ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author explores a different pathway: not applying scientific methods to dance, but asking what studies of science can tell about choreographic methods to performers as modes of research in their own right. He suggests that social analysis of science – as found in the field of social epistemology – has as much to offer performers' understanding of embodied practice as science does. The author offers notes toward a social epistemology of choreography as research. He proposes two distinctions based on social epistemology to understand how choreography can accomplish research in the sense are: technique may be distinguished from practice, and the technical can be distinguished from the epistemic. Although choreographic objects mean differently in different times and places, this kind of contextually and socially constructed meaning does not exhaust their meaning. As epistemic objects, they also push back against the social act of construction, revealing their own emergent contours.
