Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T05:02:01.239Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Exploring Rhetorical Agency in University Dance Students

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2015

Rachel Mehaffey
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper details the theoretical frameworks, methods, and preliminary results from a year-long study of rhetorical agency in undergraduate dance majors. Over the course of two semesters at a BFA Dance Performance and Choreography program, I facilitated a series of extracurricular dance labs for a group of five first- and second-year students. Throughout the academic year, I interviewed the dancers, recorded the lab sessions, and collected free-writes from the participants. This wealth of data can shed light on the relationship between conceiving dancers-as-authors and the emergence of agentic personal narratives in university students. This study offers implications for future research on rhetorical agency as a pedagogical or compositional tool, as a lens for hearing and sharing dancers’ narratives, or as a means to explore authorship in other disciplines.

Type
Research Article
Information
Congress on Research in Dance Conference Proceedings , Volume 2015 , Fall 2015 , pp. 102 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © Rachel Mehaffey 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Albright, Ann Cooper. 1997. Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Albright, Ann Cooper. 2013. Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Cooper, Marilyn M. 2011. “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted.” College Composition and Communication 62(3): 420–49.Google Scholar
Fraleigh, Sondra. 1987. Dance and the Lived Body: A Descriptive Aesthetics. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Geisler, Cheryl. 2004. “How Ought We to Understand the Concept of Rhetorical Agency? Report from the ARS.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34(3): 9–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, Jill. 1999. “Somatic Authority and the Myth of the Ideal Body in Dance Education.” Dance Research Journal 31(2): 80–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gorrell, Donna. 1997. “The Rhetorical Situation Again: Linked Components in a Venn Diagram.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 30(4): 395–412.Google Scholar
Roses-Thema, Cynthia. 2008. Rhetorical Moves: Reclaiming the Dancer as Rhetor in a Dance Performance. Saarbrucken, Germany: VDM Verlag.Google Scholar
Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 1966. The Phenomenology of Dance. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
States, Bert O. 1995. “The Actor's Presence: Three Phenomenal Modes.” In Acting (Re)Considered: Theories and Practice, edited by Zarilli, Phillip B., 22–42. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Thomas, Helen. 2003. The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory. Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, Amanda. 2008. “Disciplinary Rhetorics, Rhetorical Agency, and the Construction of Voice.” In Rhetoric in Detail: Discourse Analyses of Rhetorical Talk and Text, edited by Johnstone, Barbara and Eisenhart, Christopher, 227–248. Dartmouth, MA: University of Massachusetts.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zarilli, Phillip. 2004. “Towards a Phenomenological Model of the Actor's Embodied Experience.” Theater Journal 56: 653–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar