The empirical study of school practice concerns a dance class (eleven to twelve-year-old students). The lessons are led by a physical education teacher (P), expert in teaching dance and occasional amateur dancer in a choreographic center. The cycle entitled “fairy tale in body” is based on different fairy tales (e.g. Cinderella, Swan Lake, Snow White). The intention of P is to give students an understanding of the world of fairy tales by using this familiar setting as an imaginary support for enabling students to "translate” a story with their body, they are the actors of contemporary dance. The data to be used for presentation in the symposium concern a subgroup of students who have chosen to create a dance based on “Cinderella”. Teaching dance, taken as an example, aims to make students familiar with contemporary dance works (oeuvres) and to make themselves the producers of a personal oeuvre. This approach of oeuvres is not to be limited neither to “visit the oeuvre” (Chevallard, 1996) nor to be in "free dance". The chosen example aims to enlighten the theoretical concept of "epistemic capacities" produced by the didactical activity of dancing, in its links with "savant choreographic practice", which can be modeled in terms of "epistemic game" played by a choreographer and a dancer. We rely on modelling in the form of "epistemic game" to describe the practice in class based on the following two questions: What sort of game are the students playing? What game does one play in contemporary dance? Observing the production of the students has been related to the professional dancers’ production from the ballet "Cinderella" (the oeuvre that the students have appreciated at theater before the teaching cycle). Our observation leads us to question more precisely the notion of "danced language" and in particular to examine the links between gestures and words. Indeed, among the most common stimuli to make students dance, words play an important role: sentences, texts, songs, poems, stories and nursery rhymes. Thus we can ask what the word adds to danced gesture, and what "translating" a word into dance movement is. Furthermore, the analysis uses the notion of equilibration between two poles of didactic action, the contract and the milieu. We will see how this equilibration, achieved by the teacher (or not), allows the students to construct and develop "epistemic capacities" that come close to an "epistemic game" identified in artists' oeuvres.

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