Responsive Bodies: Towards an Ethics of Contemporary Dance

Alexander Schwan

doi:10.21476/PP.2023.82510

Abstract

Providing an introduction to six major contributions towards an ethics of contemporary dance, the text draws on the example of Anna Halprin’s Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the Line (1989) and raises the fundamental question: How does an ethical responsibility arise in the situation of a performance and extends beyond the moment of dancing and the experience of a dance piece? How can we understand contemporaneity beyond shared time and presence so that contemporary dance can acknowledge the fragility and incompleteness of the past and unlock the potentiality of the future? And how is this understanding of contemporaneity linked to ethical responsiveness in dance and dance reception?

Author Biography

Alexander H. Schwan

Dr Alexander H. Schwan is a dance scholar and theologian with a research focus on spirituality, religion, and ethics. He is the author of the book Schrift im Raum. Korrelationen von Tanzen und Schreiben bei Jan Fabre, Trisha Brown und William Forsythe, which was honoured with the Tiburtius Award in 2016. His current book project, Theologies of Modern Dance, researches theological implications in the works of modernist choreographers in Europe, Israel, and the US. He has been a visiting lecturer at the University of California Santa Barbara and has held visiting fellowships at UC Berkeley, Princeton University, and Harvard. His article “Queering Jewish Dance: Baruch Agadati” (Dance Research Journal 2022) was awarded an Honourable Mention for the Dance Studies Association’s Gertrude Lippincott Award for the best English-language article in dance studies.

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