Paper short abstract:

Contrary to common perception, dancers are not only artists but can be researchers. This paper elaborates on the research practice and knowledge production of such dancers between the arts and sciences and discusses the larger trend to learn and borrow from the arts for science and society.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2016, I have observed and collaborated with an international group of dance researchers that form the Institute for the Study of Somatic Communication (ISSC). The ISSC studies embodied expertise and claims that the resulting knowledge can aid science and society. Meeting in local and virtual CoLaboratories, the dancers have more flexibility in their research protocols and experimental set-ups than scientists studying comparable phenomena in the academy. Yet, resources and recognition are scant because as artists, they are on the bottom of the knowledge hierarchy.

The idea to think of art in general and dance in specific as experimentation or research practice is en vogue and might appear as just another spin of the knowledge economy. However, the history of contemporary dance suggests that the practice emerged as a mode of research that investigated human embodiment in close collaboration with natural and social scientists in the late 19th century. With an increasing separation of the arts and sciences, and the turn to behaviorism and cognitivism in psychology, the experience-based research of the dancers diminished in scientific value and put dancers in the place in which we perceive them today: as expressive rather than as inventive of new knowledge.

I elaborate on the details of how dancers research and produce knowledge and compare their work to similar research in the sciences proper. Furthermore, I situate the work of the ISSC in a discussion of the larger trend to learn and borrow from the knowledge of the arts.