From movement to rhythm in dance tuition: The teaching and achievement of interactional synchrony

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Abstract: My paper is based on the study of rhythm tuition in dance classes from an EMCA perspective. It understands tuition to be an interactive process that centres upon the training of the body to move in particular ways at particular times through demonstration and direction.

For some time I’ve been interested in what might be called embodied intersubjectivity. The manner in which we understand and experience the body of others. Arguably, this is the most fundamental and foundational aspect of human experience and sociality.

As humans we are continually on the move - whether that be in terms of ambulation (walking down the street) or in terms of body mechanisms (breathing, heart beat, and the like). Within this, a fundamental question is how 'duration' becomes 'moments' of meaning (to misread the relationship between Bergson and Lefebvre) or, more precisely, how we find rhythm in movement.

To that end I draw on the work on interaction rhythms and the ongoing achievement of 'interactional synchrony' to foreground the procedural and practical manner in which bodies are taught to move together. The argument being that broader processes of interaction and coordination rest upon such foundations.

In this presentation I will primarily be concerned with the routine and interactive manner in which this occurs in online ballroom dance tuition videos - identifiable in the visible embodied practices of dance tutors.

However, I will root the analysis in a reflexive appreciation of the 'everyday analytics' of dance training, given my own history as a professional dance teacher.

Speaker information: Darren Reed is a Social Scientist and Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department, University of York. His research encompasses the study of performance and musical instruction and embodied interaction with robots. He has a history in the study of technology and interaction and Human Computer Interaction (HCI).

He is a member of the Centre for Advanced Studies of Language and Communication (CASLC) and the Science and Technology Studies Unit (SATSU), University of York. He undertakes an ethnomethodological approach through the use of Embodied Conversation Analysis to understand verbal and embodied behaviours, with and through technology.

Prior to university, he trained as a ballroom dancer and is a qualified Associate of the National Teachers of Dance (ANTD).