Found in Translation: unlearning ‘expertise’ in inclusive dance practice

Names of presenters: Sally Doughty and Sue Smith Nature of proposal: Presentation/provocation
Title: Found in Translation: unlearning ‘expertise’ in inclusive dance practice

Abstract: This presentation/provocation responds to the conference theme of ‘addressing hierarchies’, and suggests how ‘unlearning’ can challenge histories of inclusive dance practices.

We reflect on our research undertaken as part of Critical Mass, an inclusive mass choreography performed at the Commonwealth Games 2022 Opening Ceremony. Interrogating how disabled and non-disabled young people learn the codified dance styles of Breaking and Kuchipudi, we propose that embedding inclusivity more rigorously in dance practices, from studio to management, promotes unlearning as a guiding disposition.

Our provocation is that unlearning expertise in/of the dancing body radically shifts expectations of ‘difference’ in dance practices. Interrogating inclusive participation and translation within Breaking and Kuchipudi, we propose that good practice includes challenging individuals to explore and move beyond existing movement boundaries without prioritising certain bodies or expressive capacities over others. This, in turn, challenges current operational and conceptual hierarchies in dance pedagogy and production. Translation, interpretation and authenticity promote individual expressions of identity, participant-led agendas and the generation of new communities (Bartlett 2017; Whatley 2007; Elin and Boswell 2004), that support reinterpretation and invention rather than fulfilling the physical geometry of codified dance vocabularies. Through unlearning loyalty to a movement idea (‘that’s not a headspin, this is!’) we propose new insights for studio practice and pedagogy in which people with different bodies and neurologies can idiosyncratically express movement whilst being united by qualities, efforts, direction and intention.

Approaching movement translation from this perspective requires a degree of unlearning (McLeod et al 2020; Visser 2017; Risner 2009) and the acknowledgement that earlier learnings may be incorrect and reductive. We therefore set a provocation for unlearning that challenges traditional ways of using translation in inclusive dance practices, and reimagines traditional hierarchies or ‘cascades’ of knowledge as more rhizomic structures with multi-directional forces of expertise that inform processes, experiences and outcomes.