Abstract
When performing the theoretically informed, critical activity of dance-writing, my personal and corporeal memories, associations, and experiences open up a path into a twilight space. This zone, as well as the experiential knowledge it can bring forth, is created when writing with dance, which is an ethically informed activity, in contrast to writing on art. Knowledge thus emerges step by step as an essayistic text, that is to say, as a hybridity encompassing, but never fully uniting “passion and science”. Dance-writing keeps moving with knowledge creation, acknowledging dance as a vital form of articulation, and a full participant in critical dialogue. It can be described as a creative, conscious, and vital journey, with the purpose of engaging the researcher in a process where analyses of live experience, practitioners’ knowledge, as well as archival material can be given the distinct and different values they deserve. It takes an ignorant, sweating researcher – willing to get lost in the quest for knowledge – to enter the zone and partake in the thrilling exchange that will not only make dance events “move differently”, but transform the researcher as well. The very thought of treating dancers – in action, as well as in archival traces – as equals and intelligent, rather than too quickly judging them from a safe distance, will indeed affect the explorative process. Ultimately, it is claimed that dance-writing allows us to partake in a practical verification of radical equality. In the paper, dance-writing is worked through in a number of interwoven, theoretically informed clusters, in relation to examples from the dance theatre performance Oedipus the King (2011). The main contribution the paper wishes to make is to provide a set of theoretical concepts to serve as directional indicators for dance-writing in the promising trans-disciplinary field where practice-based research and the humanities can intersect. Well aware that a thorough understanding of dance-writing might only be possible to achieve by involving bodily practices, I will attempt to give a “live” demonstration as part of the oral- corporeal presentation at the conference.
Keywords
experiential knowledge; essay; exchange; ethics; equality
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/eksig2013.111
Citation
von Rosen, A.(2013) Accessing Experiential Knowledge through Dance-Writing, in Nimkulrat, N., Niedderer, K., Evans, M. (eds.), EKSIG 2013: Knowing Inside Out – Experiential Knowledge, Expertise and Connoisseurship, 4–5 July 2013, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/eksig2013.111
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Accessing Experiential Knowledge through Dance-Writing
When performing the theoretically informed, critical activity of dance-writing, my personal and corporeal memories, associations, and experiences open up a path into a twilight space. This zone, as well as the experiential knowledge it can bring forth, is created when writing with dance, which is an ethically informed activity, in contrast to writing on art. Knowledge thus emerges step by step as an essayistic text, that is to say, as a hybridity encompassing, but never fully uniting “passion and science”. Dance-writing keeps moving with knowledge creation, acknowledging dance as a vital form of articulation, and a full participant in critical dialogue. It can be described as a creative, conscious, and vital journey, with the purpose of engaging the researcher in a process where analyses of live experience, practitioners’ knowledge, as well as archival material can be given the distinct and different values they deserve. It takes an ignorant, sweating researcher – willing to get lost in the quest for knowledge – to enter the zone and partake in the thrilling exchange that will not only make dance events “move differently”, but transform the researcher as well. The very thought of treating dancers – in action, as well as in archival traces – as equals and intelligent, rather than too quickly judging them from a safe distance, will indeed affect the explorative process. Ultimately, it is claimed that dance-writing allows us to partake in a practical verification of radical equality. In the paper, dance-writing is worked through in a number of interwoven, theoretically informed clusters, in relation to examples from the dance theatre performance Oedipus the King (2011). The main contribution the paper wishes to make is to provide a set of theoretical concepts to serve as directional indicators for dance-writing in the promising trans-disciplinary field where practice-based research and the humanities can intersect. Well aware that a thorough understanding of dance-writing might only be possible to achieve by involving bodily practices, I will attempt to give a “live” demonstration as part of the oral- corporeal presentation at the conference.