Considering Ethics in Dance, Theatre and Performance

In this genuine, beautiful and lucid book, Fiona Bannon deals with the practice of joint authorship in dance, theatre and performance as an activity that interweaves aesthetic perceptual processes with an ethical practice of living an examined life in relation to others. Bannon is the chair of DanceHE— a UK-wide network promoting dance in higher education—and she previously worked in performance arts. In the book, her engagement in performance and in education is woven into a clear pedagogical vision that has implications for philosophy. The explicit goal here is to articulate the ethos within the practice of making collaborative performance works and, in return, to ask the readers to consider shared performance as providing a valuable training ground for cultivating ethical ideas as embodied habitus. Bannon’s pedagogical disposition considers the responsibility of each one of us in generating the future of our ‘beings-in-common’ in contemporary society. Bannon does not, however, lay it on the line like this; her work proposes a form of ‘reflective culture-making’ as an active alternative for existing traditions in cultural criticism. Instead of following a predefined discipline of thought or an artistic style, the investigation emphasizes a collective aesthetic experience as a complex practice for ethical social and political negotiations of selves in relation to our common future with others

Aesthetics · Art · Criticism · Dance · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Ethnography · Ethos · Habitus · Negotiation · Performing arts · Political science · Politics · Relation (database · Social science · Sociology · Style (visual arts · The arts · Visual arts · Diversity and Impact of Dance · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Law · Theatre and Performance Studies