The Porous Body: Cultivating malleability in traditional dance training
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Contemporary dance is constantly evolving. Its landscape has transformed and developed significantly over the past 30 years, slowly shifting from a repertoire company scene to a diverse freelance environment. In this idiosyncratic milieu, the breadth of skills that dancers need to master is constantly becoming more complex. Given that emerging contemporary dancers will be encountering the new reality of an increasingly heterogeneous freelance environment, how should training institutions best prepare students for this paradigm shift? To address this challenge, I began developing ‘The Porous Body’, a structure of feeling that promotes the practice of heightened physical and mental malleability by following four fundamental guiding principles: flow, playfulness, metaphor and paradox. Sourcing from my own performative, choreographic and pedagogical practices, and the work of dance artists, movement practitioners, philosophers and psychologists from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I will formulate this method while sharing anecdotal feedback collected from dancers with whom I have recently experimented with this concept of physical and mental malleability.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".