scholarly journals Dance as a social practice

IDEA JOURNAL ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (02) ◽  
pp. 335-349
Author(s):  
Olivia Millard
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Group Movement ◽  
Children With Disability ◽  
Dance Improvisation

This article explores an ongoing group dance improvisation practice which, while primarily an artistic practice, could also be considered a social practice which is brought about by the physical, embodied and intersubjective environment in which it exists. Among others, the ideas of Tim Ingold, Hannah Arendt and Hanne De Jaeghar are used to explore the implications of what happens when individuals share a dancing practice. The article will also describe how the ongoing dance practice has been drawn upon to develop dance workshops for children with disability. The workshops were developed to include a variety of dance activities such as learning movement material, dance improvisation and supported group movement generation (choreography). Through the principle of intersubjectivity, described by cognitive science philosopher, Hanne De Jaegher, as ‘perspectives that are influenced by and co-created by more than one subject,’ dance will be discussed as a social practice as well as a situation in which one participates physically and creatively.

scholarly journals AllPlay Dance: Two Pilot Dance Projects for Children With Disability, Developed and Assessed With a Dance Studies Approach

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivia Millard ◽  
Ebony Lindor ◽  
Nicole Papadopoulos ◽  
Carmel Sivaratnam ◽  
Jane McGillivray ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Program Development ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Creative Arts ◽  
Collaborative Approach ◽  
Pilot Projects ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Children With Disability ◽  
Dance Improvisation

AllPlay Dance is founded on a collaborative approach to research between the School of Psychology and the School of Communication of Creative Arts, both of Deakin University. The research is also undertaken in partnership with professional ballet company, Queensland Ballet. This paper describes the development and execution of two pilot projects for children with disability, utilizing a dance studies methodology. The projects were conducted in 2018 and 2019 for children with cerebral palsy (CP) and autism spectrum disorder, as part of the AllPlay Dance program. Participants with disabilities ranged in age from 7 to 12 years. As well as describing the approach to the program development, we discuss the involvement of older and more experienced buddies who were included as a method to support the participation in dance of children with disabilities. We will also describe the diffusion of authorship in the making of group dances as a tool for inclusion and the premise of dance as a social practice in which participants inter-subjectively generate meaning and sense making. The AllPlay Dance projects were developed as a series of dance classes in which participants worked with set or learned movement material, dance improvisation, and tasks for movement generation in order to collectively generate a dance for performance. This paper focuses on the aim of developing inclusive approaches to dance classes that challenge “ableist” notions of dance as spectacle to enable to work toward building transferable programs to allow all children who so desire and to participate in dance in their communities.

scholarly journals Green Aspirations and (Un)sustainable Detours

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ditte Holm
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Public Art ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Adequate Measure ◽  
Short Term Evaluation ◽  
Term Evaluation ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
Reflexive Analysis

The participatory, public art project Istedgade Green Spots and Sustainable Detours wanted to engage several hundred local residents to take part in co-designing, implementing and sustaining multiple green oases in and around the street Istedgade in central Copenhagen. This article constitutes a qualitative, reflexive analysis of the processes of developing the artwork with a particular emphasis on the reasons why it failed to develop the ambitious project it originally envisioned. The article discusses the project through the lens of the new norms for artistic practice that have evolved within social practice art, a field of art with a particular sensitivity towards issues of invisibilities, inequalities and injustices and a strong activist dimension. While highlighting two key challenges affecting the success of the project, the article also raises the question of whether the short-term evaluation of the project constitutes an adequate measure for this type of intervention into urban development.

scholarly journals Experimental Work on the Norms of Assertion

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Turri
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Experimental Work ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Life Science ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Norms Of Assertion

Communication is essential to human society, and assertion is central to communication. This article reviews evidence from life science, cognitive science, and philosophy relevant to understanding how our social practice of assertion is structured and sustained. The principal conclusion supported by this body of evidence is that knowledge is a central norm of assertion—that is, according to the rules of the practice, assertions should express knowledge.

Beyond Broadway

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacy Wolf
Keyword(s):  
High Schools ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
Musical Theatre ◽  
Summer Camps ◽  
Afterschool Programs ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Cultural Experiences ◽  
National Performance ◽  
The Status

As a ubiquitous national performance form, musical theatre—an utterly American, unapologetically commercial, earnestly popular, middlebrow genre of art and entertainment—has astonishing staying power. Local productions cross economic, racial, and geographic divides, assuming the status of a national folk practice. Shows are handed down across generations, remarkable in a country with so few common cultural experiences. Artists and audiences learn the Broadway canon, absorb the musical’s conventions, and have a lot of fun in the process. “Broadway,” as a globally recognizable brand, maintains its status as musical theatre’s birthplace, but the form persists in American culture thanks to amateur productions at high schools, community theatres, afterschool programs, summer camps, and dinner theatres. Beyond Broadway illustrates the widespread presence and persistence of musical theatre in US culture and examines it as a social practice: a live, visceral experience of creating, watching, and listening. Why does local musical theatre flourish in America? Why do people continue to find it pleasurable? Why do they passionately engage in an old-fashioned, slow artistic practice that requires intense, person-to-person collaboration? Why do audiences still flock to musicals in their hometowns? What does local musical theatre do? Beyond Broadway answers these questions by traveling across America, stopping at elementary schools, a middle school performance festival, afterschool programs, high schools, summer camps, state park outdoor theatres, community theatres, and dinner theatres. This expedition illustrates the musical’s abundance and longevity as a thriving social activity that touches millions of lives.

