Dance, Movement & Spiritualities - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2014

We open our issue with ‘Professorial Reflections’ – an informal, but nonetheless productive discussion about researching spirituality in dance and performance studies. We aim to offer this type of discussion, between different leading professors in dance and performance studies, in subsequent issues of DMAS. Our intention here is to open dialogue about spirituality in these fields, through informal discussion, with the aim of supporting new areas of research.

In the decade before the outbreak of World War I, the newly emerging field of modern dance became one in which writers and visual artists, who rejected the materialism of nineteenth-century culture and society, explored ideas of the spiritual. This article gives a new historical reading to such ideas around dance in the period just before the outbreak of the Great War by focusing on two seemingly disparate figures. It considers the ways in which the musician Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, who devised the influential form Eurhythmics, and the visual artist Wassily Kandinsky, who pioneered the idea of abstraction in painting, discussed the spiritual in relation to dance and performance. It places this discussion in the broader context of its time by considering the artists and intellectuals around these two figures, with particular reference to two Englishmen, father and son, M.E. and M.T.H Sadler who travelled to Germany in the summer of 1912 to visit Kandinsky and Jaques-Dalcroze, and published the first books in English discussing their work. This new historical reading considers the role of dance in contemporary early twentieth-century discussions about the spiritual, and the range of different meanings that the term embraced during this period.

This article considers a range of spiritual, psychological and pedagogical writing to examine whether the contemporary notion of ‘secular-spirituality’ can move forward our understanding of collaborative working processes in the performing arts. With reference to Anttila, Bigger, Bini, Czikszentmihalyi, Lave and Wenger, James, Roff, and Van Ness, the article focuses on the rehearsal room interplay of life world and social world through three key notions. These are ‘embodied knowing’, ‘bodily intelligence’ and ‘belonging’ in relation to the individual in the wider collaborative process. Some working practices of Forced Entertainment – as discussed by Tim Etchells – are then considered as a concluding and practice-based referent.

In 2012 Pat the Dog Playwright Centre held a two-day workshop for First Dance, a devised theatre and dance piece that explored the rituals of queer marriage through the protagonist, as he endeavoured to select the first dance to be performed at his wedding. Reflecting on the workshop process, this article examines the traditions of the first dance, in terms of both the appropriation of a heterosexual ritual, and the role dance has played in the queer community, as a means of designating queer space and belonging. Recognizing the ‘first dance’ as a Eurocentric, heteronormative, performative ritual, expected within a white, western wedding, the necessity and expectation of a first dance in a ‘queer’ space is interrogated. The fundamental question that is addressed is then: are members of the queer community performing the rituals of heterosexual weddings in order to gain inclusion, assimilate and conform to dominant cultural values, or are they appropriating these rituals in order to subvert them and recodify them as acts of resistance against homophobic bigotry and heterosexist cultural practices?

I am currently dramaturging a play entitled, First Dance. It is a devised piece of theatre loosely based around a gay man trying to decide what dance to perform with his partner for the first dance at his wedding. On 5–6 March 2012 I attended a development workshop for the play with Pat the Dog Theatre Creation2 in Kitchener, Ontario. The piece is being co-created by Trevor Copp and Jeff Fox, who are performing the piece, and Lisa O’Connell who is writing it alongside them. Trevor is a ballroom dancer. He is a performer and this story is very much his own. It is not a play about him and his husband, but him and his dance partner, preparing for the wedding. While the play is not based directly in real events, it is clear that he is closely connected to the subject matter.

Contemporary American evangelical dance, both in novice and professional iterations, is a burgeoning subculture, that in its pursuit of excellence in honour of God, deploys many of the dominant discourses of power utilized by western concert dance, such as ideal body type in terms of size, race and gender. In addition to these discourses, contemporary Christian dance establishes additional discourses of power designed to promote an evangelical Christian message through such elements as movement vocabulary, costume and musical accompaniment. Dance studies scholars have utilized Foucault’s notion of ‘docile bodies’ as a technology of power to investigate the practices of ballet pedagogy and performance in western concert dance in general. However, no scholars to date have looked at the particular ways in which these practices are implemented by the subculture of American evangelical dance. This article examines the practices of two contemporary, professional, Christian dance companies in terms of movement vocabulary and costume choices to uncover the complex ways in which these companies cultivate discourses of power that contribute to a particular kind of docile body, the docile body that is controlled, disciplined and de-eroticized for Christian worship. I argue that uncovering the ways in which these practices contribute to docility in Christian dance leads scholars to a greater understanding of the dynamics between religious beliefs and the body in contemporary society.

This article is an invitation to celebrate and honour the divinity of the dance in each person. The phrase ‘returning to the dancing body’ highlights the inherent vitality, renewal and communion with the divine that may be experienced through dancing and may be experienced over and over as we return to the dance to refresh and cultivate a spiritual self. The physical body engaged holistically in movement with a phenomenological focused awareness appears to have the potential for us to experience our spirituality in new and rejuvenating ways. Honouring the body, movement and the sacred vitality of the dance may broaden our concepts and connections to our selves and the numinous, and allow experiences of unification and vital aliveness to occur.

This article explores the intersections between the dance, biblical studies and performance praxis. It articulates the possible kinds of knowledge(s) that are at the intersection between movement as a performance practice and biblical research. By looking at Adrian Howells’s work Foot Washing For The Sole (2009) as a prototype for Kinaesthetic Hermeneutics, this exploration suggests that Howells’s embodied reading of Luke 7:37–83 provides a methodology for interpreting scripture through the body. This article ultimately seeks to answer the question can the body be a site for biblical exegesis?

Dance in Scripture: How Biblical Dancers Can Revolutionize Worship Today, A. Yarber (2013) Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers ISBN 13: 9781620326626, p/bk, $16.00