Professor Vida L Midgelow leads postgraduate research across Middlesex University and its partners.
Professor Midgelow is a recognised leader in Practice-as-Research and doctoral education with more than 25 years of experience facilitating and lecturing in dance and creative fields. She joined Middlesex University as Professor in Dance and Choreographic Practices in 2012, prior to this position, she was a Professor and Director of Research at the University of Northampton.
She formed 'Artistic Doctorates in Europe' in 2016 which was initially funded by Erasmus Plus, developing sector-leading guidance for best practice in Artistic Research Degrees and resources for dance research in practice.
Professor Midgelow undertakes mentoring, dramaturgical, curatorial and consultancy roles for artists and organisations. These facilitative activities combine with her own research within the framework of the Choreographic Lab, of which she is co-director. The Choreographic Lab, based at Dance4/FABRIC, Nottingham, provides platforms for sharing choreographic practices and critical inquiry. Extending these interests she conceptualised was the founding co-editor of the hybrid peer-reviewed journal, Choreographic Practices, 2010-2020.
Her movement practice and research is grounded in somatic and improvisatory approaches. She is also a qualified practitioner of Yoga and Thai Yoga Massage. Her movement and video work has been shown internationally and she publishes her research in professional, online and academic journals. As a movement artist/researcher her work currently focuses upon artistic research methods, somatic approaches to dance training, improvisation and articulating choreographic processes.
Selected essays writings: Practice-as-Research (in Dodds, 2019), Improvisation as a paradigm for Phenomenology (in Fraleigh 2018); Some Fleshy thinking (in Geoge-Graves 2015), Creative Articulations Process (CAP) (co-written with J. Bacon, Choreographic Practices 2015). Midgelow's extensive edited volume Improvisation in Dance with Oxford University Press was published in 2019 and her monograph, Reworking the ballet: Counter Narratives and Alternative Bodies was published by Routledge in 2007. Recent performance works include: BreathBone, Skript and the performative lecture Everywhere and Nowhere.
Professor Midgelow was Chair of 'The Standing Conference on Dance in Higher Education (DanceHE, UK)(www.DanceHE.org.uk) ' (2010-13), served on the boards of 'The Society of Dance History Scholars (USA) for over 10 years (www.sdhs.org), Vice-chair of the board at Dance4 (www.Dance4.co.uk) and is currently a board member for Jaivant Patel Dance (www.jaivantpateldance.com).
She is a regular peer reviewer for several funding bodies (inc. AHRC, Leverhulme, British Academy and Austrian Science Foundation) and for publishers/journals (inc. Routledge, Palgrave, Oxford University Press, Dance Research Journal and Theatre, Dance and Performance Training).
Prof Vida Midgelow is a committed educator. Her teaching interests encompass supervisory research pedagogy, research methods, ethics, choreography, practice as research, release and somatically based movement practices, dance making and improvisation, dance writing, critical approaches to contemporary performance and dance analysis/writing.
She is a highly experienced PhD supervisor, specialising in supporting PhD's by Practice as Research and has been honoured to support many candidates. She invites potential research degree students to discuss proposals for study in areas related to her research interests.
Her current supervisions include:
Funke Oyebanjo: Script writing for the Web
Sharon Reshef Armony: Stage Screen Performance
Leah Antonellis: Austism and Dance
Dominque Rivoal: Somatic / relational film practice
Zhibo Zhao: Beijing Dance Academy - Creativity and Improvisation
Abigial Diaz: Dance and technology
Kevin Skelton: Opera training, breath and somatics (External Supervisor, University of Toronto)
Completed projects:
Nic Sandiland: Accenting agency
Heashin Park: Dance in schools and Experiences of Deaf Children
Helen Kindred: Improvisation Practices
Pete Gomes: Improvised Cinema
Athina Valha: 'Agon' and choreographic Practice
Jamieson Dryburgh: Dance technique and creative pedagogy
Amy Voris: Authentic Movement and choreography (External Supervisor, University of Chichester)
Victor Fung: Dance4 and the Centre for Advanced Training (co-funded Ph.D. with Dance4)
Lotti Nichol: Screen/Body performance practices
Sarah Black: Mother as Curator: Sited performance practices
Stina Sommerlade: Dance ecologies and funding policy
Stephen Fossey: Activating social space and performative practices
Susanne Martin: Dance Improvisation and Aging
Sara Giddens: Still Small Acts (AHRC funded Collaborative Ph.D. with Dance4)
Rosanna Irvine: Towards a non-representational poetics of choreography (AHRC funded Collaborative Ph.D. with Dance4)
I-Ying Wu: Improvisation and Daoism (External Supervisor, University of Northampton)
Jonathan Chapman: Painting and intertextuality (Ph.D. by publication/portfolio, University of Northampton)
Luis Stoleo: Mapping and performance (Ph.D. inc. Practice, University of Northampton)
Rachel Durden: Genital sensation (University of Northampton)
Hilary Elliot: Vision and Improvisation (External supervisor, University of Huddersfield)
Prof Vida Midgelow has provided platforms for sharing insights into doctoral education, choreographic practices, critical inquiry and debate. As an artist-scholar her work focuses on somatic approaches to dance training, improvised practices, and articulating choreographic processes.
