Granoff Music Center Colloquium: “Musical Pedagogies in Percussive Dance” - Samantha Jones (Harvard)

Samantha Jones (Harvard University) presents a colloquium focused on her research on musicality in percussive dance. Focusing on the non-competitive and social styles of Old-Style Irish Step and sean-nós dancing, she examines how musical and choreographic knowledge circulates through embodied modes of transmission. Oral mnemonics, hand gestures, notation –– these transmission methods offer rich sites for examining the interaction of embodied cognition, performance aesthetics, and community. In framing these techniques as musical pedagogies, Samantha offers new ways of conceptualizing musical experience in dance.