Dance research beyond borders
Chair and Panellists
Chair: Charlotte Waelde
Charlotte Waelde is Professor of Intellectual Property Law in the Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University. Her research interests lie at the interface between intellectual property law (particularly copyright), technologies, and intangible cultural heritage. Her work reaches out into other domains including human rights, competition law, international private law and the regulation and promotion of new technologies more generally as they intersect with her core interests.
Kate Elswit
Kate is a scholar–artist whose research on performing bodies combines dance history, performance theory, cultural studies, medical humanities, experimental practice, and technology. She is the author of Watching Weimar Dance (2014), winner of the Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research and honorable mention for the Callaway Prize, and of Theatre & Dance (2018). Her current research includes a monograph on the intersections of breath, performance, and measurement from the Victorian era to the present, as well as the digital humanities project Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry, in collaboration with Harmony Bench, which is funded by a three-year project grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge, and is now Reader in Theatre and Performance at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. www.kateelswit.org
Siobhan Davies
Siobhan Davies is a renowned British choreographer who rose to prominence in the 1970s, and was Artistic Director of Siobhan Davies Dance until March 2021. Davies was a founding member of London Contemporary Dance Theatre and in 1982 joined forces with Richard Alston and Ian Spink to create independent dance company Second Stride. Founding Siobhan Davies Dance in 1988, she works closely with collaborating artists to ensure that their own artistic enquiry is part of the creative process. By 2002 she moved away from the traditional theatre circuit and started making work for gallery spaces. Davies applies choreography across a wide range of creative disciplines including visual arts and film. Recent choreographic works have been presented at some of the most prestigious art institutions in the UK and Europe, including Lenbachhaus (Munich), Whitechapel Gallery (London) and Turner Contemporary (Margate). Davies is currently an Associate Professor at the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University. Davies was awarded a Damehood in 2020 for her continued service and contribution to the dance industry.
Scott deLahunta
is Professor of Dance, Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University and co-Director of Motion Bank, now hosted by Hochschule Mainz University of Applied Sciences. His research seeks to deepen and apply the understanding of dance as a form of embodied knowledge and choreography as skilful bodily practice. This builds on over a decade of working within contemporary dance companies as research director and facilitator. Since 2010, he has held a research position at Coventry University and assisted in setting up the Centre for Dance Research in 2015. http://www.sdela.dds.nl/.
Timmy De Laet
Timmy is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Dance Studies at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). He is the founder of CoDa ⏐ Cultures of Dance, the Research Network for Dance Studies that brings together several partners from across Europe to contribute to the development of dance studies as an academic and practice-oriented discipline on both a local and international level. His research focuses on the reiterative nature of dance in relation to reenactment, archivisation, and historiography. His current projects are supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), the Fulbright Commission, and the Belgian American Educational Foundation (B.A.E.F.).
Rachel Krische
Rachel has performed, made work and taught extensively and internationally throughout her career, embracing and immersing herself within a diverse range of creative processes and environments. Her research interests span improvisation, performance, dance-making, embodied knowledges, embodied cognition and archive. As Senior Lecturer/HEA Senior Fellow at Leeds Beckett University, she supervises doctoral students and also delivers on the BA and MA Dance programmes. Most recently she has been collaborating with artist/scholars Sally Doughty and Lisa Kendall on Body of Knowledge, a research project that examines how the dancer’s body can be considered as a living archive by collecting, articulating and disseminating experiences – dance related and other – that reside in the body. The three artists also contributed a chapter about the project within the publication Art and Dance in Dialogue, Body Space Object, recently published by Palgrave Macmillan. https://www.bodyofknowledge.co.uk/performance