Ami Skånberg Dahlstedt

What subject do you teach at SKH and in which education?
I teach choreography, screendance and writing, and I direct the Master Dance Education (M.A.D.E. in Stockholm).

Is there anything you would like to highlight within your area?
I think it is important to have poly-cultural perspectives in dance methodologies. It is necessary to ask why a particular dance should be taught and to whom? For me, art is a space that is never static, it is constantly reformulated by those who participate. Therefore, it is urgent to be self-critical and enable conversations about humans, nonhumans, the history of dance as well as what is meant by innovation.

What else do you think is important within your area and what do you do when you don't teach at SKH?
I have a PhD in Dance from University of Roehampton, London. In UK, and internationally, non-Western dance techniques are more integrated in the canon. There are new choreographies and new conversations to engage with, for example about identities and cultural symbols that have been globalized, but also made invisible in dance. The term "integrated dance" in the 1950s meant inviting non-white dancers to North American dance companies. Today the term also concerns integrating more bodies in the art of dance. The art of dance has a historical heritage where dance has been presented as a court culture with specific ideas about beauty and art. Dance also still processes values from "modernism". The art of dance changes because it is in a conversation with its society and its audience. I work as a performer, choreographer and filmmaker. My research interests are practice-led and concern gender codified movement practice, and auto-ethnographic accounts from within the practice. My own walking research method is suriashi. I have a Japanese dance practice since 2000 with Senreinokai in Kyoto. At Academy of Music and Drama in Gothenburg, I also teach dance history and dance theory. I hope to both increase the knowledge and critical thinking in dance, as well as the appreciation and value of non-verbal communication.

To read more about my work, please visit my Google Scholar profile.

Various publications

Ami Skånberg Dahlstedt (ORCID 0000-0001-5388-9809)
Le suriashi, un rituel de résistance, published in the French Art journal Proteus November 2022: http://www.revue-proteus.com/articles/Proteus19-7.pdf

GU-journalen: https://issuu.com/universityofgothenburg/docs/guj5-6.2022/26

Keynote at International Screendance Symposium, University of Wisconsin-Madison, April 2022
Presentation: https://youtu.be/yQ2GY7nE9q0
Workshop: https://vimeo.com/728358720

Dancing with our Ancestors – keynote at the conference Decolonizing Tertiary Dance Education: Time to Act! April, 2022: https://youtu.be/ZM--7T12gpE

Suriashi as Experimental Pilgrimage in Urban and Other Spaces, PhD thesis March, 2022: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ami-Skanberg-Dahlstedt-2/publication/360847814_Suriashi_as_Experimental_Pilgrimage_in_Urban_and_Other_Spaces/links/628e5e94c660ab61f8445678/Suriashi-as-Experimental-Pilgrimage-in-Urban-and-Other-Spaces.pdf

Suriashi as a ceremonial, subversive act 2020 in the book Walking Bodies, Triarchy Press

OtoKin: Mapping for Sound Space Exploration through Dance Improvisation 2019: https://www.nime.org/proceedings/2019/nime2019_paper031.pdf

A Body of Accents 2018: https://nordicjournalofdance.com/NordicJounal_9(1).pdf

Suriashi-a meditation on the local through artistic research, pp 29-41 2018 i boken  Artistic Research: Being There-explorations into the Local, NSU Press

Paradigms of Movement Composition 2014 in International Screendance journal: https://screendancejournal.org/index.php/screendance/article/view/4523/3751

(Photo: Pethrin Kamande)