With restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, we shifted to a video dance performance experience for the Fall 2020 semester at our university. We decided to use a drone to film an outdoor performance of our tap ensemble. This turned out to be a very successful performance experience for dancers, choreographers, and the online audience. This…

This article investigates the implications of childhood dance training and its effects on dance artists' trajectories into the professional field in the United States. It asks what would happen if young movers did not start their dance training with technique, but rather the foundations of the creative process, improvisation, and dance making. By…

During dance, endorphins, the so-called happiness hormone, are released--a fact that undoubtedly favors contacts with others as well as is an excellent opportunity to establish or strengthen them. Nowadays, with dynamically progressing digitization, dance has also found its place on the Internet. Both individual users and organizations see the…

The COVID-19 pandemic entered Trinidad and Tobago on 12 March 2020. We immediately went into lockdown and borders were officially closed to all travellers, including nationals. The Prime Minister, Dr. Keith Rowley, cancelled Carnival for 2021 on 28 September 2020. This was devastating news for a culture and economy dependent on the celebrations.…

Teaching dance technique in academic environments can be problematic in that many Western practices are rooted in traditions that contradict contemporary educational theory. This can create a disconnect between maintaining time-honored traditions and developing more student-centered class structures. This article questions the importance of…

This paper illuminates kinesthesia's role in ballet training by revealing findings of a study regarding non-tactile corporeal communication termed kinesthetic dialogue. Even before the novel Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) heightened awareness of physical distancing, physical interaction between teacher and student was already increasingly…

One Saturday, in November in 2014, a researcher made an explorative intervention with 22 professional performing and teaching dance artists on the independent dance field in Norway. Through the three-hour-long intervention, the researcher and participants dived into questions about choreographic processes and dance pedagogy in contemporary times.…

Choreographic practice still competes for the same level of value as language-based study in higher education and therefore choreographic practice and pedagogy can be a means through which to address issues of precarity for dance and dance studies in the university economy today. This article addresses this problem by sharing a UK-based…

Dancers in India come from a background that focuses on performance and are trained to teach the way they were taught. When such dancers join a K-12 space as dance educators, they need to find new ways of teaching dance and movement. The teaching strategies employed in a dance studio, institute, or under a guru vary immensely from the strategies…

Dance programs in higher education offering both professional degrees (BFA) and liberal arts degrees (BA, BS) often focus most of their energy, attention, and resources to ever-increasing BFA programs. At the same time, liberal arts programs in dance often provide the real bread and butter of program headcounts, credit hours generated, and degrees…

The field of dance education is not immune to conflicted discourses about race in the United States. This article investigates the subject of race, education, and dance, and problematizes current postracial discourses in postsecondary education. It examines the implications of race and ethnicity in a number of critical areas, such as faculty and…

My dissertation, a self-reflective autoethnography, examines, analyzes, and interprets children's dances created by seventeen nine-11 year olds attending a Midwestern, urban elementary school. The significance of this longitudinal study is in the offering of a fresh perspective on children's dance-making as a mode of embodied understanding and as…

This case study focuses on a group of teachers' and students' opinions regarding the recent reforms in the dance department of Tainan University of Technology (TUT) in Taiwan. The author uses Pierre Bourdieu's theory of forms of capital and symbolic violence to probe for the motivation, process and consequences of the changes brought about by…

The idea of "best practices" in the performing arts is introduced as a set of progressive educational values and pedagogical strategies that attempt to not only train youth in the performing arts, but also to be transformative. This article builds on the work of educational reformer John Dewey to describe progressive performing arts…

Those who advocate for dance in education inevitably face many roadblocks, including ignorance of how dance can contribute to education, implementation of standardized performance assessments, lack of funding, entrenched issues of politics and power, and fear and discomfort about the body. It is dance teachers' responsibility to enlighten,…