Evaluating the impact and effectiveness of meditation in a dance conservatoire context

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This article positions meditation as a critical well-being practice that nurtures well-being and self-regulation. The utilization of meditation within a dance conservatoire environment can contribute to the pro-active engagement with self-care, and meditation, as a practice of ‘embodied self-care’, foregrounds subjective agency and can disrupt the dominant paradigms of dance pedagogy as a process of striving towards idealized goals. In this article, we evaluate the implementation of a meditation practice programme within a dance conservatoire setting, and by drawing on the premise of meditation as a practice of self-regulation, we argue that it is a vital vehicle for well-being and resilience in dancers. We also position meditation as a somatic practice that can be utilized to foreground the embodied subjectivity of dance students through a productive encounter of western dominant dance training practices and eastern contemplative practices which activates agency and embodied criticality.