ABSTRACT
“In my practice I do … in my practice I am interested in …” declared Russell Maliphant at the beginning of his workshop Resonance of the Body Image during the 5th Dance Education Biennale at the Centre for Contemporary Dance at the University of Music and Dance in Cologne. 1 He proceeded to describe his working process as a hybrid, created out of the mixture of various movement techniques he had practiced over the years and the latest research on fascia. The workshop was to be understood as a field of experimentation. The borrowing and mixing of terminologies from the natural sciences and medicine, the conceptualization of dance research and dance education as laboratories, as well as the notion that dance offers a specific embodied form of knowledge, have become well established in the contemporary dance field (Hardt and Stern 2014, Obrist and Vanderlinden 2001, Peters 2013, Riley and Hunter 2009, Kleinschmidt 2017). How dance is taught and learned is no longer conceived in terms of conventional dance techniques but is the site for research and knowledge production (Diehl and Lampert 2011, Legg 2011). As such, dance education serves as an ideal “object” of analysis within a wider discussion of Practice-as-Research as much as it profits from a more rigorous conceptualizing of how practice can function as an analytic category. 2
