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Author Bio

Alice Marshall (Vale) is a Senior Lecturer and Research Academic, as well as Artistic Director of Adaire to Dance, an Arts Council England-supported company creating work across the UK. Her interdisciplinary practice blends choreography, original music, and digital media to explore unheard social themes. Alice explores this through accessible dance and the emotional resonance of movement. She has presented internationally on her research and solo-authored Entertainment in the Performing Arts (Routledge). She is a dedicated advocate for regional arts, serving on the boards of Arts Derbyshire and Hubbub Theatre and co-directs the East Midlands Dance Artists Network CIC.

Keywords

Dance, autoethnography, grief, embodiment, transformation

Abstract

This work presents an autoethnographic, practice-as-research inquiry into Tender Steps (Adaire to Dance, 2024), a dance-for-film grounded in the author’s lived experience of baby loss. Through embodied reflection, the article explores how personal experience becomes a site of inquiry, examining the relationship between the performer’s being and the act of performance. Drawing on phenomenological and performance-based perspectives, it considers how posture, weight, breath, and voice function as embodied knowledge and how meaning is co-constructed through the intersubjective relationship between performer and audience. It reflects on the ethical and emotional implications of making lived experience public within a digitally mediated form and extends this inquiry into pedagogical practice. It argues for embodied, experiential approaches to inquiry that privilege presence, vulnerability, and reflection as ways of knowing within both artistic and educational contexts.

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