Round Table: Why Embodied Knowledge Matters
— A collective exploration
Dr. Caroline Ribbers, Stephen Shropshire, and Dr. Suzan Tunca will share insights from their doctoral research, highlighting why embodied knowledge plays a vital role in dance creation and education. Ribbers and Tunca reflect on completed projects, while Shropshire offers a glimpse into his ongoing research and evolving ideas. Together, they invite you to engage in an open, inquisitive dialogue to explore how the body as a source of knowledge and creativity, can inform and inspire artistic practice, pedagogy, and research and what this can mean in relation to society at large.
Speakers: Caroline Ribbers, Stephen Shropshire, Suzan Tunca
Language of communication: Engels
Sunday 5 October: 10:30 – 12:00
Theater a/h Vrijthof, Maastricht
Dr. Caroline Ribbers works as a practitioner-researcher of embodied education at the Fontys Academy of the Arts. She facilitates yoga classes within the Academy’s Dance Arts in Context programme, is a research mentor for students interested in the relationship between dance and embodied practice, and runs the Embodied Education Lab, which provides space and support for students-teachers-researchers exploring the potential and development of embodied education. Ribbers’ work is deeply informed by her doctoral research, an educational design study that resulted in a yoga method for dance students to support their embodied learning through engaging in meta-learning. Caroline is also an active member of the international DEED network (Designing Embodied Education in Dance), which investigates how tertiary dance education (BA, MA, MFA, PhD) can be reimagined through the integration of embodied perspectives. Ribbers is also interested in exploring how embodied approaches to education can extent beyond dance.
Stephen Shropshire is a choreographer, curator and dance researcher who has created new choreographic works for companies and festivals all around the world. He is a graduate of the Juilliard School in New York City, holds a MA from the University of Maastricht, and is currently a doctoral candidate at PhDArts, Leiden University Academy of Creative and Performing Arts in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Since 2017 Shropshire has been chief curator of the Nederlandse Dansdagen dansMuseum and since 2025, a core team member of the Master Choreography COMMA at Fontys Academy of the Arts and Codarts Rotterdam.
Dr. Suzan Tunca, (Türkiye/Germany) works as a dancer, dance researcher, choreographer and educator and is responsible for the ICK Academy. Between 1998 and 2016 she performed internationally as as a dancer with among others Krisztina de Châtel and Emio Greco | PC. In 2023, she obtained her PhD at PhDArts at Leiden University with research into a “dancing language” in which she brings together bodily theory and discursive practice. She previously completed an MA in artistic research at the University of Amsterdam and is an alumna of the third cycle performing arts practice research program DAS THIRD (Amsterdam University of the Arts). She accompanies and supervises artistic research of dance artists in professional practice at ICK and in educational trajectories at PhD, MA and BA levels at Leiden University, DAS Choreography, Codarts and Fontys, among others. Since 2025, Suzan is a member of the Route Kunst, an advisory steering group for arts research at the Dutch Science Agenda.
Lecture: Dances of Power and Rebellion
What does dance have to do with social power relations? Can dance contribute to their stabilisation or destabilisation? How can protest, resistance or social criticism be danced?
The lecture discusses these questions using selected historical and contemporary examples. I will argue that dance is ambivalent in its relationship to power: precisely because it is a physical art form, it can contribute to stabilising and preserving existing social conditions. At the same time, unlike any other art or movement practice, it can make aesthetic resistance, social criticism and political protest visible and tangible directly on and through the body.
Speaker: Gabriele Klein
Language of communication: Engels
Sunday 5 October: 13:00 – 14:00
Theater a/h Vrijthof, Maastricht
Gabriele Klein, Dr. rer. soc., has been professor of ballet and dance (Hans van Manen Chair) at the University of Amsterdam since 2022. From 2002 to 2023 she was a professor of dance and performance studies at the University of Hamburg. There she was director of the center for performance studies and established the international master programme in performance studies. She has been a visiting professor at Smith College (USA), UCLA (USA), Stellenbosch University (South Africa), Osaka City University (Japan), the University of São Paulo (Brazil), the University of the Arts Taipei (Taiwan), the University of Bern (Switzerland), and the Mozarteum in Salzburg (Austria), among others. Her English-language publications include books such as ‘Dance (and) Theory’ (2013, with G. Brandstetter), ‘Emerging Bodies’ (2011, with S. Noeth), ‘Pina Bauschs Dance Theater. Compagnie, artistic practices, and reception’ (2020), ‘Materialities in Dance and Performance. Writing, Documenting, Archiving’ (2024, with F.A. Cramer).
Dutch Dance Research provides a platform for dance research in the Netherlands with the aim of making the necessity of research for the art of dance and its social relevance visible and accessible to a wide audience.
Dutch Dance Research is a joint initiative of the Netherlandse Dansdagen, the dansMuseum and ICK Dans Amsterdam. This year forces are joined with new partners Fontys Academy of the Arts and the Hans van Manen chair, University of Amsterdam.