Dancing Otherwise: Exploring Pluriversal Practices Network

In this episode, Vicky, Daniela and Michelle share insight into the focus of the network, which aims to explore how practices created by artists from diverse backgrounds and artistic perspectives, produce new understandings, positionalities and new modes of knowing. They reflect upon their network experiences thus far and offer insights into their approaches to the network events, underpinned by practices of care and creating new opportunities for dialogue. Throughout the episode, they consider what being otherwise means to them, the potential of Pluriversal thinking in allowing us to think more broadly and how such provocation may in turn, contribute to a wider dance research ecology. Dancing Otherwise: Exploring Pluriversal Practices Network

The network emerged from the investigators’ interests in dance and politics and a curiosity about the potential for dance to explore, illustrate and provoke ways of relating and being ‘otherwise’. The Dancing Otherwise network looks beyond mainstream UK dance practices to explore culturally diverse, environmentally-engaged, experimental, edgy and novel modes of making, producing and researching dance that tell us something about the aspirations of artists and researchers for ' being otherwise' (Akomolafe 2022).

Website: www.dancingotherwise.com

Instagram: @dancingotherwise

Victoria Hunter (Principal Investigator)

Vicky Hunter is a Practitioner-Researcher and Professor in Site Dance and formerly head of the MA Choreography and Professional Practices programme at the University of Chichester. She joined Bath Spa in October 2023 and leads the AHRC ‘Dancing Otherwise: Exploring Pluriversal Practices’ network and is a member of the Ecotones research project led by Professor Amanda Bayley. Her research is transdisciplinary and includes site dance practice and theory, embodied research methods and post human feminism, eco-somatic awareness, environmental choreography, practice-research methods, dance and new materialisms.

Biography: https://www.bathspa.ac.uk/our-people/vicky-hunter/

Contact: ⁠ v.hunter@bathspa.ac.uk

Daniela Perazzo (Co-investigator)

Daniela is Senior Lecturer in Dance and Postgraduate Research Coordinator for the School of Arts at Kingston University London. Her research interrogates the intersections of the aesthetic and the political in contemporary choreography, focusing on the ethical, po(i)etic and critical potentialities of experimental and collaborative practices. Her latest research engages with notions of vulnerability and discomfort and attends to the gaps, difficulties and entanglements of modes of being in relation.

Biography: https://www.kingston.ac.uk/staff/profile/dr-daniela-perazzo-179/

Contact: D.Perazzo@kingston.ac.uk

Michelle Elliott (Co-investigator)

Michelle is the Subject Leader for Dance at Bath Spa University with research interests in a range of sociocultural issues, the ontology of creativity and embodied cognitive theories. She has publications on critical approaches to dance analysis, dance and cultural identity politics and creativity research. Michelle is the co-convenor of the Creative Practice and Embodied Knowledge Research Group, a collective that aims to celebrate and elevate knowledge that exists and emerges from our creative, embodied interactions and experiences.

Biography: https://www.bathspa.ac.uk/our-people/michelle-elliott/

Contact: M.Elliott@bathspa.ac.uk

AHRC-funded Dance Research Matters Networks

The five AHRC-funded Dance Research Matters Networks explore current issues and generate change and legacy for the sector. The ecosystems created by the Networks traverse across South Asian dance, digital black dance, future producing dance ecologies, critical dance pedagogies, and pluriversal dance practices and will be mapped for reach and impact in and beyond the sector.

Please visit:

danceresearchmatters.coventry.ac.uk

@danceresearchmatters

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