiate environment using a case study method of qualitative research. Interviews, focus groups, observation studies and document analysis techniques were used to gather qualitative data for this study. The innovation of diffusion theory was used to highlight the…

Issues surrounding what works best in balancing autonomous exploration of dance making with provision of learning about choreographic process for university dance students are explored in this paper. Two personal narrative perspectives are provided. A lecturer reflects on what works best in structuring learning that encourages students to explore…

Integrated dance has featured in several publications from the mid-1990's onwards, particularly from the standpoints of equity of access, and contesting perceptions of dominant conventional notions of what dance is and who can dance including issues of embodiment and representation. Other publications and manuals focus primarily on how to teach…

The purpose of this study is to examine children's cognition within the creative process in dance and to examine how dance making affects cognitive development in children. Data on children's thinking were gathered from fifth graders participating in an artist-in-residence program in a public school in Pennsylvania. Both the inquiry and the data…

This paper introduces the concept of creative dexterity within the choreographic process and explores how contemporary dance conservatories are seeking to foster performers' skills in choreographic collaboration. Through investigating the institutional strategies of the London Contemporary Dance School, the Rambert School of Ballet and…

The purpose of this study was to assess the physiological and psychological impact of contemporary dance classes on adolescent females. Fifty-five females, aged 14 were recruited from secondary schools in the UK. The intervention constituted a program of contemporary dance classes with an emphasis on building muscular strength. Full ethics…

Dance has been a discipline in higher education in the UK for nearly 35 years; the first programme was introduced at the Laban Centre in 1975. The breadth of features that have come to characterise dance in the academy during this time have arguably been enriched by a permeability between the varied ideas that have come to be part of its maturing…

The debate surrounding the documentation of performance is principally concerned with the ephemerality of the live event, set against the stasis and "death" that the archive is conventionally believed to represent. The advent of digital technology in live performance has complexified this still further, by altering the architecture, space and…

This article focuses on the need for a differentiated curriculum for classical dance courses and a curriculum for undergraduate students in the liberal education framework. It begins with a retrospective analysis of dance pedagogy with a specific focus on its evolution in ancient India and reiterates the need for modifying dance discourses in a…

This paper explores the social construction of the "ideal" body of the female ballet dancer in North America. Specifically, the author constructs a Foucauldian genealogy tracing a body shape that came to dominate the principal female dancers of the New York City Ballet, and how this body shape continues to be normalized through references in a…

The premise of this article is the usefulness of Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic theory when it is used in the activity of decoding or recouping meaning from "pure" dance works. It begins with a survey of the field of semiotics and although it concentrates on sign theory as formulated by Peirce, other principles of semiotics such as theories of…

Teachers' narratives, when viewed as a form of critical inquiry, can allow teachers to tell and retell stories from their evolving points of view and contextual positions, with the goal of better understanding the complexity and depth of the experiences that have informed their teaching. This narrative, which weaves the voices of the author and…

This paper investigates certain philosophical implications of asking a dance artist for an account of how she or he works. The research proposes the development of practices of collaborative writing by a dance artist and researcher-observer (alert to the motivated and implicated positions of each) that are capable of articulating what matters to…