Daring in dance–Bachelor Students in Dance Developing Life Skills for the 21 st Century

Abstract

This article investigates how to find connections between dance education and the development of life skills for the 21 st century by interpreting students’ experiences of daring in dance. The article draws on a section of my PhD thesis that focuses on BA students’ lived experiences in modern and contemporary dance. The project is informed by hermeneutic phenomenology, and the material consists of eleven students log books and interviews. One of the main themes in the material is daring in dance , which is connected to a transformative learning process. In this article I dig more deeply into the embodied dimension of such learning process and discuss how the result of this process can be interpreted as developing life skills for the 21 st century. The analysis shows that becoming a professional dancer is a vulnerable process, encompassing both fear of failure and learning to trust one’s own competencies. Several of these competencies point toward skills recognised as important to learning in the 21 st century, such as flexibility, problem solving, self-direction and social skills. By focusing on everyday embodied experiences of daring in dance, this research provides one example of the development of life skills in higher education based in empirical research.