Improvisation and the Earth

2019 ◽  
pp. 594-610
Author(s):  
Tamara Ashley
Keyword(s):  
Practice Research ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Future ◽  
Dance Improvisation ◽  
Ethical Work

This chapter draws upon artistic practice research to discuss the construction of improvisation scores as a deeply site-sensitive, time-sensitive, and person-sensitive process that leads to the construction of specific microrelations that connect specific practitioners to specific places on the earth. These microrelations manifest as mindful actions in the detailed cultivation of the earth as a score, where the artists can become concerned with the relational dimensions of their actions in terms of sustainability. The chapter proposes that the cultivation of mindfulness and explicit intention of each and every gesture as a contribution to the cultivation of the earth as score is where the ethical work of the artists resides. The chapter offers a broad, questioning, and critical perspective on how the practices of improvisation might contribute to the development of a future dance ecology that is both sustainable and interconnected. Dance improvisation is thus proposed as an activist and applied practice that enables the experiential examination of ecologically sensitive relations, and the chapter asserts that the future of the dance ecology is entwined with how we relate to and embody the places in which dance is made

Modelling Improvisation as Emergence

2019 ◽  
pp. 544-562
Author(s):  
Colleen Dunagan ◽  
Roxane L. Fenton ◽  
Evan D. Dorn
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Conceptual Model ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
Contact Improvisation ◽  
Dance Improvisation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Automated Decision Making ◽  
Self Organizing

This chapter examines improvisation through the lens of emergence in order to continue a dialogue with cognitive science, emphasize the action of dancers as bodyminds, and reflect on the value of emergence as a conceptual model for dance improvisation pedagogy. By first introducing the basic tenets of emergence and then revisiting the existing work on emergence in relationship to ensemble improvisation, the chapter offers an examination of the concept of self-organizing consciousness and its possible manifestation within the practice of contact improvisation. By linking scientific and dancerly concepts of sensory perception, habitual/automated decision-making, and the multiple mental aspects that comprise higher-level consciousness, the chapter argues for the adoption of emergence as a model for understanding dance improvisation that provides students with a way of understanding the act of improvisation as an exercise in critical thinking rather than one that grounds creativity in a Romantic notion of the individual.

Becoming animal: Children's physical play and dance improvisation as transformative activities that generate novel meanings

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-175
Author(s):  
Carolien Hermans
Keyword(s):  
Sense Making ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Dynamic Coupling ◽  
Enactive Approach ◽  
Transformative Potential ◽  
Physical Play ◽  
Dance Improvisation ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
Theoretical Reflection

Abstract This article addresses the transformative potential of children's physical play and dance improvisation. Using the enactive approach as a theoretical framework, it is argued that play and dance improvisation trigger novel sense-making capabilities by a deep engagement with the environment. Both activities give rise to transformative forces, ways of becoming that create openings and passages through which one re-engages and re-connects with the environment. This article combines theoretical reflection with artistic practice. By intermingling the thinking with the doing, I hope to gain embodied insights in underlying mechanisms of both play and dance improvisation. First, I discuss the concept of transformation. Then I explore how the enactive approach can be helpful in understanding the emergence of new values and meanings in both play and dance improvisation through dynamic coupling. From here I move to my artistic practice. I present an auto-ethnographic research that consists of two events. The first event is a spontaneous play event of my 12-year-old daughter that serves as an entrance point to examine animal becomings as transformative forces. The second event is an improvised dance solo, in which I re-enact the animal becomings of my daughter. The aim is to grasp, in a corporeal sense, the transformative forces that are at work here.

scholarly journals Emergent Meaning Structures: A Socio-Semantic Network Analysis of Artistic Collectives

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikita Basov ◽  
Wouter De Nooy ◽  
Aleksandra Nenko
Keyword(s):  
Network Analysis ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Small Groups ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Semantic Network ◽  
Semantic Networks ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Semantic Network Analysis ◽  
Meaning Structure ◽  
Specific Meaning

This paper explores meaning structures in the social practice of small groups. While social and institutional fields impose meaning structures, they are put to practice (emerge) in the context of specific activities that take place within a field. Collaborating in small groups, field participants form such practical contexts. It enables playing on gaps and overlaps among imposed meaning structures and joint creation of emergent meaning structures that define them as a social group. Difficult to capture, emergent meaning structures are largely disregarded by institutional and field perspectives on meaning structures. As a consequence, the importance of collective practice to meaning structures is underrated.We investigate imposed and emergent meaning structures in artistic collectives. The field of contemporary art does not impose its meaning structure explicitly, so meaning structures that emerge in artistic practice are relatively free to vary across social groups. In particular, we study two St. Petersburg collectives of artists, who intensely interact with each other and engage in joint creative work and exhibitions. We show that these collectives elaborate their own meaning structures within the framework of field-specific meaning structures, blending meanings corresponding to the different fields and field positions occupied by members of the collective.The duality of semantic and social structure is central to the notion of meaning structures. We use word collocations in natural language as semantic structure and interaction ties as social structure in a mixed methods socio-semantic network analysis. In this approach, social networks help to understand semantic networks.

scholarly journals The Point of Assertion is to Transmit Knowledge

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Turri
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Present Evidence

Recent work in philosophy and cognitive science shows that knowledge is the norm of our social practice of assertion, in the sense that an assertion should express knowledge. But why should an assertion express knowledge? I hypothesize that an assertion should express knowledge because the point of assertion is to transmit knowledge. I present evidence supporting this hypothesis.

Language as a mental travel guide

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles P. Davis ◽  
Gerry T. M. Altmann ◽  
Eiling Yee
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Travel Guide

Abstract Gilead et al.'s approach to human cognition places abstraction and prediction at the heart of “mental travel” under a “representational diversity” perspective that embraces foundational concepts in cognitive science. But, it gives insufficient credit to the possibility that the process of abstraction produces a gradient, and underestimates the importance of a highly influential domain in predictive cognition: language, and related, the emergence of experientially based structure through time.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document