Doug Risner

Karen Schupp

Pam Musil

This book critically examines matters of age and aging in relation to dance. As a novel collection of diverse authors’ voices, this edited book traverses the human lifespan from early childhood to death as it negotiates a breadth of dance experiences and contexts. The conversations ignited within each chapter invite readers to interrogate current disciplinary attitudes and dominant assumptions and serve as catalysts for changing and evolving long entrenched views among dancers regarding matters of age and aging. The text is organized in three sections, each representing a specific context within which dance exists. Section titles include educational contexts, social and cultural contexts, and artistic contexts. Within these broad categories, each contributor’s milieu of lived experiences illuminate age-related factors and their many intersections. While several contributing authors address and problematize the phenomenon of aging in mid-life and beyond, other authors tackle important issues that impact young dancers and dance professionals.

Negotiating Age, Place, and Purpose

Dancing Across the Lifespan

Mary Elizabeth Anderson

The role of the hybrid artist-educator in schools and communities over the past fifty years has evolved significantly. Although education reform and political pressures during the last five decades have frequently interrupted steady and sustained arts education programming in the United States-especially in theatre and dance-the teaching artist today performs an important role in numerous educational contexts. Over the past fifteen years, the work of teaching artists has received growing professional attention and research: the Association of Teaching Artists (ATA) was founded in 1998 to support, advocate for, strengthen and serve the teaching artist profession. This volume, focused on teaching artists in dance and theatre disciplines, expands this developing area of inquiry and reveals topographies for teaching in and through these arts disciplines that have, until this text, been examined separately. Directed toward the last decade's growth and professionalization, the book asks: where and how is teaching artistry in dance and theatre happening? What is guiding, supporting, or complicating the work of teaching artists in dance and theatre arts today? What training and preparation do teaching artists receive? How do teaching artists effectively address the cultural diversity of the communities they serve? What are the political and economic influences that impact the work and delivery of teaching artistry? What has been learned on a large scale about the hybrid lives and work of teaching artists in dance and theatre arts? In sum, what is the status of the teaching artist today? This book examines pedagogical, artistic, and professional issues for two performing arts disciplines by using the voices and experiences of each form's practitioners and those who prepare them.

Hybrid Lives of Teaching Artists in Dance and Theatre Arts: A Critical Reader

Winner, Susan W. Stinson Book Award for Dance Education—University of North Carolina Greensboro Winner, Ruth Lovell Murray Book Award—National Dance Education Organization "Original and groundbreaking.... This is a pivotal text to propel dance education beyond the status quo tenants of 'best practices.'... This text may well be the driver moving personal, value-based pedagogies beyond methods-based instruction. An exciting read and an honest journey in meaningful decision making."--Susan Kirchner, Towson University. The first of its kind, this volume presents research-based fictionalized case studies from experts in the field of dance education, examining theory and practice developed from real-world scenarios that call for ethical decision-making. Dilemmas faced by dance educators in the studio, on stage, in recreation centers and correctional facilities, and on social media are explored, accompanied by activities for humanizing dance pedagogy. These challenges converge from educational policies and mandates developed over the past two decades, including teacher-proof "scripted" curriculum, high-stakes testing, standardization, and methods-centered teacher preparation; difficulties are often perpetuated by those who want to make change happen but do not know how.

Case Studies on Humanizing Dance Pedagogy

Ethical Dilemmas in Dance Education

Wendy Oliver

The essays in this book consider how gender dynamics manifest in the dance community.

An Evidence-Based Approach

Dance and Gender

Angela Pickard

Originally published as a special issue of Research in Dance Education, now with an added chapter, this text acknowledges and celebrates the increasingly diverse careers and employment networks in which dance professionals and dance educators are engaged. Addressing issues and developments relating to the workplace of dance, the text explores what it means to transcend the boundary between dance as passion, and dance as employment. Chapters explore challenges of professional practice including limitations on access, precarity, bodily risk, gender inequality, and sexual harassment, and challenge the status quo to offer readers new ways of thinking about dance, and how this might translate into professional practice and work. Ultimately celebrating the passion which motivates dancers to embark on a professional career, and highlighting the elation and joy which such employment can bring, this volume encourages dance professionals, students, and educators to imagine things differently and develop teaching approaches, curricula, work places, and communities which capitalise on the diversity and dedication of individuals in the field. This text will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, researchers, academics, professionals in the field of Dance, Dance Education, Choreography and related art forms, Curriculum studies and Sociology of Education.

Challenges and Opportunities for Dance Professionals, Students, and Educators

Dance, Professional Practice, and the Workplace

Winner, Susan W. Stinson Book Award for Dance Education—University of North Carolina Greensboro Winner, Ruth Lovell Murray Book Award—National Dance Education Organization “Original and groundbreaking…. This is a pivotal text to propel dance education beyond the status quo tenants of ‘best practices.’…This text may well be the driver moving personal, value-based pedagogies beyond methods-based instruction. An exciting read and an honest journey in meaningful decision making.”—Susan Kirchner, Towson University The first of its kind, this volume presents research-based fictionalized case studies from experts in the field of dance education, examining theory and practice developed from real-world scenarios that call for ethical decision-making. Dilemmas faced by dance educators in the studio, on stage, in recreation centers and correctional facilities, and on social media are explored, accompanied by activities for humanizing dance pedagogy. These challenges converge from educational policies and mandates developed over the past two decades, including teacher-proof “scripted” curriculum, high-stakes testing, standardization, and methods-centered teacher preparation; difficulties are often perpetuated by those who want to make change happen but do not know how.

Doug Risner

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