Department of Music and Dance

My research focuses on 'cham, commonly referred to as Tibetan sacred dance, among
the refugee monks in India. Given my limitations as an outsider and a female researcher, I
was prompted to test the effectiveness of structural analysis in understanding a foreign
dance from an etic perspective. I carried out my experiment using Dance Form Analysis on
a five-minute-excerpt of a solo performance by His Holiness the Seventeenth Gyalwang
Karmapa during February 2012 in Bodhgaya, India. Despite the challenges, the experiment
yielded a positive result. Through detailed process of deconstructing and reconstructing the
dance, I was able to move beyond my initial observer perception to reveal a highly codified
system of movement.

In my master thesis “A dance museum” (Erlien, 2014) from the Erasmus Mundus Master program “Choreomundus – International master in Dance Knowledge, Practice and Heritage” I research and discuss dance dissemination in 10 different museums in Europe. In this article I will focus on a common method for dance dissemination in the Nordic countries, presentation of traditional dance in open-air museums. Skansen and The Museum of Romsdal have dance groups that perform staged traditional dances for tourists during the summer season. The danced repertoire has been the same for many decades, which the museums argue for being transmission and dissemination of their own old tradition of having a dance group (Erlien, 2014). I will challenge this by introduce how new museology principles may enrich museums´ dissemination of dance traditions in line with the UNESCO convention of 2003 for transmission and safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage. I will illuminate this with an imagined interact...

This article proposes to view the present actions regarding cultural heritage through the prism of two different paradigms: the paradigm of preservation and the paradigm of safeguarding. The question posed is whether and how these two paradigms can work together and support each other. The article is written as a dialogue between Tone Erlien, initiator, curator, and project manager of the * Tone Erlien graduated from the Erasmus Mundus program "Choreomundus-International Master in Dance Knowledge, Practice and Heritage" in June 2014. She has in addition a bachelor degree and master degree from NTNU, Norway. The topic of her Choreomundus master thesis is A Dance Museum-Museums and Institutions in Europe Promoting Dance and Intangible Cultural Heritage. She works as a project manager for a 3-year project called "Interactive dance dissemination in museums", a collaboration between the Norwegian Centre for Traditional Music and Dance and MiST-Museums of South Trøndelag, Norway, that has produced three temporary interactive dance exhibitions in Trondheim, Norway. She currently works on her doctoral thesis analysing the three dance exhibitions.

In my master thesis "A dance museum" (Erlien, 2014) from the Erasmus Mundus Master program "Choreomundus-International master in Dance Knowledge, Practice and Heritage" I research and discuss dance dissemination in 10 different museums in Europe. In this article I will focus on a common method for dance dissemination in the Nordic countries, presentation of traditional dance in open-air museums. Skansen and The Museum of Romsdal have dance groups that perform staged traditional dances for tourists during the summer season. The danced repertoire has been the same for many decades, which the museums argue for being transmission and dissemination of their own old tradition of having a dance group (Erlien, 2014). I will challenge this by introduce how new museology principles may enrich museums dissemination of dance traditions in line with the UNESCO convention of 2003 for transmission and safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage. I will illuminate this with an imagined interactive dissemination setting on a museum arena, based on transmission of the qualities and aesthetics of traditional dances in the Nordic countries. Introduksjon I min masteroppgave «A dance museum» (Erlien, 2014) fra Erasmus Mundus masterprogrammet i dansevitenskap «Choreomundus-International master in Dance Knowledge, Practice and Heritage» skriver jeg om for

