Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T01:04:12.183Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Knowing: Dance’s trade literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2022

Scott deLahunta*
Affiliation:
Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University, United Kingdom

Abstract

This article explores the possibility that dance is a field of expert knowledge that can be studied from the perspective of documents created by dancers and choreographers whose anticipated viewers/readers are mainly other practitioners. These documents include written texts and annotated video recordings created with the aim of sharing processes, techniques and ideas. These documents seek, in a variety of ways, to partially transform experiential knowledge from the tacit/ implicit to the explicit. As such, they suggest a form of trade literature that circulates dance knowledge within its professional network, but with the potential to generate productive exchanges with others outside of this network. By drawing on a number of examples of this trade literature and discussing their methods of circulating dance knowledge, this article makes a link to the theme of this special issue which is dance as a vehicle to discuss and debate ownership and cultural property.

Type
Article
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International Cultural Property Society

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

Blades, H., and Meehan, E.. 2018. Performing Process: Sharing Dance and Choreographic Practice. Bristol, UK: Intellect Books.Google Scholar
Bleeker, M. 2017. Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance. London: RoutledgeGoogle Scholar
Burrows, J. 2010. A Choreographer’s Handbook. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeLahunta, S. 2013. “Publishing Choreographic Ideas: Discourse from Practice.” In Share: Handbook for Artistic Research Education, edited by Wilson, M. and van Ruiten, S., 170–77. Amsterdam: European League of Institutes of the Arts.Google Scholar
DeLahunta, S. 2015. “The Utility of Words (the Poet’s Technique).” In Research Environments: Reflections on the Value of Artistic Processes, edited by Haffner, N. and Quast, H., 245–54. Berlin: Universitaet der Kunste Berlin.Google Scholar
DeLahunta, S. 2020. “Language-in-Use: Practical Dance Vocabularies and Knowing.” Biblioteca Teatrale 134: 259–81.Google Scholar
Diehl, I., and Lampert, F.. 2010. Dance Techniques 2010. Berlin: Tanzplan Deutschland.Google Scholar
Drobnick, J. 2006. “Deborah Hay: A Performance Primer.” Performance Research 11, no. 2: 4357.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Forsythe, W. 1999. Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye. Karlsruhe: Hatje Cantz Verlag.Google Scholar
Gorman, E.H., and Sandefur, R.L.. 2011. ‘“Golden Age,’ Quiescence, and Revival: How the Sociology of Professions Became the Study of Knowledge-Based Work.Work and Occupations 38, no. 3: 275302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hay, D. 2000. My Body, the Buddhist. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Heaney, S. 1980. “Feeling into Words.” In Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968–1978, edited by Heaney, S., 4160. London: Faber & Faber.Google Scholar
Hodge, A. 1999. Twentieth-Century Actor Training. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Leach, J. 2014. “Choreographic Objects: Contemporary Dance, Digital Creations and Prototyping Social Visibility.” Journal of Cultural Economy 7, no. 4: 458–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leach, J. 2017. “Making Knowledge from Movement: Some Notes on the Contextual Impetus to Transmit Knowledge from Dance.” In Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance, edited by Bleeker, M., 141–54. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lepecki, A. 2010. “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances.” Dance Research Journal 42, no. 2: 2848.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karreman, L. 2017. “The Motion Capture Imaginary: Digital Renderings of Dance Knowledge.” PhD diss., Utrecht University.Google Scholar
Melrose, S. 2007. “Still Harping On (About Expert Practitioner-Centred Modes of Knowledge and Models of Intelligibility).” Keynote presentation, AHDS Summer School: Digital Representations of Performing Arts, National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh, July, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/15237424.pdf (accessed 23 October 2020).Google Scholar
Melrose, S. 2018. “Nothing Like … Falling ….Performance Research 23, no. 4–5: 152–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merlin, B. 2007. The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit. London: Nick Hern Books.Google Scholar
Rotman, B. 2002. “Corporeal or Gesturo-haptic Writing.” Configurations 10, no. 3: 423–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Völkers, H. 2010Foreword.” In Dance Techniques 2010, edited by Diehl, I. and Lampert, F., 89. Berlin: Tanzplan Deutschland.Google Scholar
Ziegler, Z. 2007. “Electronic Memory Design: From Archiving to Rehearsal Software.” In Capturing Intention: Documentation, Analysis and Notation Research Based on the Work of Emio Greco / PC, edited by deLahunta, S., 3441. Amsterdam: Emio Greco / PC and Amsterdam School of the Arts.Google Scholar