Body-Biographies

How do dancers’ life stories contribute to dance history? Through an autobiographical project exploring life review with her dance teachers – Hilary Cartwright, Christine Kono, Chris Lechner, and Marcus Schulkind – Elizabeth Waterhouse develops an embodied methodology for life story interviews and life-writing. Merging dance studies, auto/biography studies, oral history, and practice-led dance research, this interdisciplinary inquiry offers a methodologically innovative and reflexive contribution to the study of dance, memory, and embodiment. Drawing on her experience as both a dance scholar and former professional dancer, Waterhouse shows how gathering her dance teachers’ life stories enables her to write embodied history.