Weaving Presences, Unravelling Normal: Affirming Diverse Ways of Being in Dance Pedagogy

Abstract

This is an art-pedagogical thesis that is a continuation of a process of artistic-pedagogical practice as inquiry grounded in my work in Winter 2019-2020 at a vocational special education training program in contemporary dance, where I co-taught with fellow Dance Pedagogy MA student Mercedes Balarezo. Through this process, I came to clarify that I was focusing on what reflections, perspectives, and/or questions emerged when I aimed to artistically-pedagogically explore states of presence in a way that enabled students to be as they are. I was and am not aiming to somehow describe or phenomenologically research the students' experiences or states of presence, but rather to see what reflections, challenges, possibilities, etc. came from a pedagogical process in which my intention was for the students to do that first-person exploration in a way that didn’t demand a certain way of being. I also do not want to generalize anything within this project to any sort of defined populations. My goal is rather to use the intertwining of mine and the students' reflections with existing discourse to open further conversation amongst dance pedagogues. I will discuss elements around exploration, the unknown, reflective practices, and visibility. I am working within a larger context of disability studies, neurodiversity, and mad studies, as well as existing developments and work around disability and/in dance, not in order to make any claims about disability (which is already something that escapes definition) and dance, but rather to bring to the surface questions or approaches that I believe are important to dance pedagogy in many contexts.