The researchers Maria João Alves, Ana Leitão, and Adriana Gehres have published the chapter “Dancing Simply Together: An Example of Transdisciplinary Research in Arts and Sciences” in the book Contemporary Choreography: A Critical Reader, edited by Jo Butterworth and Vicky Hunter and recently published by Routledge / Taylor & Francis.
The chapter presents the DAST – Dancing Simply Together project as an example of transdisciplinary research, linking practices of collective improvisation with complexity theory. The research develops through collective creation processes that draw on the concept of Generative Dance (Leitão & Alves, 2024) — a proposal by the artist and researcher Ana Leitão that combines Agent-Based Models and collective improvisation — and involves participants both with and without formal dance training.
The text maps relevant theoretical perspectives and advances the notion of a triadic convergence between social, motor, and choreographic cognition in collective compositions, providing a conceptual framework to understand generative dance practice as a distributed cognitive process that emerges from the relations between bodies, movement, and context. The analysis focuses on choreographic emergence as a relational phenomenon, ranging from practices involving interaction with technology to the fundamental principle of creation-cooperation.
The chapter positions dance as a space for situated knowledge production, in which artistic practice and critical reflection are intertwined, contributing to contemporary debates on choreography, collective creation, and practice-based research.
The DAST Project – Dancing Simply Together: Exploring the Connections and Flow Between Dance and Complexity (2023–2025) – was funded by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq, 420222/2022-7) and partially supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) through the 2020–2023 strategic project UIDB/00472/2020, https://doi.org/10.54499/UIDB/
References
Alves, M. J., Leitão, A. M., & Gehres, A. (2026). Dancing simply together: An example of transdisciplinary research in arts and sciences. In J. Butterworth & V. Hunter (Eds.), Contemporary choreography: A critical reader (3rd ed., pp. 189–203). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032645759