Pedagogical Perspectives on Developing Creativity in Dance Students

This article presents a study on three somatic movement dance educators’ perspectives on developing creativity in dance students. A post-positivist, inductive qualitative study was undertaken to gather practitioners Katye Coe’s, Sara Reed’s, and Rebecca Weber’s phenomenological reflections on teaching somatically informed dance and how somatic practices may contribute to enhancing students’ creativity in dance. Data were collected through open-ended interviews, which then underwent thematic analysis to identify shared pedagogical perspectives on developing creativity in dance students. Key themes which emerged included metaphorical thinking, a breadth and multi-directionality of thought, a sensitized relationship to embodiment, and applied practice or “usefulness.” These findings are theoretically contextualized through establishing their relation to existing cognitive psychological literature from the field of creativity research. The themes’ reliability is also enhanced through similar connections to existing somatics research from dance studies.