- Home
- A-Z Publications
- Dance, Movement & Spiritualities
- Previous Issues
- Volume 2, Issue 3, 2016
Dance, Movement & Spiritualities - Volume 2, Issue 3, 2016
Volume 2, Issue 3, 2016
-
-
Why people dance – evolution, sociality and dance
By Andrée GrauAbstractDance, along with song and body percussion, emanates from the body. All three therefore can be said to belong to the most elementary artistic processes. Anthropologist John Blacking believed that they were ‘a special kind of exercise of sensory, communicative and cooperative powers that is as fundamental to the making and remaking of human nature as speech’. The article engages with such an idea and examines the significance of dance in human evolution, moving away from the usual schema that presents bipedalism and the development of language as the two key moments in human evolution. It proposes instead another stage in-between, that it was the ability to move together in time that allowed collaboration among individuals, which led to the acquisition of language, and, therefore, culture. The article also investigates what can be loosely called the ‘power’ of dance. Dance is seen as powerful because it integrates intellect, our mental apparatus that engages primarily with reason and cognition, and affect, which emphasizes feeling and emotion. Three examples from Europe, Oceania, and Africa are discussed to demonstrate the similarities of the ways dancers have articulated what can be called, for expediency, a shared aesthetic experience bringing a heightened state of consciousness. Through such examples, dance is presented as a multi-sensory pursuit that connects human beings in a particular kind of relationship, which gives dance its power.
-
-
-
Professorial reflection: Creative experiments with the capture (and release) of performance through research and scholarship
Authors: Hillary Keeney and Bradford KeeneyAbstractResearchers of any form of embodied, creative performance including dance, movement, theatre, music or even the healing arts face the challenge of bridging the inherent gap between the performances themselves and the commentary (theories and analyses) we generate about them. This article is a conversation between the authors, discussing the ways they have grappled with the relationship between description and performance across their research, scholarship and practice in both the healing and performing arts. The discussion includes an introduction to a qualitative research method called Recursive Frame Analysis (RFA), originally developed by Bradford Keeney as a way of mapping the movement of change-oriented conversation. In addition to the application of RFA to research in dance, the authors discuss their experiences conducting ethnographic research on the Kalahari Ju/’hoan Bushman (San) healing dance. The Bushmen have their own unique way of handling the relationship between embodied experience and explanatory commentary, which is presented herein through their story of First and Second Creation. The latter offers an ancient and astute contextual framework for holding the relationship between language and non-language mediated experience that dancers and scholars of dance may find intriguing. This conversation as a whole is intended to open up further thinking and dialogue about the relationship between performance and scholarship, as well as inspire dancers and performers of all kinds to develop creative approaches to scholarly enquiry that affirm rather than detract from the complexity and richness of performance itself.
-
-
-
Dancing through myself: Memory, identity, spirituality
More LessAbstractInfluenced by the rhetorical critique of post-structuralism and the additions of such new styles of ethnographic research as sensory ethnography, there has been an increased interest in autoethnography, which has been ultimately influenced by the new research in the area of neuroscience with specific reference to embodiment. This article follows my reflections from those on ethnography to contemplation of the neuroscience of embodiment, and finally the autoethnographic project focused on embodying the spiritual.
-
-
-
Positive Race Relations through Cuban Music: A Perspective from the Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT)
Authors: Demi Simi and Jonathan MatusitzAbstractThis article examines positive race relations through music in Cuba from the perspective of the relational-cultural theory (RCT). The RCT postulates that the solution to personal growth is not isolation per se. Rather, mutually maturing relationships and growth-fostering connections can help heal personal problems and, by the same token, promote mutual respect so as to decrease racial tensions. Acknowledging the colour issues that have affected many Cubans of African descent, the RCT illustrates how musical productivity and creativity can improve congenial race relations in Cuba. An important conclusion is that, the Afro-Cuban people, despite living in a repressive political system, have shown ‘resistance’ by being innovative through the arts. Music has articulated their need to participate in human affairs due to the enduring deprivations brought by slavery, preferential treatments towards capitalist whites and tourists, condemned cultural practices, and lack of leadership roles. Today, the Afro-Cuban people can form communities of support in which they can partake with locals (rather than staying in isolation).
-
-
-
Performing Sand: A Case for the Abandonment of Video Documentation in Buddhist-Inspired Live Art
By Pema ClarkAbstractDocumenting performance in the context of practice-based research has become the standard protocol for the assessment of live work in the academy as permanent document and archive. In contrast, the practice of Buddhism recognizes impermanence as the central doctrine governing all conditioned existence. What happens when these two fields are combined? In addressing the dialectic inherent in documenting a field of performance art that relies on its doctrinal foundations to convey principles that video documentation renders redundant, I offer an alternative method of documentation as part of the creative process that keeps the work ‘live’ in the mind of the audience upon every subsequent engagement with the archive. Far from being a failure to document, Buddhist performance art demands a new approach to the documentation of performance.
The article includes a performance score inspired by my autobiographical performance artwork At Sea: 1980–2010.
-
-
-
Somatically inspired movement and prepatriarchal religious symbolism
Authors: Amanda Williamson, Martha Eddy, Linda Hartley, Mark Talyor, Enrique Meléndez and Mary AbramsAbstractIn this article I examine how religious symbolism is enacted in movement underpinned by somatic awareness, but, of note, a matrifocal religious symbolism – certainly holistic symbols that pre-date patriarchal religion, such as the circle, water, spiral, serpent and womb. Although these symbols continue to live on, somewhat transformed in patriarchal religions, I observe it is symbols related to the re-emergence and reconstruction of the palaeolithic and neolithic Goddess, painstakingly and contentiously unearthed through critical feminist voices, that play a more creative role in the pedagogies of movement-based somatics. The first part of this article examines the palaeolithic and neolithic Goddess, where the female principle is positioned as the source and genesis of religious symbolism; the second part weaves together how prepatriarchal symbols are embedded in ontogenetic and phylogenetic somatic movement exploration. While there is much popular literature on polytheistic Goddess pantheons in neopagan, wiccan and new-age spiritual movements, I turn my attention in this article to the prehistoric Goddess, articulating key ideas from scholars working in archaeology, critical feminism and cultural history, such as Irwin Thompson, Marija Gimbutas, Sjöö and Mor, Merlin Stone, and Carol Christ. Here I explore how somatic movement dance education is not a direct expression of the prehistoric prepatriarchal Goddess (nor an appropriation), but does engage and enact some of the world’s most primordial religious symbolism, in turn reflecting the prehistoric Goddess and Her more-than-human cellular matrix.
-
-
-
Book Review
More LessAbstractISADORA DUNCAN IN THE 21ST CENTURY: CAPTURING THE ART AND SPIRIT OF THE DANCER’S LEGACY, ANDREA MANTELL SEIDEL (2016) Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company Inc., Publishers, 272 pp., ISBN: 9780786477951, s/bk, $40
-