Kinaesthesia and Visual Self-Reflection in Contemporary Dance

Image: Britta Knappmann

This book is Shantel's first monograph. The book expands critical inquiry and knowledge about contemporary dancers’ embodied experiences in the practice, contributing to more complex understandings about dancers’ dancing intelligence. It features original interviews with a group of UK-based professional-level contemporary, ballet, hip hop, and breaking dancers, her twenty-plus years’ training and working in contemporary dance, and the bringing together of the rich discourse on the topic of kinaesthesia and visual self-reflection. The triangulated phenomenological and sociological-based research offers an explication of the concept of a ‘kinaesthetic mode of attention’ particular to contemporary dance practice(s) and discussion of the values and practices which nurture and develop this mode. Zooming in on the use of video self-images in these dance practice settings, from the dancer perspective, provides further insights regarding kinaesthesia’s historicised polarisation with the visual and opportunities to re-reflect on reflections, thus opening up to disruptive yet playful diffractions in becoming contemporary dancer, particularly amongst an increasingly complex landscape of visual and theoretical technologies. 

For book details, including how to purchase, please go to Palgrave Macmillan.

---