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My practice-informed-research project is a written thesis informed by my experiences as a dance artist performing in and creating work for the museum. Moving past the outdated question of why dance in the museum, my thesis asks how dance is currently situated in the museum and what is its potential there? Through examining different modes of attention of the dance artist and her social-spatial skills we first come to understand dance as a relational, site-based practice in the museum and, later, through evidence provided for by the case studies, discover the potential for dance to play a more significant part of change taking place in the museum. This thesis looks critically at the practice of dance in the museum through the lenses of spatial theory, somatic enquiry, and relational aesthetics. Looking through these particular lenses has value as it re-considers the human body, movement, and the museum as contributing aspects to the production of spatial relations and offers a wider contribution to knowledge vis-a-vis the dance artist's story, a story not yet told in the museum. My research is within a UK, EU, and US context over the last six years (2014-2020) and begins with the premise that dance is a relational, site-based practice. By applying the lens of public practice to dance in the museum and as a form of relation I build on the work of Nicholas Bourriaud (1998). My practice follows in the lineage of Post-Modern dance artists such as Yvonne Rainer who make claims for everyday movement as dance and borrows from Gabriella Giannachi's (2012) theories on presence as modes of encounter to argue for the dance artist as part of and affective to the human ecosystem of the museum. I explore three case studies as ways to understand what seeing, doing, and being in the museum through the detached, absent, and present dance artist can tell us about the potentiality of dance in the museum that has been unexplored thus far. The findings of my research suggest that the spatial relational aspects of dance in the museum provide opportunity for the dancer to engage more fully within the human ecological environment of the museum as a way to contribute to institutional change and policy making and towards more creative, inclusive, just, and sustainable cultural spaces and as examples for our contemporary moment.

This thesis explores the hitherto hardly investigated phenomenon of the national dance platform (NaDaP). NaDaPs are dance festivals in which three elements converge: they raise the claim of representing the nation, they present contemporary dance and their targeted audience is mainly (foreign) dance programmers. Despite the phenomenon being a global(ised) one, it only exists through local iterations. The thesis argues that both local and global dimensions interact and influence each other in the phenomenon. The questions leading the investigation are whether NaDaPs mediate or represent a nation, how they claim national-ness and to what extent this reflects back on the structure and content of each iteration. Using the system of cultural flows proposed by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai and called 'scapes' (Appadurai 1990, 1996), this thesis explores the streams of ideas, people and finances that interact at NaDaPs in their local and global dimensions and problematises the contradictory ways in which dance interplays with global(ised) systems of power. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study produces close readings of platforms in Israel, Britain, Germany and Sri Lanka; specifically, 'International Exposure 2015', 'British Dance Edition 2016', 'Dance Platform Germany 2016' and 'Shakti'. A Space for the Single Body, and explores the ideologies that governed the events. NaDaPs emerged in the 1990s, in the context of a globalised neo-liberal economy that favoured the constitution of dance pieces as marketable goods. While the phenomenon of the NaDaP had the positive effect of increasing the visibility and growth of contemporary dance, this thesis investigates the ideologies governing the notion of contemporaneity and questions whether contemporary dance might at times act as the folk dance of hegemonic nations, while NaDaPs act as agents of a neo-colonial system engaged in expanding its markets. Further, under the lens of the 'financescape 'the thesis investigates the situationality of dancers with bodies that are described as 'non-normate' for not conforming to presumptions of the 'non-disabled' dancer. I argue that they subsume both the resistance to and the endorsement of a system that constructs dance as a commodity and propose 'non-normatisable' as a denomination that reflects this complexity. The thesis concludes by discussing the existence of 'Danceland 'as a non-territorial imagined community (Anderson 1983) that presents many characteristics of a real-existing nation and paves the way for further explorations of the phenomenon of the NaDaP. The concept of 'Danceland 'leads to ask what its own NaDaP would reflect and how it would contrast occurrences in other lands. But more importantly, it emphasises the shared responsibility of all actors in the transnational dance community, to co-create their own environments asserting their positionalities with strong political voices.