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- Volume 3, Issue 1, 2016
Dance, Movement & Spiritualities - Volume 3, Issue 1-2, 2016
Volume 3, Issue 1-2, 2016
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Katherine Mansfield and the dance of life
More LessAbstractThis article explores the links between dance and spirituality as experienced by writer Katherine Mansfield in the last months of her life (she died in France in January 1923). Dance played a central role in Georges Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, established at the Le Prieuré of Fontainebleau-Avon in 1922. Mansfield had been searching for some time for a new way of being-in-the-world, and the ritualized movements she observed at the Institute seemed to hold the key to her spiritual renewal. Through dance she thus discovered what philosopher Hans Jonas has called ‘the dynamic connection of all things’. Using the insights offered by Jonas and French philosophers Renaud Barbaras and Georges Didi-Huberman I wish to place Mansfield’s quest for ‘the new world within’ in the context of the ongoing human quest for authenticity and mind/body unity.
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Margaret Fisk Taylor’s sacred dance, moving imagination, and kinaesthetic empathy
By Hiie SaumaaAbstractIn this article, I shed light upon the work of Margaret Fisk Taylor (1908–2004), a pioneer of liturgical dance in the United States. Taylor’s visionary approach to sacred movement and her prolific writings are rarely discussed in dance studies and the full range of her innovative ideas is overlooked in liturgical dance writing. I examine her movement philosophy and her theorization of the dynamics between spirituality, movement and imagination, focusing particularly on her concepts of ‘simple rhythms’ and ‘creative dramatic action’. I demonstrate how Taylor’s use of movement and gesture as a way to imagine, connect to, and empathize with the other adds a new dimension to recent accounts on ‘kinaesthetic empathy’. I suggest that, at the heart, Taylor’s movement philosophy proposes a physicalized form of empathy.
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Dancing evolutionary spirituality
More LessAbstractIn this poetic auto- and somatic-ethnography, I discuss common qualities between my practice of dance and Zen meditation which arose out of rifts in my Jewish upbringing. I focus on flow, awareness, presence, emergence and non-duality and show how meditation and dance with somatic awareness are bridges to the next realm in human development. I make parallels to ideas in Integral Philosophy, a map of worldwide ideas of systems that explain levels of human development and potential. I look at a few of my experiences of heightened states resulting from dance, meditation and Korean shamanic dance and conclude that meditative dance is an essential step forward in human development and in evolving consciousness.
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Reconnecting to the feminine: Transformative effects of Sensual Movement and Dance
Authors: Lisa Fasullo, John Lurquin and Gerard BodekerAbstractDance is documented to produce substantive neurophysiological, psychological and quality-of-life benefits. Adding to that research we document the therapeutic effects of Sensual Movement and Dance in restoring women to a state of wholeness, enhanced self-expression and a general sense of ease. Specifically, we report on the physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual findings of an eight-week pilot research study. Informing the design of the pilot are reports over a ten-year period by women participants in a Sensual Movement and Dance programme that indicate consistent growth in self-confidence, reduction in stress, marked decrease in levels of self-consciousness, and improvements in women’s senses of autonomy and overall quality of life. In the pilot study, most participants also reported improvements in emotional regulation and a decrease in anxiety and depression. According to study participants, more than simply talking about sensuality, women want to feel more of it in themselves and in their lives.
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Transient light: Enchanted encounters with dappled light
More LessAbstractThe Dapple Light Project is a moving video and live dance performance installation, offering intimate encounters with dappled light as a vibratory place of sensuous enchantment. The article illuminates enchantment experiences in the videoing processes and installation scenography of this project, approaching wonder as a secular attunement with the physical, the digital and the moving presence of this elusive light. Jane Bennett’s theories on materiality shape reflections on the wonder experience and inform a view of enchantment in action. Laura Marks’ writings on haptic visuality and Gaston Bachelard’s contemplations on reverie and home offer intimate and sensuous dwellings for reflecting on mysteries of body, abode and interiority as materialized in this video installation. The article contemplates the transient fluctuations of dappled light as embodied enchantment and considers this in relation to Buddhist understandings of impermanence and dependant arising.
