Collaborative practices in dance research: unpacking the process

Abstract

This essay explores the numerous and diverse ways collaborative practices in dance research can unfold. Strengths and challenges within the collaborative process are discussed as emphasis is given to the multiple perspectives and types of relationships that evolve from and within the process. These core elements offer scholars a rich array of choices that can enhance research endeavors as well as inform pedagogical practices. Unpacking collaboration in this manner carries particular relevance in a world that is as global as it is fragmented, underscoring the need to understand collaboration not as a specific research methodology but as a dynamic process. Examples in dance science, choreography, dance education, and pedagogy are considered to illustrate the possibilities collaboration holds for future research queries.

Keywords:

• collaboration
• research practices
• dance education
• critical feminist pedagogy
• choreography
• dance science

Notes

1. Two relatively recent examples can be found in the scholarship of Tomko (1999) and Burt (1998). Tomko looks at American dance history at the turn of the twentieth century through a multiple lens of social reform, class structure, and immigration. Burt (1998) blurs previously accepted boundaries in his examination of race, gender, and nationalistic identities within early modern dance.

2. For example, a statistical analysis of co- and multi-authored research published in RIDE in the past 10 years revealed the following: 2005–2009: 24.0%; 2010–2014: 44.2%. This represents a 20% increase in collaborative-based research.

3. See Fortin and Siedentop (1995), Fortin (1995, 2002), Fortin, Lord, and Long (2002), Fortin and Girard (2005), Fortin, Cyr, and Tremblay (2005), and Rip, Fortin, and Vallerand (2006).

4. The following examples of collaborative publications that involved at least two members of this research team focusing on DPC: Craft, Chappell, and Twining (2008), Chappell et al. (2009, 2012), Chappell, Craft, et al. (2011), Chappell and Craft (2011), and Craft et al. (2012).