An innovative exploration of understanding through dance, Dancing Across the Page draws on the frameworks of phenomenology, feminism and postmodernism to offer readers an understanding of performance studies that is grounded in personal narrative and lived experience. Through accounts of contemporary dance making, improvisation and dance education, Karen Barbour explores a diversity of themes, including power, activism, and cultural, gendered and personal identity. An intimate yet rigorous investigation of creativity in dance, Dancing Across the Page emphasizes embodied knowledge and imagination as a basis for creative action in the world.
Karen Barbour is an associate professor in dance in the School of Arts at The University of Waikato in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her teaching, performance and research focuses on embodied ways of knowing particularly feminist choreographic practices in dance, site-specific, digital dance and pedagogical movement contexts. Her book publications include Dancing Across the Page: Narrative and Embodied Ways of Knowing (Barbour 2011), (Re)Positioning Site Dance: Local Acts, Global Perspectives (Barbour et al. 2019) and Ethnographic Worldviews: Transformations and Social Justice (Rinehart et al. 2014). Karen is editor of the journal Dance Research Aotearoa, presents regularly at international conferences and has published her writing in a range of books and journals.