Abstract
If performance studies is to explore sports from the perspective of athletes, coaches form a potential pool of allies as they are engaged in their own ‘para-ethnographic’ studies of athletes’ performance. This paper examines developmental coaching, that is, the teaching of skills, as a form of applied phenomenology, drawing on examples from the author’s fieldwork on capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian dance and martial art. In particular, the paper explores an instructor’s intervention when the author was trying to learn to plantar bananeira (‘to plant a banana tree’), the capoeira version of a handstand. The intervention had several stages, all revealing an acute perception of how the learning experience was structured: the coach pantomimed incorrect practice to increase the author’s self awareness, diagnosed what part of the skill I might be able to learn next, and created a tailored exercise to shift the author’s perceptions. Studying this sort of coach-athlete interaction helps us to better understand performance traditions, but it also poses a series of challenges in terms of shifting our scale, recognising that we will not produce certain forms of theoretical narrative, and taking phenomenological analysis seriously.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Being there |
Subtitle of host publication | after : proceedings of the 2006 Conference of the Australasian Association for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies |
Place of Publication | Sydney |
Publisher | Australasian Association for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies (ADSA) |
Number of pages | 8 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781742100128 |
Publication status | Published - 2008 |
Event | Annual Conference of Australasian Association for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies - Sydney Duration: 4 Jul 2006 → 7 Jul 2006 |
Conference
Conference | Annual Conference of Australasian Association for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies |
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City | Sydney |
Period | 4/07/06 → 7/07/06 |
Keywords
- sports coaching
- capoiera
- phenomenology
- sport as performance
- performance analysis
- embodiment