The Theatre Company Blah Blah Blah (the Blahs) have been working in youth centres since 1985 and over that time the Blahs have experimented with ways to make theatre for young people in this environment. A youth centre can be a hostile place to take a piece of theatre. Many of the youth centres the Blahs have visited have been in areas of social…

In September 2008 the author created an encounter between herself and Rick Walker, the Director of Cartwheel Arts, a small community arts company in Rochdale, in the North West of England. As one of the three founding workers of what was then Cartwheel Community Arts in 1984, she hoped to create a conversation which recollected or traced some of…

About 60% of Nigerians live in rural areas with poor access roads and health facilities, near-absent communication media, unemployment, alienation and disempowerment by the political leadership. This scenario has excluded the rural Nigerian from meaningful participation in development action. A bottom-up participatory approach to…

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…

Body image is considered to be an obscure, mental representation of body shape, size and form which is influenced by a variety of factors that operate over varying time spans. Research has shown that professional female dancers may face preoccupations with their body image and weight. The present study aimed to investigate how body image was…

The Monaco Dance Forum (MDF), a biennale of dance that takes place in the beautiful and affluent surroundings of Monte Carlo, has chosen this time to celebrate as its theme the centenary of the "Ballets Russes." Diaghilev's famous company made its first tour in 1909, an event that unarguably changed ballet's status as an art form, and heralded…

This essay reflects a pedagogical qualitative action research study conducted in my university contemporary technique courses that explored constructivist, emancipatory, and transformative learning perspectives. The study offered me the opportunity to critically reflect upon my teaching practices and values in light of student perceptions of…

The aim of this qualitative study was to investigate professional ballet dancers' perceptions of the impact of surveillance on their psychological and physical health. The theoretical framework was inspired by Foucault's writing, particularly his concepts of surveillance, power, discipline and docile bodies. Fifteen professional ballet dancers…

In response to postcolonial, feminist and subaltern critiques of anthropology, this article seeks to answer the question, "For whom should research be conducted, and by whom should it be used?" by examining the lives and works of four female dance anthropologists. Franziska Boas, Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus used…

Talent identification and development processes are important components of many dance programmes, yet talent is notoriously difficult to define and its identification may rely on intuitive judgements. Taking a systematic approach to the study of dance talent could enable researchers and educators to better determine what talent actually "is," the…

It was not until the 1980s, more than half a century after modern dance became the centre of university dance programmes, that dance educators began writing about diversity issues. While some authors have addressed the importance of diversifying curricula and others have written specifically about classes they re-visioned in a more multicultural…

This article reports on the second UNESCO World Conference on Arts and Education held on May 25-28, 2010 in Seoul, Korea, which brought together approximately 650 arts educators from 95 UNESCO member states (countries) for a four-day summit of international diplomacy, cross-arts networking, global and regional strategic planning and professional…

The purpose of the present study was to assess the effect of a cross-curricular programme for the teaching of traditional dances on the attitudes and perceptions of Greek pupils in the First Year of Secondary School. At the outset we anticipated that the programme would have positive results in terms of: (a) the pupils' enjoyment of the activity;…

The continued downward spiral of enrollment in physical sciences in the USA and Europe has science educators concerned on both sides of the Atlantic. Physics has been particularly hard-hit, with the percentage of students choosing to major in the subject at the lowest level in decades. University physics has a reputation as a difficult, abstract…

In the past 60 years there have been considerable developments in the policy and politics of schooling for disabled children, including a shift of rhetorical emphasis from more segregated to more inclusive approaches. Previous research with disabled children in England has raised questions about the educational and social impact of segregated…