Making Dance, Making Sense: Epistemology and choreography

TLDR

The dancers' experiences of choreography and rehearsal, though central to the art, have been underexplored and warrant further investigation by dance educators. The study investigates how dancers construct knowledge during rehearsal. The researcher employed an interpretive methodology, reviewing dance education and epistemology literature, to collect and analyze narrative accounts from ten university dancers involved in a newly created choreography. The narratives revealed an emergent epistemology comprising four key clusters—interpersonal construction, bodily re‑remembering, and context‑situated knowing—highlighting significant epistemological issues for future dance research.

Abstract

This interpretive inquiry explores the construction of knowledge by dancers in the rehearsal process. Although seemingly primary to the act of choreography, the dancers' experiences of the choreographic process have not been explored fully. Though often neglected, the dancers' experience of rehearsal warrants further investigation for dance educators. Through the dancers' narratives, an account of the nature of knowing emerges from which an epistemology, or theory of knowledge, is theorized. Following a review of the relevant literature in dance education and epistemology, an interpretive methodology is used as a framework for collecting and interpreting the narrative accounts of ten university dancers with whom the researcher recently created a new piece of choreography. Four significant epistemological clusters are discussed, most notably knowing as interpersonal construction, knowing as re-membering the body, and the contextual situatedness of knowing from a particular body, place, and time. The study reveals important epistemological issues for further dance research agendas.