my given name is Pavle Heidler. i prefer to spell my name as pavleheidler. i go by pav or pavle. i was born in a country that doesn’t exist, in a city that is now capital to Croatia, a popular tourist destination. i identify as trans non-binary, my pronouns are they/them, and i am on the spectrum (adhd-autism).
i like to say that i am a movement-and-word artist and activist, an educator, and a queer critical thinker who specialises in developing research-based performative practices within the expanding fields of dance and choreography. my work-ing is meant to be encouraging of the continual re-form-ing in and of the intersectional and the emergent field of queer critical practice.
i studied dancing at SEAD, P.A.R.T.S., and SKH (Stockholm University of the Arts). by the time i started studying at SKH i was telling people i wasn’t studying dancing anymore, i was studying the way we’re studying dancing. since 2013, i’ve been a certified Somatic Movement Educator of Body-Mind Centering®.
i situate my practice within the expanding fields of dance and choreography, where dance and choreography are understood to be critical practices; critical as in critical for the development of the general field of body-based knowledge, and critical as in analytical and self-reflective. the expanding fields of dance and choreography i situate within the western tradition of staged dance and choreography, the development of which stems from the court of louis xiv and thrives in the present moment there where the artistic and academic modalities are encouraged to intersect.
one of my main areas of research concerns the notion of Cartesian dualism, i.e., the mind-body split. within the context of my practice, i am observing some of the ways in which the application of Cartesian dualism in the West complicates the study of dancing, e.g., by forcing us to associate our thinking with a single part of our anatomy, thereby restricting our relationship to thinking itself with linear, language-based standards. most dancers have, of course, experienced thinking beyond the linear, and beyond the language-based. my question is, what happens when we consider all those non-linear and non-lingual experiences as cognitive experiences? how does our practice change when it becomes knowledgeable without having to stop being, e.g., intuitive? and how does considering all this influence our relationship to dancing, the way we evaluate dancing, the way we recognise its purpose? i often identify my aim within this area of research with the term embodiment; i intend the term embodiment here to represent the effort opposite to that of a split, i.e., the effort to integrate that which we traditionally associate with “the mind” with what which we traditionally associate with “the body” into a dynamic operative unit, which—i‘d like to argue—is imperative for dancing, wherever dancing is featured as a research method.
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