About

This project is concerned with the concept and practices of wandering in dance and beyond. By investigating wandering it aims to create a new paradigm for dance practice and knowledge production. At the crux of the project is the development of a new Practice-as-Research (PaR) methodology with wandering as its main modality. Thus wandering is the subject but also informs the methodology of this research project.  The notion of wandering is related to terms such as drift, aimlessness, uncertainty. Dance and movement practices have explored such concepts through activities including walking, improvising, waiting, allowing attention to roam, stillness. These could be seen as antithetical to active production, even counter-productive. In contrast, this project advances these constituents of wandering as fundamental to the process of production and proposes that such practices can be re-evaluated on new terms. Further, through attentive and rigorous testing, it aims to reclaim these practices as essential tools for a contemporary dance practitioner-researcher.  Key to the investigation are notions drawn from physical experience by writer Rebecca Solnit and dancer/writer Nancy Stark Smith. Solnit’s ‘being lost’ (2003), exposes the paradox that to be fully attentive to the present we must be in a state of uncertainty. Stark Smith’s ‘the Gap’ (1997) is a moment of uncertainty in dance improvisation from which any act is possible. Such synchronous alertness and uncertainty is essential to the practice of wandering, and informs the context for developing practice in this project.  Recently, value in dance has become contingent on producing knowledge, evidenced both in artists’ work (eg. Katye Coe’s Preparation, (2015), and Jonathon Burrows’ Weak Dance Strong Questions, (2001) and publications (eg. Brandstetter & Klein, 2013), which expose problems and questions that arise when investigating how dancing produces knowledge. Within this frame, this project uses wandering to interrogate production procedures and assumptions of value specifically   through practice.