Fourteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Contemporary dance is continually evolving. Its landscape has transformed and developed significantly over the past thirty years, slowly shifting from a repertoire company scene to a diverse freelance environment. In this idiosyncratic milieu, the breadth of skills that dancers need to master is continuously becoming more complex. Given that emerging contemporary dancers will be encountering the new reality of an increasingly heterogeneous freelance environment, how should training institutions best prepare students for this paradigm shift? To address this challenge, I began developing “The Porous Body,” a structure of feeling that promotes the practice of heightened physical and mental malleability by following four guiding principles: flow, playfulness, metaphor and paradox, a combination that offers multiple bi-poles between which move the energetics of metamorphosis. Sourcing from my own performative, choreographic and pedagogical practices, and the work of dance artists, movement practitioners, philosophers and psychologists from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (such as Carol Dweck, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Mary Starks Whitehouse, Ohad Naharin, and Anouk van Dijk), I will, through a scholarly presentation, formulate this method and share its fundamental concepts.