Chasing expertise: reappraising the role of intuitive process in creative decisionmaking

What are some of the implications for the ways we think about contemporary dance-making, today, if we start from the premise that while art-making is a mode of work, expertise in that mode of work is rarely thematised in Dance writing - even though that expertise is widely celebrated in the world or worlds of dance and performance?
I asked in the early days of the 21stC why terms like “performance mastery”, “virtuosity” and “disciplinary expertise” figured so rarely in performance and dance studies writing, even though each of these plays its role in judgements made every day in the working environments as well as the performance spaces of dance/performance. Today I want to talk about the vital role of intuitive process in creative decision-making in performance, a role that tends to increase (rather than diminish) as the practitioner’s own expertise increases. Intuitive process, from this perspective, is a vital knowledge practice (epistemics) in art-making, rather than the poor and frivolous cousin of rational and analytic thought.

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