La presente investigación aborda la producción cultural de literatura tomando como referente la historia y las percepciones de los escritores contemporáneos de la Ciudad de Guatemala. Utiliza la terminología de “producción cultural” para referirse al proceso de creación de obras de arte en un campo socializado, en el que los artistas se enfrentan a distintos grupos de poder que ocupan y regulan lo que entra en el canon literario. A partir del análisis de la obra de Pierre Bourdieu, una revisión histórica de la literatura guatemalteca y de entrevistas con cuatro escritores, la investigación logra articular el perfil de los y las escritoras guatemaltecas, su acceso a educación y el papel fundamental que juega la “rebeldía” para producir obras de arte. Los resultados presentan una reflexión en torno al papel de las casas editoriales como agentes reguladores de la producción de literatura, así como la ausencia de crítica literaria. Los participantes de la investigación abordaron la educación como un sistema de reproducción del poder hegemónico, que puede limitar las posibilidades de creación artística. La investigación concluye cuestionando la validez de los postulados de Bourdieu sobre la producción literaria, e invita a una revisión de la teoría en el contexto guatemalteco.

The following research addresses contact improvisation as a low regulated dance which allows diverse practitioners to take part in different modalities. In this case, the study focuses on European summer intensive festivals. The aim consists in revisiting contact improvisation as a dance form which has been previously framed in a nationalist context, in order to address on its current practice in a transnational network. It approaches contact improvisation spontaneity and relation to gravity as pre-reflective decisions, and proposes the importance of the natural bodily attitude through the lived experience of alternative movement practices. This inquiry is guided by the following question: in the transnational and egalitarian context of contact improvisation summer festivals, how do practitioners with different movement backgrounds manifest the continuity of their parallel movement practices in the pre-reflective decisions that they take during improvisation?
The research was designed as a multi-sited ethnography in two summer festivals. It consisted in active participation as a dancer, observation, video recording of jams and biographic inspired interviews with practitioners who I encountered in such events. From the first-person experience in the fieldwork, I focused on the habits and affinities of the interviewees, while realizations from jams were analysed based on the relationships from the Labanotation structural system. As results, it is possible to identify how relationships and communication through touch are the requirements of a dance that accepts a wide range of decision making. The practitioners have been through personal exploration in unfamiliar settings, they have found in contact improvisation a space to explore their creativity and feel challenged by the unknown. Overall, the research shows how the summer festivals are a meeting point in which the dance is transmitted body-to-body, renewing the interest and enjoyment of the practitioners. It describes the diversity of experiences and approaches to dance contact improvisation, a practice which explicitly welcomes a wide range of possibilities.

A partir de experiencias personales de mi formación en danza como patri- monio intangible en el programa Choreomundus, propongo una reflexión teórica sobre la experiencia corporal en el museo como punto de encuentro con cono- cimientos de prácticas tradicionales. La ponencia se basa en el proceso reflexivo que he derivado a raíz de mi participación activa como bailarina en museos. Mi argumento consiste en afirmar que la presencia de cuerpos vivos en acción gene- raba un grado de atención distinta al que ocurre cuando los visitantes observan objetos o pantallas. Dicha interacción colectiva ha sido abordada por las antro- pólogas Gore y Grau (2014) cuando afirman que la danza es una experiencia inte- ractiva con rasgos específicos en los que la atención sensorial se agudiza. A partir de esta interacción, son las personas que confluyen en la danza quienes recrean y ejecutan un patrón de movimiento que está asociado a un sentido de comunidad, a una tradición y un contexto sociocultural. Al considerar la danza como legado o patrimonio cultural, mi objetivo consiste en proponer que dicha actividad de- pende de estrategias curatoriales apropiadas que permitan actualizar y difundir el conocimiento corporal de distintas tradiciones. En este sentido me baso en los estudios de patrimonio desarrollados por Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2004) en donde afirma que a diferencia de los objetos materiales, las personas no sólo son obje- tos de preservación cultural sino sujetos, es decir, no solamente repositorios de cultura sino agentes. Así, propongo que las estrategias curatoriales para ejecutar danza en los museos aportan al debate sobre tradición e innovación, y se perfilan como una forma distinta de conocer a los otros: como cuerpos vivos y creativos.

