As an Odissi student travelling back and forth in Taiwan and India the first stage is to deal with physical barriers. This indicates the fundamental concept of choreographic movement, such as how to use one’s body to carry out the beauty of Odissi dance. Odissi is built on various parts of the body to be integrated harmoniously, and its power displays smoothly in the flow, eventually reaching a seemingly effortless dance status. The embodiment of Odissi requires different levels of learning. This article will provide a fundamental view of a foreign beginner who is searching the way to get into the body language of Odissi dance, studying it through different cultural contexts. It does so by borrowing somatic education resources and specific techniques from Taiwan, such as Experienced Anatomy Workshop, Gyrokinesis and Taichi-Dowing, to enhance the experience and efficient use of the body in Odissi, and cultivate an inner view of self-awareness while practicing the dance.

This study explores the experiences of body image in women employed as performers within the cruise ship industry. Previous research within the dance population has predominantly focussed on ballet dancers. We were particularly interested in understanding how the unique environment of life aboard a cruise ship impacted body image. We interviewed nine female cruise ship performers aged 25 to 34 years regarding their experiences of body image aboard a cruise ship and how they had experienced body image as a cruise ship performer. The three key themes were: industry-based demands on body image, impact of the environment on body image, and social influences on body image, each of which highlighted both negative and positive influences. The findings highlight the impact of cruise ship experiences and industry standards on female ship performers’ perceptions of body image and the importance of recognising ship-specific (and more general dance genre-specific) body image in future research.

In 2019, the Bangladesh ‘Ocean Dance Festival’ organized WDAAP’s Choreolab by the coasts of the Bay of Bengal in Cox's Bazar. The event was for a group of 19 young professional dance artists coming from across the regions of the Asia-Pacific. The mandate of the event was to foster the professional development of these artists as well as the maturation of dance practice through research, education and creation. I had the privilege of mentoring this vibrant group of talented artists. My participation in directing the Choreolab was one of my many international projects facilitating young and emerging professional artists into finding an authentic connection between their dance practice, their reality, and their time and space. The project focused on both creative possibilities and challenges in a process of negotiating authenticity through the contemporization of traditional cultural material. It also explored “contemporary” as a concept and how that idea relates to the arts, particularly dance. The process of the sessions included many discussions and experimentations to examine and interrogate the concept of identity in this age of neo-colonialism that uses globalization, cultural imperialism and socio-economic conditioning. The participants of the Choreolab were invited to explore in what circumstances contemporization leads to positive transformation and empowerment. In this article, I would like to share with you the transformative process of this Choreolab, which culminated in an in-progress dance work called Chand (Moon): The Reflection of a Wish. Chand was a 30- minute choreography for 19 performers who vocalized, sung, and moved in a collective or communal ritual, which served to understand their present by reflecting on the past and looking towards their dreams.

This paper navigates through the author’s process of photography and screendance during two specific cross-cultural collaborations in an effort to understand more deeply her creative process. In these dance projects, she analyzes and positions the camera as a witness and as a dancing body with attention to kinaesthetic empathy, improvisation, framing, and editing. This analysis explores the possibilities of co- creating with the camera and dancer in a current technological and internet landscape. She situates this analysis as a negotiation between her relationship with the camera and her own subjectivity as a Kathak dance practitioner within the context of dance and film in India. This paper detours from perceiving the camera as a passive, ethnographic, and historical experience in India and centers the discussion around the relationship between the moving body and the camera. The author then describes her pedagogy for the university classroom which arose from her creative process. By proposing the camera as an instigator to provoke an inquiry-based filmmaking process for students, she facilitates new ways to see, listen, create and connect in their tumultuous and unsteady pandemic world of 2020.

This article explores the layers uncovered within the collaborative dance-making process of Them:Me:Us. Utilizing a practice-led methodology, this research is an investigation of the research question: How might I facilitate a collaborative choreographic process that explores notions of a choreographic democracy? This article focuses on four key elements that correlate to a political democracy: relationship, communication, process and values. It suggests that a layering of these elements enables dancers to shift traditional understandings of hierarchical power in the dance-making process and allows the collaboration to move collectively with ideas that might not be discovered alone. Collaborators can be creatively connected and feel safe in offering their voice, their stories and their realities into a dance-making process and thus enact a process that may enhance and deepen skills that facilitate collaboration and perhaps, democracy.