Place and the Dancing Body

Photo Credit: Domitilla Ferrari

A/P Michelle Duffy, in collaboration Dr Paul Atkinson (Monash) and A/P Jo Ailwood (Newcastle)

This project investigates the concept of place as understood through the prism of dance as a particular form of sensuous mobility. In the study of dance, the relationship between corporeal knowledge and knowledge of place is always mediated by particular sensual modalities from the proprioceptive mapping of choreographic possibility to the audience’s understanding of movement as part of a larger visual and aural event. The dancer, in making visible rhythms in his or her own body, creates a ‘communicative musicality’ (Malloch 2005) that enables others to engage and participate within human structured time-spaces. This research draws on non-representational theory as a means to open up ways to make sense of non-cognitive, bodily, emotional and affective processes in corporeal movement.

Indicative publications:

Duffy, M., Atkinson, P., Wood, N. (2019). Thresholds of Representation: Physical disability in dance and perceptions of the moving body. In C. Boyd & C. Edwards (eds) Non-representational theory and the creative arts Bloomsbury; pp. 243-262

Atkinson, P., Duffy, M. (2019). Seeing movement: Dancing bodies and the sensuality of place. Emotion Space and Society 30: 20-26

Atkinson, P., Duffy, M. (2015) The amplification of affect: Tension, intensity and form in modern dance. In J. Taylor (ed) Modernism and Affect: Feeling in Modern Literature and Culture (pp. 94-110). Edinburgh University Press.