Kinaesthesia and Visual Self-Reflection in Contemporary Dance

Kinaesthesia and Visual Self-reflection in Contemporary Dance features interviews with UK-based professional-level contemporary, ballet, hip hop, and breaking dancers and cross-disciplinary explication of kinaesthesia and visual self-reflection discourses. Expanding on the concept of a ’kinaesthetic mode of attention’ leads to discussion of some of the key values and practices which nurture and develop this mode in contemporary dance. Zooming in on entanglements with video self-images in dance practice provides further insights regarding kinaesthesia’s historicised polarisation with the visual. It thus provides opportunities to dwell on and reconsider reflections, opening up to a set of playful yet disruptive diffractions inherent in the process of becoming a contemporary dancer, particularly amongst an increasingly complex landscape of visual and theoretical technologies.

Shantel Ehrenberg is a dance academic and practitioner interested in the complexity of the corporeal. She is lecturer in Dance & Theatre at the University of Surrey, UK. Her practice research has been presented internationally, and her research can also be found in publications such as Dance Research Journal, Choreographic Practices, Research in Dance Education, and Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.