Translating home: dance, cities and moments

Abstract

Creative practices emerge in relationship with ecologies, spaces and sites, where culture meets geography, where the terrain of the city meets the behaviours of its streets. This article translates the way one dancer has made her home in dance. It is structured around a series of narratives and employs practices of experimental writing in an attempt to capture affective moments. The paradigms that interconnect and inform this writing include practice-led research, contemporary dance, inter-disciplinary studio practices, somatic methodology and dance in tertiary education. Relationships between practices of dancing and writing are at the heart of this paper, which explores how affective spaces created by processes and ecologies of dance might be translated to the page. These auto-ethnographic narratives do not claim to speak for any communities of practice or to map relationships between cities and dancers. Instead, they concentrate on a few specific moments out of many, in the hope that these moments may illuminate a sense of how ecologies of dance, place and community interweave, creating all manner of different kinds of dance-homes, bringing sensoriums of proprioception, touch, connection and listening to the worlds of our cities.