ABSTRACT
A crucial lesson of Robert Wood's artistic philosophy is that any genuine collaboration across the borders of choreographic arts and anthropology requires some radical epistemological repositioning. Coauthored with the distinguished New Zealand and American choreographer and dance artist Robert Wood, examines a section from one of his contemporary movement works, drawing on his knowledge of this artistic domain to probe how precision of performance and meaning is achieved. Robert Wood refers to his choreography as 'movement works' or 'movement explorations' rather than 'dances', for reasons that will become clear as we proceed. This chapter discusses a crucial lesson of Rom Harre's philosophy of scientific realism for the humanistic social sciences is that, after abandoning positivist social science with its unrealistic dogma of the accuracy of measurement, 'precision of meaning' is the most appropriate form of rigour to which we can and should aspire.
