Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the tensions and bliss inherent in curriculum delivery through the lens of dance integration. We interweave our shared experiences as dancers, dance educators, and choreographers who all teach through dance. Personal vignettes unveil the intentions and sense-making of creative artists tasked with the duty to “deliver” curriculum. They liken the tensions inherent in prescribed curriculum to those experienced between choreographer and dancer, and share encounters of pedagogical balance and counterbalance, risk and certainty, freestyle & choreography, weightlessness and gravity as it relates to learning design and the duality of meeting ends and unfolding endless possibilities (Aoki, 2005; Roth, 2014). To choreograph emergence is to present encounters where learning is truly alive (Greene 1967). The authors’ question and confront their own disquietude with utilitarian notions of dance as learning tool, and spark a call for the necessity of curricular events that offer the somatic, the subliminal, and the sublime as part of a lived curriculum (Aoki, 2005).