Download or read book Geographies of Us written by Sondra Fraleigh and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-13 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Geographies of Us: Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages is the first edited collection in the field of ecosomatics. With a combination of essays and practice pages that provide a variety of scholarly, creative, and experience-based approaches for readers, the book brings together both established and emergent scholars and artists from many diverse backgrounds and covers work rooted in a dozen countries. The essays engage an array of crucial methodologies and critical/theoretical perspectives, including practice-based research in the arts, especially in performance and dance studies, critical theory, ecocriticism, Indigenous knowledges, material feminist critique, quantum field theory, and new phenomenologies. Practice pages are shorter chapters that provide readers a chance to engage creatively with the ideas presented across the collection. This book offers a multidisciplinary perspective that brings together work in performance as research, phenomenology, and dance/movement; this is one of its significant contributions to the area of ecosomatics. The book will be of interest to anyone curious about matters of embodiment, ecology, and the environment, especially artists and students of dance, performance, and somatic movement education who want to learn about ecosomatics and environmental activists who want to learn more about integrating creativity, the arts, and movement into their work.
Download or read book Land to Water Yoga written by Sondra Fraleigh and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2009-03-05 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn the five steps of land to water yoga: Standing and walking Kneeling and crawling Sitting Front lying Side lying and back floating While spending two months meditating and practicing yoga in silence at Sri Aurobindos first ashram in Baroda India, Sondra Fraleigh received her first inspirations about yoga based upon infant movement development and somatic principles. She consciously utilized this element in her creative use of yogabridging it with somatic movement education and intrinsic dancing. This unique new form of yogaLand to Water Yogamaintains yogas original intent of spiritual healing and awareness and offers a way to deepen clear seeing and a calm mind, urging one past his or her limited ego. It is based on five stages of infant development and the methods of Shin Somatics Moving Way. Its progression moves backward from the most complex movement in terms of balance to the least: from walking to floating (from land to water), providing the opportunity to retrace our personal human development back to its watery soma source. Progressing through these five primary stages may elicit surprising infant and childhood memories, which can heal trauma when one lets go of buried feelings. Peeling away social constructions via this innovative form of yoga, one can learn through curiosity and build skill with ease.
Download or read book Experimental Dance and the Somatics of Language written by Megan V. Nicely and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-11-13 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about dance’s relationship to language. It investigates how dance bodies work with the micromovements elicited by language’s affective forces, and the micropolitics of the thought-sensations that arise when movement and words accompany one another within choreographic contexts. Situating itself where theory meets practice—the zone where ideas arise to be tested, the book draws on embodied research in practices within the lineages of American postmodern dance and Japanese butoh, set in dialog with affect-based philosophies and somatics. Understanding that language is felt, both when uttered and when unspoken, this book speaks to the choreographic thinking that takes place when language is considered a primary element in creating the sensorium.
Download or read book The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training written by Doran George and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-10-19 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Doran George's The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training examines the development of Somatics as it has been adopted by successive generations of practitioners since its early beginnings in the 1950s. The study elucidates the ways that Somatics has engaged globally with some of the various locales in which it was developed and practiced, both in terms of its relationships to other dance training programs in that region and to larger aesthetic and political values. The book thereby offers a cogent analysis of how training regimens can inculcate an embodied politics as they guide and shape the experience of bodily sensation, construct forms of reflexive evaluation of bodily action, and summon bodies into relationship with one another. Throughout it focuses on how the notion of a natural body was implemented and developed in Somatics' pedagogy"--
Download or read book Ethical Agility in Dance written by Noyale Colin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-13 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection examines the potential of dance training for developing socially engaged individuals capable of forging ethical human relations for an ever-changing world and in turn frames dance as a fundamental part of human experience. This volume draws together a range of critical voices to reflect the inclusive potential of dance. The contributions offer perspectives on contemporary dance training in Britain from dance educators, scholars, practitioners and artists. Through examining the politics, values and ethics of learning dance today, this book argues for the need of a re-assessment of the evolving practices in dance training and techniques. Key questions address how the concept of ‘technique’ and associated systems of training in dance could be redefined to enable the collaboration of skills and application of ideas necessary to twenty-first-century dance. The editors present these ideas in different modes of writing. This collection of essays, conversations and manifestos offers a way to explore, debate and grasp the shifting values of contemporary dance. Examining these values in the applied field of dance reveals a complex and contrasting range of ideas, encompassing broad themes including the relationships between individuality and collectivity, rigour and creativity, and virtuosity and inclusivity. This volume points to ethical techniques as providing a way of navigating these contrasting values in dance. It serves as an invaluable resource for academics as well as practitioners and students.
