Dance & Academia: Moving the Boundaries
What is Dance without an Audience?
A series of three seminars exploring this provocative question. For academics in all disciplines, dance artists and movement practitioners, and anyone else who wants to exchange thinking about dance!
Tuesdays 3 October, 5 December 2017, 6 February 2018, 6-8.15pm
Heritage Learning Centre, Town Hall, St Aldate’s, Oxford OX1 1BX
£5 cash on the door per seminar (£1 off for any repeat attenders). Please email to reserve your place.
Tuesday 3 October: Chloe Metcalfe (Roehampton University)
When non-dancers dance: considerations of audience and performer in contemporary British community-dance events.
Social dance blurs the distinction between audience and performer. Nowhere is this more true than in community barn dances, usually held by non-performance based organisations across England. This evening will feature a brief talk about the concept of performer within this context, drawing upon PhD research of such dances in Buckinghamshire. This will be followed by a fun, practical workshop where the concepts of audience and performer are engaged with.
5 December: Susie Crow and Maggie Watson
Further information to follow
6 February: Nicky Clayton and Clive Wilkins (Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge)
What is dance without an audience? An investigation beyond language and the complexity of our social interaction to explore wordless thoughts~ to include demonstrations of tango and magic.
i. Does an audience have to be real?
ii. Is dance without an audience merely ritual, resulting in an altered state, and if so, what kind?
iii. Is dance without an audience simply the confirmation of a heartbeat?
iv. Is the introspection of an intimate partner dance audience free, and if so, what is being explored?
v. Is dance without an audience the opportunity to invent and explore realities that exist outside of the compass of shared experience?
Supported by Dancin’ Oxford Festival