Dancing Change: Embodied Cross-Currents Between Radical Dance Pedagogy and Decolonial Futures

This research project aims to articulate the dance educator’s potential in creating decolonial, ecologically-embedded futures. Applying a research-creation methodology, I look to a summer of teaching I experienced to explore Indigenous posthumanist systems of relation, theories of the rhizome and assemblage by Deleuze and Guattari, affect theory, and feminist ethics of care to ultimately critique underlying colonial-capitalist patterns of thought and embodiment, specifically dualism. I explore how these patterns permeate the dance studio space by tracing the history of Western dance studios through colonialism and capitalism, specifically in the place we call Canada, thus creating what remains today the studio, student, and teacher’s current material conditions. I then explore how a dance educator might disrupt these colonial attitudes by enacting a radical shift in their pedagogy that focuses on creating conditions which pull students into corporeal relations with the world(s) around and within them. In understanding what this shift entails, I work autoethnographically to highlight the disturbances I create in my own classes that subtly challenge my students to reconsider, question, and evaluate our commonplace social patterns. I aim to articulate how embodied pedagogical events disrupt, reorient, and attune to the ecological worlds in which we are embedded. In addressing the concerns of settler-colonial logics, I am examining how dance educators can aim to rupture colonial-capitalist binary thought patterns, thus creating the potential for radical spaces of embodied relationality, reciprocity, and care.

Department dc:contributor.department

Cultural Studies

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Parsons, Reanna

Advisor dc:contributor.supervisor

• Murray, Laura

• Dance Pedagogy
• Affect Theory
• Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Being
• Decoloniality
• Canadian Dance History
• Radical Pedagogy
• Research Creation

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1974/33518

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:queensu.scholaris.ca:1974/33518