Current areas of research include:
*Doctoral Education
*Embodied Methodologies
*Dance Improvisation
*Practice as Research / Artistic Research
*Somatically based movement practices
*Languaging and documentation strategies
Midgelow, Vida L. and Bacon, Jane (2020) Creative articulations process: a rhizomatic practice (video exposition).
Bacon, Jane and Midgelow, Vida L. (2019) Reconsidering research and supervision as creative embodied practice: reflections from the field, Artistic Doctorates in Europe: third-cycle provision in Dance and Performance. Other. Artistic Doctorates in Europe, UK.
Midgelow, Vida L. and Bacon, Jane (2019) Breathbone. [Performance]
Midgelow, Vida L. (2019) Recommendations for action: enhancing artistic doctoral education in dance and performance. Artistic Doctorates in Europe. (Published online first)
Vesty, Robert (2019) Ten Days in Tarbena: an evolutionary approach to moving through silence and sound to speech. In: The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance. Midgelow, Vida L. , ed. Oxford University Press, pp. 366-382. ISBN 9780199396986
Prof V L Midgelow is director and lead researcher for:
Artistic Doctorates in Europe: Third cycle provision in Dance and Performance (ADiE)
Artistic Doctorates in Europe (ADiE) is a three-year research project that will investigate the experience and practice of doctorate candidates in the field of dance and movement-based performance and the impact of these projects at the interface with the profession.
ADiE is Erasmus+ funded and its principal aim is to develop productive and meaningful provisions for Practice as Research Doctorates that are suitable to the fluid, increasingly interdisciplinary and global, creative industry/research environments with which they intersect. Addressing the needs of research candidates, supervisors, universities and the creative industry the resources and guidelines seek to enable the rising number of artists entering into, and being nurtured by, university environments to receive the best possible support for their artistic/scholarly endeavors and for doctorate candidates to be well prepared to become our future leaders in the arts.
ADiE asks:
What are the expectations, perceptions and experiences of the Artistic Doctorate?
What are the methodological tools and other training needs of artistic researchers in Dance and Performance?
How are doctoral 'thesis' in artistic research best supervised and supported?
How do doctoral studies through artistic research respond to, and prepare candidates for, the future?
How might universities and creative partners better support artistic research doctorates and reflect the future needs of creative industry and higher education environments?
Led by Prof Vida L Midgelow at Middlesex University, this is a collaboration across four research/teaching institutions - Middlesex and Chichester Universities (United Kingdom), Stockholm University of the Arts (Sweden) and University of the Arts, Helsinki (Finland), in partnership with four leading professional arts organisations - Dance4 (United Kingdom), Kiasma Theatre - Museum of Contemporary Arts and Zodiak Centre for New Dance (Finland) and WELD (Sweden).
For more details contact v.midgelow@mdx.ac.uk
Vida Midgelow, Professor of Dance and Choreographic Practices at Middlesex University, contributes new insights to the field of practice-as-research (PaR) / Artistic Research (AR) with a particular emphasis on movement and choreography.
Midgelow’s impacts in this area have been generated through advocacy, publications and research practices, including two significant strands of research:
Artistic Doctorates in Europe (ADiE, 2016-19, Erasmus+ funded). ADiE undertook surveys and developed case studies, revealing shared concerns and gaps in doctoral provision. Addressing these gaps ADiE curated a series of events, encouraging a cross-sector approach by bringing together representatives from the academy and the cultural industries. This led to a series of publications, notably, ‘Reconsidering Research and Supervision as Creative Embodied Practice: Reflections from the Field’ (2019), which offers insights and guidance to candidates and supervisors, proposing a creative, co-relational, collective and networked process, incorporating partners beyond the academy in the development of third spaces for doctoral engagement. While the edited resource, ‘Research (in/as) Motion: A resource collection’ (2019, nivel.teak.fi/adie) includes contributions by an international group of 46 authors, revealing ways to work effectively with tacit knowings, attend to the complexities of situated knowledge and the centrality (but not unproblematic nature) of first person, enskilled, research. Through engagements with key stakeholders ADiE also produced the guidance report, ‘Recommendations for Action’ (2019), outlining best practices in doctoral provision and available in five languages.
‘Creative Articulations Process (CAP)’ (ACE funding). Co- developed with Emeritus Professor Jane Bacon, University of Chichester CAP offers methods and associated strategies for artist researchers to speak from (rather than about) dancing to foreground the intertwining of embodiment, experience and language. We first published this work in 2014, setting out the routes of the work in Somatics, Focusing and PaR. We have since developed CAP as a multi-layered and multifaceted process incorporating three areas of work, Preparations, a Ground Form and an Expanded Form, and six facets – outwarding, situating, delving, raising, anatomizing and outwarding. As a non-linear movement/writing process it offers insights into, and capacities for, embodied dual awareness, tracking, creative discernment and languaging, to inform creative practices and offer a method for PaR.
She has activated academic and arts sector intersections giving rise to (inter)national impacts in the following areas:
(a) Enhanced articulation capacities in creative practice for movement practitioners,
(b) Heightening awareness of embodiment and languaging for audiences and
(c) Enhancing understanding of, and provisions for, artistic research/research degrees in professional arts organisations and universities.
