Interweaving autobiographical testimony from four significant dancers, dancer and dance scholar Elizabeth Waterhouse brings the body into the center of her autotheoretical investigation of dancers’ lives. Autobodyography: Our Dancing Bodies looks at the ‘life stories’ told by four of her dance teachers—Chris Lechner, Hilary Cartwright, Christine Kono, and Marcus Schulkind (born between 1943–1963 in Myanmar, England and America). These articulate and reflective dancers have dedicated their lives to the art of dance transmission, choreography, performance and healing. Their self-narratives tell of the pleasures as well as the challenges of leading lives as body workers and artists in the West, enumerating the bodily and kinetic experiences that constitute the dancers’ everyday life worlds and their sense of selves. Treating these case stories inductively, Waterhouse focuses equally on listening to the individual dancers’ kinaesthetic self-narratives (Part I) and critically reflecting on her methodology and its interpretative potential and findings (Part II).