El escrito recobra una de las obras emblemáticas que fue parte del giro posdramático de la Facultad de Artes en sus últimos cinco años, y ofrece una pieza importante de estudio para entender el impacto que cobró la posmodernidad en los procesos creativos de la carrera de Teatro. Da cuenta de estéticas, prácticas y preocupaciones artísticas que colaboran a la articulación de recuentos temporales e históricos de lo sensible y su expansión como terreno siempre en emergencia y en el centro de tensiones disciplinarias. Para amplificar y sustanciar el reconocimiento del arte como labor epistemológica, el escrito revisita el uso del concepto de investigación artística enraizada en la práctica, con el objetivo de indagar en el rol que cumple el cuerpo y la sensibilidad del actor en la producción de este tipo de conocimiento en concreto. A partir del montaje de la obra Ansia, dirigido por María Josefina Viteri, con los estudiantes de la carrera de Teatro de la FAUCE, se pone en diálogo la improvisación corporal del elenco con la ininteligible dramaturgia de Sarah Kane. Se recurre a conceptualizaciones de la fenomenología de la danza para explicitar cómo las partituras de acciones propician la ruptura de hábitos y la ejecución de nuevos códigos intersubjetivos que estructuran el acontecimiento teatral. A partir de la exploración sensorial inmanente en la improvisación, se describe cómo la ocupación de espacios no ordinarios para la escena devino en nuevas formas de utilizar los cuerpos, ya no solo como signos, sino como herramienta de investigación colectiva. Así, a pesar de la contingencia que la improvisación actualiza, el montaje de Ansia es leído como un acontecimiento en el que las disrupciones del flujo natural del cuerpo dieron lugar a una experiencia epistemológica, colectiva, sensible y corporizada.

Scholarly research in the fi eld of traditional dance 1 has been carried out under the umbrella of cultural studies that have been ignored in all academic circles in the East African states of Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda. Until the late 1960s, there was no distinguished academic institution in the East African region that offered studies in dance. Although traditional dance plays a pivotal role in the execution of the day-today activities in many East African communities, less effort has been put into its development in form of research from within the region. Much of its sources today create concern due, but not limited only, to their scarcity, but also to the fact that outsiders from the dance traditions in question mostly author them, thereby creating a perennial outsider-researcher phenomenon. In this paper, I refl ect on two traditional dance research experiences; In Transylvania-Romania in October 2013, and a comparatively longer experience of folk dancing in the different rural communities of Uganda in a quest to further understand the practical results of a fi eld research in traditional dance that is rather dominated by dance researchers from outside that dance culture, and the infl uence of such research results to the bearers of the dance tradition.

For generations, dance and music traditions have continuously proliferated from people's ways of life, human natural and prevailing environments, and from community life interactions and co/existences. While it is well established that the arts complement each other, in formal educational contexts, they have often been researched, assessed, and interpreted in isolation-meaning that only bits and pieces of a given phenomenon are explored. Sometimes these isolated pieces are made to represent "the whole", which hinders full regeneration 1 of the knowledge therein. In this paper, I bring to the fore the need to focus more on arts processes in both formal and non-formal dance and dance-music knowledge production systems, or contexts that allow for full cultural regeneration relevant for arts education and arts education research.

This article explores Dance-musicking as a non-prescriptive process of interdependent engagement with dance and music in their teaching and learning contexts. It asks how this engagement challenges and disrupts uneven institutional hierarchies, and how it cultivates a more holistic understanding of, and access to the knowledge embedded in the dancing and dance-musicking processes. The discussion is informed by my dance, music, and dance-music practice oscillating between formal and non-formal settings, and continuous research on the same in East Africa. It is premised on a critical observation that within the twentieth century, dance and music knowledge has continued to grow more into an institutionalized form than it has into a communal one. The article pivots the dance-musicking process as a cross-sectoral collaborative engagement for teaching and learning dance, music, and dance-music discussed on both micro and macro levels of artistic (co)existence. As such, it highlights core elements of “communitarian” teaching and learning approaches, which have not favourably evolved alongside formal education. This situation is attributed to a lack in cross-sectoral complementarity between the formal and non-formal dance, and music knowledge bases —complementarity that works well in transforming higher education institutions into intellectual resources that positively influence, and that are influenced by their communities.