‘Warming Up’
Within my dance pedagogical practice, warming up is not merely a preparatory phase but serves as a bridge guiding participants from their everyday experiences into a state of dynamic presence and heightened sensory awareness. Warming up aims to invite participants to engage in active relationships with themselves, others, and the more/other-than-human environment through responsive, embodied exploration.
Just as the warming up phase in dance pedagogical practice bridges everyday and artistic modes of being, this section connects my pedagogical approaches with artistic and postqualitative research methodologies in the context of early childhood dance education. In this spirit, I invite the reader to engage in a conceptual warmup with a discussion of my methodological journey within artistic research, situated at the intersection of artistic, arts-educational, and academic contexts (e.g., Borgdorff 2012). I describe how my dance pedagogical work with children has gradually evolved into a fluid artistic research methodology, giving rise to emergent methods through collaborative and relational processes. In the following discussion, I examine how artistic research within improvisation‑based dance pedagogy operates as a creative and multimodal translation process. I further outline my methods, materials, and the relational nature of research ethics.