Entertainment education: Communicating public health messages through dance

Public health communication, if done well, can make a significant positive contribution to people’s health. Entertainment education provides audiences with a creative and pleasurable experience to promote uptake of key messages. ‘Dance Your PhD’ entry views outnumber the majority of journal article citations, so the first author chose to partake in the competition to raise awareness of the poor quality of New Zealand housing and its impact on wellbeing, and explore non-traditional methods to communicate research findings. A range of dance styles were utilised in the film including contemporary, reggaeton, disco and salsa to illustrate various concepts including water ingress and mouldy housing conditions negatively impacting health. In a short timeframe, the dance film received a relatively large number of views on YouTube. Non-traditional forms of communicating research should be readily considered, as they provide a quick, accessible and memorable way of disseminating messages to a wide audience and can improve health literacy

Breathe through your vagina! - An attempt to catch ineffability

This article is an experimental journey witnessing one moment of my 20-minute performance, where I deconstructed pole dance with the symbol of a cross to analyse intricacies of the female body. I chose to explore one moment as it holds a range of indefinite interpretations. This one moment offers multiplicity, where I introduce my female body as speaking subject and parody the male gaze associated with pole dance. Further, I highlight the meanings I derive from the symbol of the cross and the crucifix coloured by my Catholic upbringing. Additionally, I share an exploration of a feminine imaginary and the fluidity of deconstruction. During my investigations, I question how undisciplining dance relates to my experiences. This writing implements artistic linguistic structures and word usage to sense destabilisation and unexpectedness

Cultural connection: Approaches to cultural education through Latin American dance

Latin Dance Party refers to a tertiary cultural dance unit in Brisbane, Australia, that combines technical/social Latin American dance with cultural perspectives. This article explores the recommendations from two research projects carried out in this unit, over two years, to investigate team-building and cultural authenticity within teaching and learning pedagogies. As a result of these recommendations, the researchers have explored approaches that enhance teacher-student relationships, the development of online contextual resources, and reflective teaching and learning strategies. These approaches have implications for future research into the integration of cultural contexts into dance teaching methodology in university settings

Sighted, an overview

This article is an examination of audience responses to Sighted, two solo dance performances presented individually and simultaneously. The work was presented at venues related to different disciplines. Audience members, who numbered up to 20 and who were free to choose where to stand or move around the space and how to behave, were invited immediately following the performance to write down their responses. This was in order to elicit direct and undigested thoughts before conversation or dialogue has started. These, together with interviews with the dancers, form the basis for this research, which looks at the nature of venues and audiences and to what extent privately felt and communally understood audience commentary can correlate

Issues and Challenges around the fostering of a productive respectful community ethos within an integrated/inclusive class context.

In teaching and facilitating dance in integrated community contexts, building a community among participants seems critically important. In this context, how are the differing needs of a class managed in order to foster a respectful productive learning environment? How is a sense of agency cultivated? What pedagogical issues arise in such a context? In this article, I attempt to interrogate these questions, recognising strategies, identifying and unpacking some of the negotiations, issues and challenges. My approach draws on the work of Chappell (2011), Kuppers (2007, 2014), Shapiro (1998) and Zitomer (2013). Theorising my personal practice from a dance teachers 'self-narrative' point of view, interwoven with other viewpoints from dance and educational research, it can be argued that much is to be gained from reflection that empowers teachers and learners in integrated community contexts

Miss Karen is in it to win: A performative autoethnography approach to investigating dance competition culture

As a researcher, my goal is to ignite conversations in both the academic discourse of dance and the larger population about dance competition culture, the regional and national events where children and adolescents perform short dances for awards. I investigate dance competition culture both as a scholar and as an artist, and as a former competitive dancer and current postmodern dancer. Through my research, a semi-fictional character, Miss Karen, based on my embodied experiences with dance competition culture emerged. This article unpacks how the development and performance of Miss Karen binds together the creative/performative and scholarly/written aspects of my research. In the case of devising and performing Miss Karen, this involves a performative autoethnography approach situated in physical cultural studies. The use of a performative autoethnography approach, particularly in the project's creative components that informs and is informed by qualitative research approaches and collaborative interdisciplinary creative practices, fuels both research process and outcomes. The approach is multifaceted and unified; reshapes traditional approaches to dance scholarship and creative practice; and leads to multiple, integrated outcomes

'After dance...?' A Critical Dialogue on Possibilities for Un-disciplining of Dance

Abstract: Recently considerable scholarly attention has been given to the notion of 'un-disciplining' dance, and there is an idea in the air that ought not just be waved away that after the great modern and post-modern 'revolutions' of thetwentieth century dance, at least in its codified, institutionalised and presentational 'artistic' forms,may have worn itself out and become incapable of self-renewal through yet another stylistic 'revolution' that ushers in the 'next big thing'. There is also a sense that academic and corporate institutions of dance have sacrificed (or forgotten about) the aim of the emancipation of the human spirit through movement, and become fixated on increasingly sophisticated and technologically-driven ways to codify, standardise, and otherwise control the creation and distribution of movement and movement performances created and marketed in the name of 'dance'. With no illusion of delivering a final word on the topic, we begin a brief dialogue on the 'un-disciplining' of dance, with hopes that we can raise some interesting questions, even if we settle none.

Dancing with Dolly: Linda Ashley's enduring legacy

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Reflections on a Caroline Plummer Fellowship in Community Dance Project: A circle of life

This article examines the outcomes of a Caroline Plummer Fellowship in Community Dance project that I facilitated for people living with cancer. Through the project people with cancer, or those associated with someone living with cancer, were invited to come together to create and perform a dance through a series of ten weekly sessions titled 'A Circle of Life'. In this article I reflect on the experiences of the participants as they moved from different levels of nervous apprehension to a place of confidence and pride. The project involved collaborations with University of Otago Arts Fellows and community artists as we moved through a ten-week period. The findings indicated the motivation of the dancers to continue attending sessions, despite hardship; their sense of pride in being part of something that was larger than themselves; the way the dance permitted them to embody a sense of courage; and finally, in performing, how they managed to share something that genuinely moved an audience