Kristie Mortimer - Dance and Cultural Difference in Aotearoa: Finding Common Ground in Rural Dance Studio Education

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

Edgar Degas

As Degas suggests, art prompts us to stop and reflect on the significance of particular people, stories, and perspectives. This ability to attract and distract public attention (and to conceal or reveal specific issues) makes art increasingly political in a post-truth era. While art might not evidence the veracity of an idea, it can certainly support the virality of an idea. Memes often emerge and become persuasive as a result of the aesthetics, rather than the evidence, that they present. As we promote these memes through social media, art becomes more than what you make others see. Art is what you make others want to share.

This book series is dedicated to exploring these questions. Within the volumes of Critical Studies in Dance Leadership and Inclusion, we seek to draw attention to the ways in which dance organizations and practitioners are interrogating concepts of dance in the public sphere.

Our understandings of dance leadership extend beyond stale notions of visionary leaders trailed by mindless hordes. We instead acknowledge leadership to be a dialogic phenomenon: a collectivized movement that emerges through dynamic, social exchanges of ideas, meanings, and values . Our understandings of inclusion also recognize that social participation can sometimes risk conforming to a totalitarian regime. While collaborative leadership requires the broad and active inclusion of all in the society, this needs to be done in ways that articulate, celebrate, and sustain our differences, if we are to maintain a pluralist society. Through this book series, we seek to expand understandings of how dance allows such leadership and inclusion to manifest and enhance social participation, personal fulfillment, and cultural diversity .

The dance knowledge presented in this series is constructed at the intersection of embodied and other forms of knowing. Extending upon psychology, sociology, and environmental studies, dancing reflects how we value ourselves, and our human and non-human interactions. Sharing concerns with architecture, urban planning, and political science, dance corporealizes our encounters with the design of public and private spaces. As a form of public pedagogy , dance inevitably encapsulates diverse theories of education . As an integral part of cultural studies, dance is a culturally relative phenomenon: the meanings of a dance are not universal, but emerge in different ways in different cultures, in response to diverse histories and circumstances. Through dancing, we therefore viscerally and visually reveal our different attitudes toward the sharing of space.