Dr Lise Uytterhoeven

Dr Lise Uytterhoeven is Chief Academic Officer at The Place, where she leads the growth and innovation of the world-leading London Contemporary Dance School in dance education and research. She holds a BA Dance Education from CODARTS (Rotterdam, The Netherlands) and an MA (Distinction) Dance Studies and PhD from University of Surrey, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Her monograph Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui: Dramaturgy and Engaged Spectatorship is published by Palgrave Macmillan in the New World Choreographies series. She has published in Contemporary Theatre Review, Research in Dance Education, The Bloomsbury Companion to Dance Studies (ed. Sherril Dodds), Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet (ed. Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel & Jill Nunes Jensen), Fifty Contemporary Choreographers (ed. Jo Butterworth & Lorna Sanders) and The Ethics of Art (ed. Guy Cools & Pascal Gielen). Her co-authored study guide What Moves You? Shaping your dissertation in dance is published by Routledge.

Lise is a passionate advocate for dance research, having served as a Trustee of the Society for Dance Research from 2009-2024 and as Chair and Co-Chair from 2018-24. She is currently a member of the Associate Board of the journal Dance Research. She was appointed to the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF 2023) review panel by the Office for Students.

I am currently working on the following projects:

  • Across the fields of dance pedagogy and critical dance studies and my interests include choreography, dramaturgy, spectatorship, humour and radical joy.
  • The ways dance responds to and shapes contemporary global challenges, including topics such as migration, transnationalism, and social justice, positioning dance as a force for change and reflection.
  • An analysis of choreographic humour in Igor x Moreno’s TAME GAME (2023) and a comparative reading of Eva Recacha’s The Picnic (2024) and Jeremy Deller and Grace Nicol’s Hogarthian Rave (2025) through the lens of radical joy.

I welcome PhD proposals and research collaborations in the following areas:

  • Dance dramaturgy and spectatorship
  • Dance, humour and radical joy
  • Dance higher education pedagogy 
  • Dance, politics, economies and globalisation
  • Dance historiography in relation to the 20th and 21st centuries

Supervised PhD projects:

Eleanor Weston (2025-ongoing) ‘Decolonial Dance Education Practice: A Methodology for Developing Inclusive and Critical Pedagogies’, PhD, London Contemporary Dance School and University of the Arts London (Co-Supervisor of educational practice).

Examined PhD projects:

Garry Clarke (2023) ‘Professional commercial dance: creative curriculums and tracking trends,’ EdD, University of Bolton.

Cor Van Istendael (2020) ‘The stylish conquest of the world. The genesis, incubation, and dissemination of new dance repertoires (1756-1818). Examples from the Southern Netherlands and the Prince-Bishopric/Land of Liège in a European context’, PhD, University of Ghent, Belgium.

Rachel Farrer (2019) ‘Independent dancers and the choreographic process: a study into the working conditions of the 21st century dancer’, PhD, University of Bedfordshire.

Publications or practice outputs: