ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that an understanding of what risk-taking in dance entails becomes clearest when one perceives improvisation and choreography as always related dynamically, tangled up in the various ways of knowing that any specific dance fosters and requires. This includes an awareness of the potential encounter with the unknown within the dance. Choreography tends to be identified with planned and decided-upon forms and improvisation as a practice in which at least some decisions are made in real time, spontaneously. In short: the more unplanned, unknown and spontaneous the action, the more risk-taking will be involved. When actualized, hitting might well read as aesthetically interesting to the audience, but it might also compromise the trust amongst the dancers, a trust that is fundamental for positive risk-taking in the group. Therefore, risk-taking itself, and the dimensions through which it can manifest in dance, can be understood as a form of knowing that simultaneously creates reality and is created by it.
