Body-Biographies (Elizabeth Waterhouse)

How do dancers' life stories contribute to dance history? Through an autobiographical project exploring life review with her dance teachers - Hilary Cartwright, Christine Kono, Chris Lechner, and Marcus Schulkind - Elizabeth Waterhouse develops an embodied methodology for life story interviews and life-writing. Merging dance studies, auto/biography studies, oral history, and practice-led dance research, this interdisciplinary inquiry offers a methodologically innovative and reflexive contribution to the study of dance, memory, and embodiment. Drawing on her experience as both a dance scholar and former professional dancer, Waterhouse shows how gathering her dance teachers' life stories enables her to write embodied history.

Elizabeth Waterhouse, born in 1979, is a professor of Ballet at the Hoch­schu­le für Mu­sik und Dar­stel­len­de Kunst Frank­furt am Main and an associate researcher at the Institute of Theatre Studies at the Universität Bern. She was a member of the Swiss National Science Foundation project »Auto_Bio_Graphy as Performance: A Field of Dance Historiographic Innovation« (2020 2024). Her research focuses on life stories, dance ethnography, embodiment, and the choreography of William Forsythe.