Corporeal Memories: A Historian’s Practice

Abstract

From the perspective of a historian, the practical pedagogical environment of an arts university offers many challenges. Dance is often begun at an early age, which means that practitioners often create a sense of the past of the art form from an ‘oral history’, comprising narratives told by teachers and colleagues as well as events and encounters. As a historian, I suggest that obligatory history classes should integrate the practical interests of the students to enable their sense of agency in relation to the past, and dancing beyond the often expensive practice of reconstruction. This requires a redefinition of dance history as a discourse constantly constructed anew and re-evaluated, a discourse which is corporeal and embodied as well as written. The pedagogical principle of this history—or rather, genealogy in the Foucauldian sense—should be in assisting the student to learn to unlearn: to question beliefs and aspects of their practice they have thus far taken for granted. For the teacher, this principle requires openness about our (institutional) positions of power, both restrictions imposed by curricular demands and our cherished canons of art. In this paper, I address some of the methodological and practical insights that artistic research in dance offers for historiography and the pedagogy of history.