The Expanded Dance Body: Beyond Co-Design

• In Event: The Belly of the Beast: Resisting Racial, Gendered, and Sexual Oppressions Through the Power of Performance

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose: In this paper we explore questions about relationality posed by the expanded dance body in a more-than-human workshop environment. We read the expanded dance body to be dancing bodies, the dominant discourses that shape bodies and dance, the space and sound in relation to which the dance takes place and the technology woven through this extended dance body: phones, glasses, ipads, motion capture software, watches: devices that machine bodies in particular ways. Our analysis is focused on a short dance film of a three minute original dance work that was collaboratively made through a dance workshop (RMIT Human Ethics approval: 25990) and which was filmed in situ by a team of camera professionals who were embedded in the workshop process. While part of this paper explores the technical and choreographic strategies employed, we also take space to think about dance as a site of political activism. We explore how dance can be part of re-making embodied experiences and how it can reposition bodies both socially and culturally. Such activism is pertinent in relation to dancers with Down Syndrome, whose identities and futures are overcoded by medical discourses and popular social imaginaries which tend to present an impoverished perspective on individuals, their capacities and their value.
Our codesign approach for producing creative work with dancers with Down syndrome is informed with principles and theorisations from critical disability studies. This scholarly domain addresses the enduring social disadvantage of people with disabilities which remains a challenge for disability communities (Johnson and West, 2021). In this context those with intellectual disabilities are a particularly disadvantaged group.

The expanded dance body is the assemblage of bodies connected in and through movement in the dance workshop. Informed by a Spinozist-Deleuzian understanding of the body as an expression of context and subjectivity as an accumulation of our actions. We activate and assemble expanded dance bodies through a codesign process. Codesign philosophies and practice originated in design disciplines to include intended end-users of objects into the design process through various approaches (Sanders and Stappers 2008). Informed by design disciplines, the last five years have seen an expanded use of codesign in social science research which has recognised the value of codesign principles for meaningfully actioning human rights and social justice principles. Codesign can centre the lived experience of marginalised people as a valuable form of knowledge and to shift traditional power dynamics in research away from academic dominance. Codesign methodologies also offer practical methods for generating stakeholder collaboration and emphasise the need for research to produce end-value for those the research collaborators. This purpose extends social science research beyond written knowledge creation as final output.

Authors

• Anna C. Hickey-Moody, Maynooth University

• Belinda Johnson, RMIT University