Responsive Bodies: Towards an Ethics of Contemporary Dance

Abstract

Providing an introduction to six major contributions towards an ethics of contemporary dance, the text draws on the example of Anna Halprin’s Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the Line (1989) and raises the fundamental question: How does an ethical responsibility arise in the situation of a performance and extends beyond the moment of dancing and the experience of a dance piece? How can we understand contemporaneity beyond shared time and presence so that contemporary dance can acknowledge the fragility and incompleteness of the past and unlock the potentiality of the future? And how is this understanding of contemporaneity linked to ethical responsiveness in dance and dance reception?