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My spirit asks to live in sensation
More LessAbstractThis qualitative, arts-based research article explores modes of physical daily practice, somatic writing and an emerging sense of spirituality within an autoethnographic framework. The research depicts the evolution of regular and varied body practices documented by somatic journaling and creative writing. The realization that spirituality can grow from an array of therapeutic and intentional somatic practices evolved from a more narrowly defined dance background that previously focused primarily on artistic, technical standards. Perspectives from contemporary dance training, the Pilates method, somatic writing, the GYROKINESIS method and Authentic Movement are the primary approaches explored. Other observations from moving within the natural world provide the lens for explorations on the role of the witness, acceptance, compassion and forgiveness. Data gathered from mindful, contemplative body-based practices led to an examination of intrinsic spiritual values. As a female dance academic, the emerging awareness of embodied physical spirituality also probes questions regarding the nature of dance scholarship, ageing in dance and the concept of somatic sustainability.
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Getting through it: The three-act play and performance as means of transforming the distressed doctoral graduate
By Sean ParkAbstractThis article illustrates how performance can help doctoral graduates struggling with their identity outside of the academy. The heuristic of the three-act play developed by Bradford and Hillary Keeney (2014) is offered as a means of breaking the scholar’s addiction to understanding before acting. By playfully performing upon the uttered phrases and habits of the stuck graduate, new frames of action and possibility are opened up that can carry him or her into more expansive and resourceful ways of being that transcend the academy. The author offers an account of his own distress and the ways in which absurdity, metaphor, movement and song opened him up to the sacred.
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Understanding Core Energetics: A client’s perspective of the Core Energetics process
More LessAbstractCore Energetics is a psychotherapeutic modality that bridges body psychotherapy with spiritual development. The current evidence base for Core Energetics is limited. Creating an evidence base for Core Energetics could support client safety and facilitate questions for determining effectiveness. To create this evidence base, foundational research must first be conducted to understand the Core Energetics experience. Such foundational research can be used to identify areas for further study. This qualitative phenomenological study provides an initial exploration into the experience of the Core Energetics client through interviews with students and alumni of the Institute of Core Energetics.
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‘Going far is returning’: Dance Movement Psychotherapists find resilience and learning and call for more collaboration and dialogue
Authors: Richard Coaten and Sarah WilliamsAbstractDance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP) can contribute more to the care of people with dementia, a subject of increasing interest and importance in the United Kingdom and globally. This article was first presented at the International Centre for Research in Arts Therapies Conference at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. It contributes to growing knowledge in the field by discussing and analysing two different, yet complementary narratives about practice then and now: first, from the perspective and learning of someone just starting out in their career as a dance movement psychotherapist and second from one who started out using dance therapeutically in the mid-1980s. The outcomes of this dialogue have helped build resilience, have fostered dialogue and learning between practitioners, and are clinically relevant to students in training and experienced practitioners alike. Outcomes also shed light on transference and counter-transference, and make a call for more collaboration and communication between dance movement psychotherapists just starting out in their careers and those more experienced. Much can be learnt from more collaboration and dialogue between DMP’s, dancers and other somatic practitioners working in the dementia care field.
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Book Reviews
Authors: Eline Kieft and Dunja NjaradiAbstractEMBODIED INQUIRY: WRITING, LIVING AND BEING THROUGH THE BODY, CELESTE SNOWBER (2016) Rotterdam: Sense Publishers ISBN: 9789463007535, p/bk, £20, ISBN: 9789463007542, h/bk, £65, ISBN: 9789463007559, e-book, £35
THE PEOPLE HAVE NEVER STOPPED DANCING: NATIVE AMERICAN MODERN DANCE HISTORIES, JACQUELINE SHEA MURPHY (2007) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 320 pp., ISBN: 9780816647750, p/bk, $25
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