Dance, Movement & Spiritualities - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2018

The solo improvisational dances of North Africa and the Middle East became part of popular discourse following Napoleon’s conquering of Egypt. Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and other visual artists painted images depicting the dancers. Gustave Flaubert (1821–80) and others penned narratives of encounters with dancers. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) wrote his play Salome (1893). Sol Bloom created the street scenes of dancers for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Hollywood turned out countless ‘blood, sex and sand films’ by stars such as Rudolph Valentino (1895–1926). These images created in the nineteenth and early twentieth century became fixed in the popular imagination and dictated the conception of the dances of North Africa and the Middle East, and ultimately the ethos of the region itself. This article considers the impact these images have had on what Arjun Appadurai refers to as the social imaginary. By extension, it examines the impact of the imagination created within the vocabulary of the dances on the dialogue between North Africa and the Middle East, and the global community, including those who trace their lineage to this area and those who do not.

Talking to tremors is a brief phenomenology – or study of experience. As an author in the field of phenomenology, I have wondered how its insights might be applied to individualized hands-on somatics practices. The following is the result. It draws upon work I did a few years ago with Alice in which she learns to talk to her tremors, making friends with them and moving past fears. She gave me permission to write about this, and is identified anonymously. I explain our work together through notes I took at the time, which I also discussed with Alice. In application of phenomenology, I contextualize our somatic process using Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogics as a recurring conceptual ground bass. In light of Bakhtin’s work, the present article explores dialogic, extralinguistic states of silence and utterance as stepping-stones towards healing – also employing the neuroscience of Antonio Damasio and Eugene Gendlin’s somatic focusing process – further delineating changes towards feeling better and becoming well. My background as a Feldenkrais and Shin Somatics practitioner aid this study, as also my studies and teaching of dance.

This article explores a performance called Salvation: Shamanic Striptease. It considers how my co-creation of this spiritual–erotic work with white South African performer Daniel P. Cunningham1 has elaborated ‘shamanic striptease’ – an emergent practice through which he seeks to discover movement and vocalization (words and song) that yield deep significance for him (as performer) and for those who witness his performance. This is a process in which somatic and semiotic meaning are negotiated. Inspired by the vision of seminal Polish theatre practitioner Jerzy Grotowski (1933–99), shamanic striptease looks for what might be called naïve expression, that is, a close merging of intention and action that generates a dense performance open to multiple interpretations. Our working process opens up considerations of the relationships between performers’ and audiences’ experiences, the multivalence of identity and searches for the transcendental in a cosmopolitan context of London. Special consideration is given in this essay to how the identity politics of postcolonial white settler culture intersect with queer cisgender expressions of masculinity.

The article looks at dance narratives and the body, investigating the somatic and spiritual practice of Authentic Movement. Be Still and Know: Authentic Movement, Witness, and Testimony considers the movement practice of Authentic Movement as a possible creative source for ‘bodily becoming.’ This article also traces the practice of Authentic Movement, which sits on the intersections of dance and spirituality, from its origins to new applications, and even its application to Body Theology. To view this physical practice as a way of meaning-making in the context of dance knowledge, and as a methodology for analyzing the body, arguably adds new ways of reflecting on biblical knowledge. As a bodily practise, Authentic Movement has the possibility of grounding a reflective theologising through the somatic body. This article uses a phenomenology of testimony as a performative mode of providing both location, context, and proof for the experiences that are documented through Authentic Movement practice. In this article I unfold the term ‘witness’ used prolifically in Authentic Movement in relation to my own religious embodiment growing up in the South as a child of a minister, demonstrating how terminology in Authentic Movement slips its taken-for-granted understandings. Thus, I expand the practice of Authentic Movement beyond its useful application and normative usage.

The act of dance appears as a pattern of conscious movements in space and time, but a dancer who has the ability to go beyond the limits of space and time (experientially) can bring about a non-local experience of oneself and the audience making it an ecstatic communion. In this paper, we are interested in examining the extent of subjective experience of a dancer and his audience; hence, we take up a case study in first-person to understand the performer-audience interaction. For this purpose, we chose Indian contemporary dancer Astad Deboo, an artist who is known to create such a magical two-way interaction consigning his audience as well as himself to a state of being mesmerized. The art of creating a non-local experience seems to be his forte, where the audience can feel him within, while he feels his audience within. To explain this phenomenon, we propose the resonance of inner experiential states of the performer and audience as the underlying mechanism that creates a non-local interaction between them. To validate the present hypothesis, one must subject both the performer and observer to experimental studies, which involve simultaneous tracking and monitoring of the active zones in the brain associated with performing and performance viewing. In the above context, it would also be interesting to see if there exists a point of time during the performance event, where both these subjects report similar active zones in the brain.

Based on an ethnographic case study conducted amidst the Sufi women of the Naqshbandi group in Cape Town South Africa in 2013/14, this article discusses and analyses Sufi women’s verbalized ideas of the embodied ritual practice named hadra. From their experience with the ritual I argue that body and mind can somatically co-habit in a relationship in Sufi religious ritual practice. I challenge Sufi women’s ideas of an ‘outside of the body’ and ‘inside of the body’ experience during the fan’a, or final stage of the ritual. This article argues that when body and mind are connected within ritual praxis, an embodied experience is generated; this holistic experience goes beyond current Sufi theological thinking. This theory is evidenced in my research through an analysis of how dancers make sense of their own body and movement experience.

This article explores the idea of a deeply embodied consciousness during movement, which has become one of the most intensely discussed topics in terms of the phenomenology and spirituality of dance and somatic practices. The strive towards an embodied state of consciousness has been historically present in the context of Zen Buddhist philosophy, wherein true embodiment is considered an enlightened state of being, wherein one’s consciousness transcends the barriers of mind versus body, self versus other and human versus non-human; it is thought that, in this state, we experience a visceral enlightenment towards our inherent connection to (or interrelation with) the spiritual and physical world around us, and that this state is a form of ‘purified’ – or even optimal – being. Phenomenological aspects underpinning this paradigm will be unpacked through representative cases of eastern movement practices whose founding philosophies align with Zen Buddhist thought. Among these movement practices will be Nihon-buyo (Japanese traditional dance), eastern martial arts and Butoh, which all utilize movement as a meditative process towards a state of selfworld transcendence. At the end of the article, the phenomenon of deeply embodied consciousness will be reframed and explained through the lens of neurophenomenology, with the aim of bringing forth the validity and relevance of this phenomenon in the newly emerging scientific research of consciousness and attention.