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Laboratory of Dance / Dance as a Vantage Point

Due to its rooting in the primary experience of movement and action, dance very easily interacts with other forms of art. It crosses and expands its recognizable forms. At the same time, by significant and progressive overlapping with the visual, new media, participatory art, it modifies them and provokes looking at them through concepts such as choreography. As such, dance demands today new approaches that take into account its emergent, dynamic and transgressive characteristics. Many of the latest dance research is inspired by insights from ​​contemporary cognitive science and/or reinterpretations of classical phenomenology. At the same time, a growing body of research is situated on the border of dance practice and theory and takes up the challenge of combining traditional methodologies with creative strategies directly derived from artistic practice. Moreover, new modes of dance research increasingly make use of new media and virtual reality in particular, which allows the creation of immersive spaces for experiencing movement and physicality from otherwise inaccessible perspectives. These contexts create an inter/multi/transdisciplinary matrix that has the potential to create new research perspectives that go far beyond performing arts. However, due to its (pre)liminal nature, these and related trends raise also significant methodological issues. Along with promoting this type of interdisciplinary research, strategies to tackle and overcome these new challenges are the primary thematic focus of the symposium.

In addition, the conference wants to explore the fact that similarly to theatre, ritual and game, dance can be an imaginative and rhetorical source of cognitive metaphors for describing life and reality in their various dimensions. Perhaps the interpretative possibilities opened up by dance have more potential than the discontinuous dramatic imagery or torn apart by the representation-reality dichotomy theatrical imagery, that co-create the horizon of the so-called performative turn? This is for instance suggested by the prominent presence of dance in the mythical and religious imaginary, wherein it appears as: the dynamic principle of reality, the vehicle for the transformation of the phenomenal view of the world, as passion dance, and maybe even as an allegory of salvation.

Despite their establishment in different theoretical-imaginary spaces, we hypothesize that these threads are connected and can be recognized as manifestations of one broader intellectual and experiential trend. Therefore, we suggest looking at those existing and potential links between both lines in interdisciplinary research contexts, which will allow us to recognize and verify the scope of a potential dance and choreographic turn.