Dancing Otherwise: Exploring Pluriversal Practices Network
The Dancing Otherwise research network recognises that many dance practices such as inter- and trans-disciplinary work, site dance, multi-modal, intercultural, interspecies, queer, and feminist work operate on the edges of a wider field of dance-making and dance research. Further, established arts funding systems, financial support for dance research and institutional and academic systems of knowledge production replicate neoliberal market conditions that set dance artists, researchers, and arts producers in competition with one another and perpetuate siloed modes of working. The network explores how practices created by artists from diverse backgrounds and artistic perspectives produce new understandings, new positionalities, and new modes of knowing. This network looks beyond the mainstream to explore culturally diverse, environmentally-engaged, experimental, edgy and novel modes of making, producing and researching dance: to explore ‘being otherwise’ (Akomolafe 2022). It does this through three key frameworks: spatial/geographic (where dance practices take place and are located), thematic (through content and repertoire), and practical (through choreographic approaches, systems of production, categorisation, and transmission).
Creative workshops, discussions and public round table events will address these research questions:
- What is a Pluriverse and how (and why) do we dance “otherwise”?
- How do we choreograph a Pluriverse?
- How might we produce, present and promote the dance Pluriverse?
- How can knowledge emergent from Dancing Otherwise inform social, ecological and behavioural change?
Dance and embodied movement practices choreograph connections between bodies by attending to relationships with the spaces and socio-cultural contexts around them; they develop awareness of bodily borders, peripheries and boundaries and involve collaborative working practices of coalitions, constellations, and care between humans, the material world, and nonhuman others. The Dancing Otherwise network engages dance practice-research with the interrogation of socio-political themes of pluriversality, inclusion and decolonisation to invoke physical and conceptual border crossings with interdisciplinary discourses and envision new and experimental modellings of UK dance ecosystems. Through the exploration of diverse practices and ways of moving in the gaps between spaces, places and disciplines, it advocates for change and the de-centring of dominant frameworks and discourses (such as whiteness, ableism, heteronormativity, anthropocentricism). It positions pluriversality and “dancing otherwise” as knowledge-making practices central to the urgent project of re-imagining and re-shaping relationships towards more socially and environmentally just world views (Yusoff, 2018) and developing practices of ‘ethical pluralism’ (Cortes-Capano 2022).
About Dance Research Matters
Dance Research Matters began with a campaign led by C-DaRE (Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University) and the AHRC (Arts and Humanities research Council). The campaign was launched with an event in May 2021 which brought together people from the UK Dance Research sector and included panel discussions on themes relevant to shaping the future of dance research. This led to £500,000 of funding which has been distributed to five dance research networks, one of which is Dancing Otherwise.
Read more about Dance Research Matters and the other networks