Editorial

Each of the articles that make up this volume speaks of the processes of dancing and dance-making from the dancers’ embodied positions. Each gives voice to the experiences of moving, watching and making to offer modes of analysis and critical discourse that are deeply informed by the author’s kinaesthetic engagements, giving rise to insights that are unique to the writer and here shared with you.

The question of embodiment is threaded through these articles in a complex web of artistic and theoretical modes that press us to consider and reconsider what it means to dance and to make dances. Fraleigh offers an insightful prompt by questioning the term ‘Are we not embodied by being born?’. This provocation echoes words we have often heard uttered by dance scholars who might be questioning the need for the term when, for many of us, it may seem anathema to single out the body from the mind and thus re-inscribe a mind/body duality that has permeated much of the development of western philosophy. Fraleigh pushes on, ‘Embodiment also promises an activity if we are to do it well and not just hang out with it. In dancing we move consciously’ (see page 162 in this issue). And here we begin to have access to an underlying set of assumptions and ideological positions inherent in the use of the term ‘embodiment’ or ‘embodied’ as used by many dance practitioner/scholars. It is not the fact of our embodiment but the potentiality of bringing to consciousness the role that embodiment plays in our dancing and creative processes.