Ensemble Thinking (ET) is a toolkit of movement scores developed by dance-maker Nina Martin in the 1980s in New York City. The scores of ET arose out of a confluence of Martin's choreographic and improvisational performance practices. The impetus for developing ET was to develop a technical language for creating and discussing improvised dance.…

We demonstrate the ways an improvisational dance workshop provided the opportunity for university students to be autonomous actors and engage in embodied sense-making through dance--two key parts of the conceptualization of enactive cognition. As part of a Design-Based Research project, we use Interaction Analysis to present examples of using…

Practitioner Exchanges (PXs) at Luna Dance Institute are casual community conversations co-facilitated by dance educators around a topic of dance teaching inquiry. With the physical disconnection of the COVID era, these in-person roundtables shifted to Zoom, and became even more essential in bringing teaching artists together. Educators from all…

Contemporary dance and meditative practices are increasingly intertwining in both academic and professional settings as the wide range of current mind/body modalities infiltrate the already vast landscape of modern dance. While the value of emphasizing mindful movement in dance cannot be understated, focusing solely on the slower, sensorial…

Dancers embody movement with an individualized approach, informed by their own unique physicality, creativity, and lived experience. In this paper, the author describes an integrative dance course in higher education that invites adult community members with developmental and intellectual disabilities to dance alongside college students twice per…

Recent scholarship in 4E Cognition posits what dancers intuitively know so well--that our conceptual maps and communicative strategies emerge directly from and in fluid relationship with our own bodily habitation of our world. This article offers a pedagogical strategy aimed to bridge the ontological divide between dancing and writing through the…

This article addresses the notion of touch and its constitutive role in the participatory sense-making process (de Jaegher and Paolo 2007) of play and dance improvisation. It is argued that touch is always relational, as it continuously changes the contours of self, other(ness), and world(ing). It is therefore surprising that touch traditionally…

I argue that personal style in improvisational dance is, amongst other factors, a matter of the dancers' attunement to sets of affordances. We can use the language and theory of affordances and enactive embodied cognition as a teaching tool to improve our students' improvisational practice. Often when a student's improvisational skill has…

This practice-based article illustrates how dance education pedagogies can help refugee youth adjust to new settings. To support refugee youth in narrating aspects of belonging in their everyday lives, this article offers pedagogies for creative movement that unfold through multiple stages. As developed in the first author's dissertation study and…

Somatic memoirs from the author's participation at dance intensives with acclaimed dancer-choreographer Moustapha Bangoura in the West African Republic of Guinea reveal how solo dance experiences can test acoustic literacy, promote music interaction, and foster an aptitude for movement invention. These skills are fundamental to West African dance…

Acknowledging criticisms of the values supported by competitive dance, this article seeks to develop and advocate a pedagogical reframing of the event in terms of situated learning and mediated learning experience. Making sense of the competitive experience with the contributions of 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive) cognition theory,…

This article focuses on the development of a theoretical framework for jazz dance in which researchers hypothesized how motif notation concepts from Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) and Language of Dance® (LOD) could be used to help learners understand how the roots and branches of jazz dance styles are related. We began by investigating the…

Jazz dance training in college and university dance programs offers a platform for students to develop a holistic understanding of dance. Three unique qualities of jazz dance are discussed: vernacular expression, improvisation and sense of play, and rhythmic dynamism. Accessing the vernacular nature of jazz dance provides historical context for…

This article outlines a somatic-based class that illustrates how the integumentary system can be introduced to dance students to further their understanding of their physical instruments. It justifies why incorporating information about specific biological systems into dance teaching is apt and beneficial for dancers, and it describes how guided…

Instructors in higher education arts programs have a responsibility to promote active citizenship and to encourage their students to use the creative arts as a vehicle for positive social change. However, in dance curricula, incorporating these concepts can be challenging, given the long history of structured technique pedagogy and the specific…