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Exploring Rhetorical Agency in University Dance Students

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2015

Rachel Mehaffey
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Abstract

This paper details the theoretical frameworks, methods, and preliminary results from a year-long study of rhetorical agency in undergraduate dance majors. Over the course of two semesters at a BFA Dance Performance and Choreography program, I facilitated a series of extracurricular dance labs for a group of five first- and second-year students. Throughout the academic year, I interviewed the dancers, recorded the lab sessions, and collected free-writes from the participants. This wealth of data can shed light on the relationship between conceiving dancers-as-authors and the emergence of agentic personal narratives in university students. This study offers implications for future research on rhetorical agency as a pedagogical or compositional tool, as a lens for hearing and sharing dancers’ narratives, or as a means to explore authorship in other disciplines.

Type
Research Article
Information
Congress on Research in Dance Conference Proceedings , Volume 2015 , Fall 2015 , pp. 102 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © Rachel Mehaffey 2015 

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References

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