Camilla Damkjaer

At SKH

I teach within areas such as, among other things, the history of theatre/dance/circus and methods in artistic research.

Profile

I’m a performance scholar specialised in the history of bodily practices within performance cultures. I’m also a practitioner of bodily techniques, especially circus and yoga.

I’m interested in how bodily techniques, and the ideas they embody, transform cultural meanings over time. Methodologically, I often work with practice-based methodologies combined with contextual, historical analysis. Theoretically, my work is grounded in different philosophies of the body.

My current research focuses on the global entanglements of circus, yoga, dance, and theatre historically and today. I am interested in understanding how contemporary practices carry and activate historical layers and meanings through processes of reinterpretation and reinvention. In dialogue with the historical study of yoga, I explore contemporary expressions of these relations.

In my former work, I have also studied contemporary circus and the way specific circus disciplines carry their own process of thinking. One expression of this can be seen in the book Home-made Academic Circus.

I finalized my PhD in 2005 with the thesis The Aesthetics of Movement – Variations on Gilles Deleuze and Merce Cunningham. This work explores the understanding of movement in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy in dialogue with the aesthetics of Merce Cunningham.

I have been educated with the fields of performances studies, literary history and cultural studies. I have studied different philosophies of the body, especially Gilles Deleuze’s thinking and phenomenology, but my work has also been informed by gender and queer studies, discourse analysis, post-colonial theory and more. In my work I also engage with the sociology and anthropology of the body.

Areas of expertise

• Bodily practices within dance/circus/yoga/theatre
• Philosophies of the body
• The cultural history of the body
• Intercultural exchanges of bodily practices
• First-person methodologies
• Methods in artistic research