Language of Dance Centre

In May 2024, at low-tide on Easington Beach in South Holderness (East Yorkshire, United Kingdom) students and researchers from the University of Hull shared a time-specific performance exploring the unique entanglement of the transient geography and human occupancy on this ever-shifting coastline. Undertaken as part of the ‘Applied Arts Ecologies and the Resilience of Coastal Communities: South Holderness Project’, this performance formed one part of the multi-stranded research outputs produced by its team (Christian Billing, Anna Fitzer, Toby Horkan, Ellen Jeffrey, Magnus Johnson and Mark Slater) in collaboration with nineteen final-year students from the BA Drama and Theatre Practice degree at the University of Hull. Working across a variety of artforms and practices to engage with the temporality of this place, the research outputs of this project – including a cycle of eight poems produced in the co-making of the live performance (Christian Billing), and ‘Coastal Process’ a musical composition in nine parts (Mark Slater) – were crafted alongside (and in response to) the project’s growing archive of oral history; a series of recorded interviews which sought to document the voices and perspectives of a community-in-transition.

Developments in digital technologies can enhance the teaching and learning experience for dance educators and students across all of our dance constituencies. The many sessions on using technology ...

The queer tango movement is an international alliance of tango practitioners who seek to denaturalize the link between gender and the division of labor in a tango partnership. The queer tango space provides participants, particularly female practioners, with relief from minority stress, access to LGBTQ sexual potentiality, and experiments in gender utopia.

The theme for NDEO 20th Anniversary Annual Conference is NDEO's Priorities for Dance Education, Connections, Knowledge, and Leadership: A New Era in Dance Education. Those of you who submitted to p...

In my column for this issue, I discuss resources for studying Laban Movement Analysis, Labanotation, and Language of Dance, each of which contribute to “literacy” in dance. Artistic literacy is a c...

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The long legs flew high into the air as the dancer warmed up with batlements cloche before the class began. The ease, the height! I heard a whisper go around the room That's Mary Skeaping! The time and place? The 1936 Jooss-Leeder Summer School at Dartington Hall, attended mainly by modem dancers from abroad. But here was an ex-member of Pavlova's company coming to see what this oft-scorned European modern dance was all about. Astonishing? Yes, until one discovered that Mary never followed the established pattern. Hers was the most open mind and attitude in the dance world that I have ever met. We did not meet at that summer course, but years later we were to work together on many occasions.