February 23rd and 24th, 2023
Mind the Body:
Creativity, Improvisation, and Play in Philosophy & Dance
Hosted by our generous sponsors:
The Dee Foundation
University of Utah's Department of Philosophy & School of Dance
The Tanner Humanities Center
THANK YOU for attending!
A two-day summit of talks, activities, and workshops focused on Dance and Philosophy
The intersection of Dance and Philosophy is a place where mind and body meet. The activity of meaning making through thought and through motion tell parallel stories. For two days atop the snowy Wasatch Mountains in Salt Lake City Utah, philosophers and dancers will come together to investigate these parallels and bridge the distance between them. Through interactive workshops hosted by local dancers, and philosophy talks given by experts on the aesthetics/cognition in movement, we hope to find inspired interdisciplinary answers to questions like the following:
What does it mean 'to know' something through dance?
How is movement made meaningful?
Where does identity emerge or recede through motion and performance?
What relationship is shared between mind and body to create intelligent and aesthetic products of action?
What is style, how does it evoke meaning, and what can it tell us about ourselves?
What can cognitive models of mind and aesthetic models of movement learn from one another?
The Speakers & Workshop Hosts
Our Speakers
Keynote: Barbara Montero
Notre Dame
The Focused Dancer and the Attentional Focus Effect
Keynote: Thomas DeFrantz
Northwestern University
Playing the Changes: Corporeal Orature and Black Aesthetic Liveliness
Meg Wallace
University of Kentucky
In Defense of the Spectacle
Ben Baker
University of Pennsylvania
Six Forms of Dance Cognition
Petronella Foultier
Umeå University
Affectivity in the Artistic Experience of Dance
Lindsay Brainard
University of Alabama, Birmingham
What is Creativity?
Edyta Kuzian
Clemson University
The Meaning in Contemporary Dance
Michael Trocchia
James Madison University
Meaningful and Mythic Movement: Susanne Langer’s Philosophy of Dance
Mykelle Walton
Mount Holyoke College
Subversive Gestures: living without horologue time and its parallel of my hair suspension practice
Alex Mendez
The Graduate Center, CUNY
Natural Expressivity and the Philosophy of Dance:
Self-Reflective Communication
Noam Tiran
UC San Diego
Control Models and Styles of Skillful Action
Our Workshops
Eric Handman & Thi Nguyen
University of Utah
The Poetics of Complex Systems: a Choreographic Method
Ilya Vidrin
Northeastern University
Practicing Joint Action through Attunement: A Somatic Partnering Workshop
Joselli Deans
University of Utah
Embodied Movement: Accessing Immateriality through Materiality
THANK YOU to our generous sponsors!
