February 23rd and 24th, 2023

Mind the Body:

Creativity, Improvisation, and Play in Philosophy & Dance

Hosted by our generous sponsors: 

The Dee Foundation 

University of Utah's Department of Philosophy & School of Dance

The Tanner Humanities Center

 THANK YOU for attending!

A two-day summit of talks, activities, and workshops focused on Dance and Philosophy

The intersection of Dance and Philosophy is a place where mind and body meet. The activity of meaning making through thought and through motion tell parallel stories. For two days atop the snowy Wasatch Mountains in Salt Lake City Utah, philosophers and dancers will come together to investigate these parallels and bridge the distance between them. Through interactive workshops hosted by local dancers, and philosophy talks given by experts on the aesthetics/cognition in movement, we hope to find inspired interdisciplinary answers to questions like the following:

What does it mean 'to know' something through dance? 

How is movement made meaningful?  

Where does identity emerge or recede through motion and performance?

What relationship is shared between mind and body to create intelligent and aesthetic products of action?

What is style, how does it evoke meaning, and what can it tell us about ourselves?

 What can cognitive models of mind and aesthetic models of movement learn from one another?

The Speakers & Workshop Hosts

 Our Speakers

Keynote: Barbara Montero

Notre Dame

The Focused Dancer and the Attentional Focus Effect

Keynote: Thomas DeFrantz

Northwestern University

Playing the Changes: Corporeal Orature and Black Aesthetic Liveliness

Meg Wallace

University of Kentucky

In Defense of the Spectacle

Ben Baker

University of Pennsylvania

Six Forms of Dance Cognition

Petronella Foultier

Umeå University

Affectivity in the Artistic Experience of Dance

Lindsay Brainard

University of Alabama, Birmingham

What is Creativity?

Edyta Kuzian

Clemson University

The Meaning in Contemporary Dance

Michael Trocchia

James Madison University

Meaningful and Mythic Movement: Susanne Langer’s Philosophy of Dance

Mykelle Walton

Mount Holyoke College

Subversive Gestures: living without horologue time and its parallel of my hair suspension practice 

Alex Mendez

The Graduate Center, CUNY

Natural Expressivity and the Philosophy of Dance:

Self-Reflective Communication

Noam Tiran

UC San Diego

Control Models and Styles of Skillful Action

        Our Workshops

Eric Handman & Thi Nguyen

University of Utah

The Poetics of Complex Systems: a Choreographic Method

Ilya Vidrin

Northeastern University

Practicing Joint Action through Attunement: A Somatic Partnering Workshop

Joselli Deans

University of Utah

Embodied Movement: Accessing Immateriality through Materiality

THANK YOU to our generous sponsors!