This paper considers how the presentation of movement practices in performance contexts blurs the distinction between making and performance, raising questions about the nature of dance ‘works’. I examine the way that practice is foregrounded in the work of UK dance artists Katye Coe and Charlie Morrissey, and American choreographer Deborah Hay, troubling distinctions between the internal and external aspects of performance. In response to this, I examine the applicability of the work–concept, to current dance practices, suggesting that the concept (...) is an open one and refers not solely to stable art objects, but also indicates open-ended entities, which are formed through a confluence of practice and performance. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of improvisational artistry in live dance performance that construes the contribution of the dance performer as a kind of agency. Andy Clark’s theory of the embodied and extended mind is used in order to consider how this account is supported by research on how a thinking-while-doing person navigates the world. I claim here that while a dance performer’s improvisational artistry does include embodied and extended features that occur outside of the brain and nervous system that (...) this can be construed as “agency” rather than “thought.” Further I claim that trained and individual style accounts for how this agency acquires its artistic nature. This account thus contributes to the philosophy of improvisation in dance performance in a way that includes motor as well as cognized intentions. (shrink)