Reconfiguring Dance Between Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology

Author: Simona Noja-Nebyla, PhD

Q&A: Alma Mater Europaea University, Maribor, Conference: It’s About People 2026, March 14, 2026

1. How can we theorize creative and pedagogical processes and working methods in dance? 

Dance has long remained marginal within the theory and philosophy of art. The reasons for this marginalization are closely tied to its ephemeral nature, its specific modes of production, and its historical reception, as well as to the difficulty of isolating dance as a “pure” object of study due to its hybridity with other artistic forms such as music and theatre. Within many traditions, the arts have been treated as separate domains, further obscuring the interdisciplinary nature of dance. Moreover, the absence of a well-documented canonical tradition and of major theoretical figures comparable to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in aesthetics or Theodor W. Adorno in music has contributed to the lack of a robust critical corpus.

Ephemerality, often cited as a limitation, may instead be understood as a defining epistemological condition of dance. Documentation, notation, and archiving practices do not simply preserve dance but actively transform it, raising fundamental questions about translation, mediation, and the status of the work itself. From this perspective, the relative absence of a canonical theoretical tradition may not only signal neglect but also reflect the resistance of dance to systems that privilege permanence, textuality, and abstraction.

To theorize creative and pedagogical processes in dance, it is therefore necessary to move beyond the constraints of a largely unchallenged classical framework and toward an epistemological shift that reconfigures both the space in which dance manifests and the role of the body within it. Such a shift entails rethinking choreography not as the production of fixed compositions but as an emergent process; the body not as an instrument, but as a site of knowledge production; and technique not as reproduction, but as the ongoing negotiation of relations.

Dance is understood not as the creation of stable forms but as a dynamic interplay between bodies, environments, temporalities, and modalities of perception. The body becomes a locus of embodied knowledge, where thinking and doing are no longer separable. Somatic practices and theories of embodied cognition reinforce this perspective by framing choreographic processes as modes of inquiry rather than mere execution.

This reconfiguration also transforms the relationship between creative and pedagogical processes. Pedagogy can no longer be reduced to the transmission of codified techniques; instead, it operates as an experimental field in which knowledge emerges through shared practice. The distinction between creation and pedagogy thus becomes porous: teaching assumes a choreographic dimension, while choreography becomes inherently pedagogical.

The transition from a “frame” to a “field” is therefore not simply methodological but theoretical. It marks a shift from hierarchical and structural models toward open, process-oriented configurations. In this context, a rhizomatic approach, as developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, foregrounds multiplicity, non-linearity, and decentralization. Creative processes unfold as networks of relations with multiple points of entry and participation, challenging traditional notions of authorship, authority, and fixed methodology.

The move from frame to field ultimately redefines dance as a dynamic system of relations rather than a bounded object. It opens the possibility for a theory of dance that is itself processual, situated, and embodied—capable of accounting for creative and pedagogical practices as interdependent modes of knowledge production.

2. Who should be writing about them and developing this kind of reflection? Do you think more teachers and choreographers should be writing manuals, books, and other forms of professional literature to counterbalance the historical marginalization of dance and support its more equal representation within the theory and philosophy of art?

To counterbalance the historical marginalization, it is crucial that practitioners themselves—choreographers, pedagogues, performers, rehearsal directors, dramaturgs—write about their methods, questions, and epistemologies, not only about finished works. Their situated accounts articulate how creative and pedagogical decisions are made “from within” somatic, improvisational, task-based, or repertoire-oriented practices, which abstract theory alone cannot reconstruct. Manuals, handbooks, and reflective practice-based writings can function as counter-canons: they document lineages, name tacit knowledge, and render visible those micro-political negotiations of authority, authorship, and embodiment that are otherwise lost in purely textual or archival discourses.

At the same time, philosophers of art, phenomenologists, critical theorists, anthropologists, and performance-studies scholars remain important because they connect these practitioner knowledges to broader conceptual debates about ontology, aesthetics, and epistemology. Contemporary philosophy of dance has begun to address ephemerality, notation, documentation, and interdisciplinarity in ways that resonate with your “frame-to-field” shift, but these debates deepen when they directly engage with practitioners’ writing and when dancers themselves appropriate and transform theoretical vocabularies. Ideally, then, manuals and professional literature are not just technique catalogues but sites of co-theorization, where practice, reflection, and external theory think together.

3. At the same time, in the last decade, we have seen a significant growth in dance literature. There is now a wide range of books that address diverse approaches, methodologies, and research perspectives, often in dialogue with other disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, pedagogy, somatic studies, and performance studies. 

Yes: more teachers and choreographers publishing methodologically explicit and critically reflexive texts is one of the most effective ways to challenge the historical asymmetry between dance and other arts within aesthetic theory and institutionalized knowledge.

Such writing can do at least four things:

• Establish genealogies of techniques and pedagogies that have remained oral or studio-bound, thus creating alternative canons and conceptual lineages.

• Offer models of processual, relational, and somatic thinking that reconfigure the very notion of “work,” “technique,” and “composition” in ways philosophy is only beginning to grasp.

• Articulate the ethical, political, and ecological dimensions of training and creation (questions of care, consent, labor, environment), which are central to dance but underrepresented in traditional aesthetics.

• Provide resources for teacher education and curriculum design, anchoring the “field” model in reproducible yet open-ended pedagogical formats.

For this to avoid simply reproducing a new canon, it matters who gets to write and be published: marginal, non-Western, Indigenous, queer, disabled, and community-based practices need institutional support (translation, open access, practice-led doctorates, editorial mentoring) so that their epistemologies shape the conversation rather than being absorbed as case studies.

4. How do you see this development in relation to the theoretical positioning of dance today?

The expansion of dance literature in the last decade has already begun to reposition dance from a marginal, “ephemeral” art to a recognized site of theoretical production in its own right. Systematic reviews of dance pedagogy and creative dance show that current writing foregrounds holistic, somatic and reflective approaches, intercultural and gender-aware teaching, and the integration of technology and other art forms—precisely the move from fixed frames to relational fields that you outline.

Several tendencies are especially relevant:

• Interdisciplinarity: Dance literature now routinely draws on philosophy, phenomenology, post-structuralism, anthropology, cognitive science, and somatic studies, treating choreographic and pedagogical processes as modes of inquiry rather than mere applications of pre-given theory.

• Somatics and embodied cognition: Research on somatic approaches and creativity explicitly theorizes the body as a locus of knowledge, emphasizing self-regulation, awareness, and agency in training, which aligns with your proposal of the body as a site of knowledge production and technique as ongoing negotiation.

• Creativity and education: Studies on creative dance in education and teacher training frame teaching as an exploratory and co-creative practice, blurring the line between pedagogy and choreography, and reinforcing the idea of pedagogy as an experimental field.

In philosophy of dance specifically, scholars have increasingly taken up questions of ephemerality, documentation, and interdisciplinarity—not only as technical problems but as keys to understanding how dance resists object-centered, text-based models of art. In this sense, the growing corpus of dance literature can be read as the materialization of the “field”: a distributed, rhizomatic network of writings in which practitioners, educators, and scholars co-construct a theory of dance that is processual, situated, and embodied, and that gradually alters what counts as theory in the arts more generally.