John Taylor
John Taylor is a dancer and educator based in Amsterdam and associated with the Modern Theatre Dance and the Expanded Contemporary Dance departments at the ATD over the past 30 years. Working with young dancers sparked an interest in the processes of how we collaborate and learn through co-creative processes, leading to the completion of his master thesis The Benefits of the Art Practice Based Technique Class for Dance in Higher Education in 2016.
As a dancer, John was awarded the Silver Dance Prize of the VSCD and worked in the Netherlands with Dansproduktie, Beppie Blankert, Blok and Steel, and the Onafhankelijk Toneel among others.
John has participated in the European research projects Inside Movement Knowledge, Labo 21, Idocde, LEAP, and MIND THE DANCE. As a member of the ARTI research group of the Amsterdam University of the Arts, he studied the potential of artist-produced digital tools for use in dance education. For the research group of the Lectorate Art Education he studied the conceptual change model. The model was the basis for the design of a professional development trajectory for dance teachers in higher education, Teaching Dance in the 21st Century.
For the Embodied Knowledge in Theater and Dance research group John is focusing on his own teaching from an eastern wisdom and phenomenological point of view where looking inward to the personal experience of kinesthesia and tactility form a starting point for the creation and development of movement in the lived body of dance students.