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In this article, we focus on dance as intra- and intergenerational learning that cultivates corporeal knowledge held in common. Three interrelated projects reveal how danced connections between life stages develops an aesthetics of complex interaction and a mutuality of learning that enacts citizenry through communities in motion in the urban-scape. The projects approach dance practice through an expanded concept of choreography that takes into account the site, situation and life stage of dancers. We propose that moving together is a social choreography, a method for developing body-place awareness and civic participation, sharing experiences and bodily practices and performing relational complexity.

How are Pacific students redesigning their own learning environments, in response to the cultural distance between Western tertiary education and their needs as Indigenous people? This study explores how Pacific students are applying their cultural values within tertiary learning spaces in which teachers are absent, disrupting educational colonization and neoliberal idealism within the autonomous learning zone of collaborative tasks. Our "talanoa" (conversations) with Pacific tertiary students and review of Pacific scholarship identifies how Pacific cultural ideals might be more clearly recognized and valued through collaborative learning. We describe this as the "Mafana" Framework; enhancing a sense of "mafana" (feeling enlivened) by fostering an "Acceptance" in learning relationships, an "Acknowledgement" of other beings in all forms, and a purposeful "Animation" of the space. While this study focuses on tertiary students in collaborative tasks associated with choreography, we present this framework for consideration as to how it might be applied within diverse subject areas, contributing to a growing body of literature that values Pacific learners' needs and perspectives.

Code switching is a linguistic term that identifies ways individuals use communication modes and registers to negotiate difference in social relations. This essay suggests that arts-based inquiry, in the form of choreography and performance, provides a suitable and efficacious location within which both verbal and nonverbal channels of code switching can be investigated. Blood and Books, a case study of dance choreography within the context of post-colonial Maori performance in Aotearoa/New Zealand, is described and analyzed for its performance of code switching. The essay is framed by a discussion of how arts-based research within tertiary higher education requires careful negotiation in the form of code switching, as performed by the author's reflexive use of vernacular and formal registers in the essay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I will address the ways in which my practice and philosophy, as a choreographic artist, inform my teaching methodologies in the Dance Studies programme at the University of Otago. These issues formed part of a in depth auto-ethnographic research inquiry (East, 2006) that traced the threads of eco-philosophical thinking through both my artistic and educational practices. Emergent themes derived from written and video records of my dance-making (a selection of eight dances from the past twenty-five years) were matched with key features of deep ecology as identified by eco-philosophers such as Gablik (1991, 1993), Goldsmith (1992), Naess (1973, 1989), Roszak (1992), Suzuki (1997) and Trussell (1980, 1989). These include: holism; identity and diversity; interrelationship; intuition and spontaneity; transformation; self determination; cooperation; and notions of community or place. They form the whenu (threads) that weave themselves through both my creative and educational processes and practices. For the purposes of this article I will very briefly discuss the implications of these eco-philosophical principles for my teaching, and in relation to my art making. I have termed this educational approach an eco-choreography pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2015 many postgraduate dance students from the Beijing Dance Academy China, have completed a one-year Masters in Community Dance at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. This paper reflects on eight student's experience of their year of international study. Data gathered through semi structured interviews were examined through the threshold concept theory and we found that these students were challenged by teacher/learner relationships, academic research in dance studies, and classroom communications. The article makes recommendations to both the Beijing Dance Academy and the University of Auckland as this academic partnership matures. While this study is specific only to the two institutions involved in the research, it may provide insights that are common across other tertiary dance programmes for international dance students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates how rapidly creatives can amend their creative processes to account for imposed limitations, particularly in the context of COVID-19. It documents a gradual shift in the way that in-person collaboration is valued. The use of communication technologies between composer and choreographer are compared through examples of the authors' own work both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This allows for observations to be made as to how interpersonal, domestic and international creative processes may develop in the future global 'new normal'. Aotearoa/New Zealand's current quasi-post-pandemic status allows for predictions to be made about what this collaborative relationship may look like for the rest of the world post-COVID. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the significance of Dance Mobility™, a new community dance programme that follows a New Zealand partnership research project, designed for older adults with diverse motor skill levels and dance experiences. The programme includes high-functioning older adults, some with sensory or balance impairments and others with Parkinson's disease. We discuss the benefits and challenges of facilitating a once-weekly dance practice model and the ways the programme affects individuals’ sensorial states of well-being and awareness. Somatic practices are introduced as integral to Dance Mobility™ teaching methods and dance activities. We include observations and comparisons with dance embodiment theories, cross-disciplinary goals of gerontology and exercise science/rehabilitation research to debate benefits and limitations of dance for older adults, and adaptive methods of the Dance Mobility™ approach. Somatic research is needed to build evidence-based conclusions that advance older adults’ feelings of well-being and safeguard their motivations to continue moving freely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I demonstrate an approach to fusing autoethnographic writing and solo dance performance, advocating for a place for the female performer to stand as creative practitioner and researcher. While contemporary ethnographers and autoethnographers have actively engaged with issues of methodology and representational forms, and have gained some recognition within qualitative research communities, artists engaged in contemporary performance research still struggle for acknowledgement of the methodological rigor and representational innovation in their work. As in other art forms, dance artists have distinct bodies of knowledge, unique methods specific to dance, and diverse embodied and representational options for sharing knowledge. Referring to creative processes utilized in developing a particular solo dance performance, I weave together descriptions of movement activities undertaken to enhance awareness, literature on human developmental movement and on performance ethnography and excerpts of creative writing. To represent my dancing in this article, I include images from the solo performance. In this weaving I offer a partial representation of embodied ways of knowing and make a call to qualitative researchers to reconnect with their own beginnings – to return home. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]