The Department of Dance Theatre, the first university accredited dance program in Poland that emerged two years ago from successful partnership of the Silesian Dance Theatre and the State Theatre School of Krakow is organizing international conference on "Understanding Dance" in multicultural society and in transnational cultural flows. Our goal is to discuss dance concepts from a few different cross disciplinary perspectives informed by anthropology, sociology, and history of criticism. It is hoped that this uniquely constructed platform for dance scholars – those of both practical and theoretical expertise – to meet and to discuss dance will help identifying tools to increase “understanding dance.” These include methods of examination, theories and points of view.
Contemporary discourse on the body prevailing social sciences in Euro-American culture tends to juxtapose corporal perception of the world against the mind. Past centuries marked by triumphant adoration of reason not only have limited human learning to the dimension of what mind can or cannot grasp but as a consequence it suppressed bodily experiences reducing them to disgraceful domain. Reaffirmation of the body as seen in cultural revolutions and social transformations of the last five decades has manifested itself in arts. And dance with complexity of its developments is one of the strongest and the most celebrated outcomes of this reaffirmation.
Poland as many other countries of East Central Europe has been left out of social and cultural transformations of the West. The exclusion was politically and historically implicated. Now, it seems, liberal arts and sciences cannot grow successfully without anthropologically and sociologically informed knowledge on the body. Dance developments in Poland suffer from these lacking as much as transformations in other arts, sciences and social developments do.
The conference program will be composed of approximately 18 papers presented according to subjects of scholarship including expertise in the presence of the body, memory, gender, politics, ethnicity, identity, dance and theatre. Diversity of approaches to analyzing dance and theatre from international guest speakers uniquely shaped by many different factors and by watching dance developments in their native countries will offer valuable insights into the study of dance and into its complexity; it will help contextualizing dance in most deeply human aspects.
The abstract papers will be translated and distributed amongst conference participants to stimulate open discussion. Documentary films and dance films will be presented in support of the concepts under discussion.
The conference comes as a result of the Department of Dance Theatre of the State Theatre School of Krakow, Theatre and Drama Faculty of Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznan and Dance New Amsterdam, New York joint forces.
Contemporary discourse on the body prevailing social sciences in Euro-American culture tends to juxtapose corporal perception of the world against the mind. Past centuries marked by triumphant adoration of reason not only have limited human learning to the dimension of what mind can or cannot grasp but as a consequence it suppressed bodily experiences reducing them to disgraceful domain. Reaffirmation of the body as seen in cultural revolutions and social transformations of the last five decades has manifested itself in arts. And dance with complexity of its developments is one of the strongest and the most celebrated outcomes of this reaffirmation.
Poland as many other countries of East Central Europe has been left out of social and cultural transformations of the West. The exclusion was politically and historically implicated. Now, it seems, liberal arts and sciences cannot grow successfully without anthropologically and sociologically informed knowledge on the body. Dance developments in Poland suffer from these lacking as much as transformations in other arts, sciences and social developments do.
The conference program will be composed of approximately 18 papers presented according to subjects of scholarship including expertise in the presence of the body, memory, gender, politics, ethnicity, identity, dance and theatre. Diversity of approaches to analyzing dance and theatre from international guest speakers uniquely shaped by many different factors and by watching dance developments in their native countries will offer valuable insights into the study of dance and into its complexity; it will help contextualizing dance in most deeply human aspects.
The abstract papers will be translated and distributed amongst conference participants to stimulate open discussion. Documentary films and dance films will be presented in support of the concepts under discussion.
The conference comes as a result of the Department of Dance Theatre of the State Theatre School of Krakow, Theatre and Drama Faculty of Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznan and Dance New Amsterdam, New York joint forces.
International Dance Conference
Understanding Dance
Bytom, POLAND
Understanding Dance
Bytom, POLAND
19-21 November 2009