The research trajectories to be converged: Susanne Martin’s current research project at a Swiss technical university (EPFL) aims at understanding the potential role of dance improvisation in higher education learning. She argues that dance improvisation can support students to increase their appetite and courage for experimentation, collaborative inquiry, and critical thinking. Hilde Rustad's research is about meaning-making in artistic processes. Her present project takes place in dancer education and investigates what kind of meanings and knowledge evolve through students' experiences with performing dance improvisation in art galleries.  

How and why we explore convergence: Inspired by the propositions of “various rehearsals” and “crisis collective” we use the conference as a starting point for a long-desired research exchange. As dance improvisers we work with similar tools and around similar questions. We also share the interest to articulate the knowledge improvisation builds upon and to investigate what kind of knowledge it can generate for people outside the dance communities. 
In our presentation – and in the process leading up to it – we let our respective research trajectories converge to feed, support and inspire each other. We will meet bodily, intellectually, and compositionally as artists, movers, and researchers. We will dance for and with each other. We will exchange and test dance scores. We will speak about our distinctive research and practice and our converging and diverging practical and conceptual tools. And we will invite the audience to accompany our unfolding artistic research collaboration as expert observers, dreamers, analysts and commentators. 

We propose this kind of explorative convergence process because we believe artistically and politically in practices that carve out yet unforeseen pathways, recognize and build (on) commonalities, and deal with differences.

Click here to view the remains of this cancelled presentation on Research Catalogue