The Wiley Handbook of Collaborative Online Learning and Global Engagement

10 Physical Embodiment of Culture Through Movement

Balinda Craig-Quijada¹ and Priya Joshi ²

¹ Kenyon College, USA

² FLAME University, India

How is culture manifested in the body through movement? In this chapter we elaborate on a global course connection between two liberal arts colleges, one in the USA and the other in India, to discuss how we integrated new understandings of culture, movement, and process into our courses. Using Sklar’s (2001) article, Five Premises for a Culturally Sensitive Approach to Dance, we investigated how “Movement knowledge is a kind of cultural knowledge” (Sklar, 2001, p. 30), and developed a collaborative dance project that would reveal culture through movement. In what follows we discuss this collaboration and issues concerning collaboration such as: How do we arrive at mutually agreeable decisions on choreography, themes, and movement invention? How do we deal with the unexpected, i.e., surprises and epiphanies that occur in combined courses? How do we manage an effective choreographic process involving multiple creators while working virtually? In keeping with American dance-anthropologist Katherine Dunham’s (1947) declaration that “I am only interested in dance as an education, as a means of knowing peoples,” (as cited in Orthwine, p. 3). we present an account of 14 young students from the USA and India who worked together on a virtual journey that helped them learn more about each other’s cultures, gain greater perspective-taking, and develop ...