Download or read book If the Body Politic Could Breathe in the Age of the Refugee written by Julia Metzger-Traber and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book posits that the ‘refugee crisis’ may actually be a crisis of identity in a rapidly changing world. It argues that Western conceptions of the individual ‘Self’ shape metaphors of political homes, and thus the geopolitics of belonging and exclusion. Metzger-Traber creatively re-conceives political belonging by perceiving the interconnection of each ‘Self’ through its most immediate home – the breathing body. On an experimental literary journey through her own past and that of Germany, she puts political philosophy in conversation with somatic and spiritual insight to expand notions of ‘Self’ and 'Home'. Then she asks: What ethical imperatives arise? What kinds of homes and homelands would we create if we no longer thought we ended at our skin?
Download or read book Moving Consciously written by Sondra Fraleigh and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2015-07-30 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The popularity of yoga and Zen meditation has heightened awareness of somatic practices. Individuals develop the conscious embodiment central to somatics work via movement and dance, or through touch from a skilled teacher or therapist often called a somatic bodyworker. Methods of touch and movement foster generative processes of consciousness in order to create a fluid interconnection between sensation, thought, movement, and expression. In Moving Consciously , Sondra Fraleigh gathers essays that probe ideas surrounding embodied knowledge and the conscious embodiment of movement and dance. Using a variety of perspectives on movement and dance somatics, Fraleigh and other contributors draw on scholarship and personal practice to participate in a multifaceted investigation of a thriving worldwide phenomenon. Their goal: to present the mental and physical health benefits of experiencing one's inner world through sensory awareness and movement integration. A stimulating addition to a burgeoning field, Moving Consciously incorporates concepts from East and West into a timely look at life-changing, intertwined practices that involve dance, movement, performance studies, and education. Contributors: Richard Biehl, Robert Bingham, Hillel Braude, Alison East, Sondra Fraleigh, Kelly Ferris Lester, Karin Rugman, Catherine Schaeffer, Jeanne Schul, and Ruth Way.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance written by Vida L. Midgelow and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 833 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the dance floor of a tango club to group therapy classes, from ballet to community theatre, improvised dance is everywhere. For some dance artists, improvisation is one of many approaches within the choreographic process. For others, it is a performance form in its own right. And while it has long been practiced, it is only within the last twenty years that dance improvisation has become a topic of critical inquiry. With The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance, dancer, teacher, and editor Vida L. Midgelow provides a cutting-edge volume on dance improvisation in all its facets. Expanding beyond conventional dance frameworks, this handbook looks at the ways that dance improvisation practices reflect our ability to adapt, communicate, and respond to our environment. Throughout the handbook, case studies from a variety of disciplines showcase the role of individual agency and collective relationships in improvisation, not just to dancers but to people of all backgrounds and abilities. In doing so, chapters celebrate all forms of improvisation, and unravel the ways that this kind of movement informs understandings of history, socio-cultural conditions, lived experience, cognition, and technologies.
Download or read book Steps to an Ecology of Mind written by Gregory Bateson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. This classic anthology of his major work includes a new Foreword by his daughter, Mary Katherine Bateson. 5 line drawings.
Download or read book Somatic Psychology written by Linda Hartley and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2004-08-13 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings attention to the interface of psychotherapy and psychological theory with the somatic practices of bodywork and movement therapy. To offer a client only psychotherapy, or only bodywork may subtly or directly reinforce the body-mind split from which so many of us suffer; in some cases this will be a reinforcement of a dilemma central to the client's problems. Hartley views body psychotherapy and transpersonal psychotherapy as building bridges between the once separated processes of psyche, soma, and spirit. Today the emerging field of somatic psychology is also contributing to the expanded field of psychology a subtle differentiation of bodymind process, developed through almost a century and a half of research and practice in somatic therapy and education. Originally trained as a dancer, movement therapist and bodywork practitioner, Hartley continues to use movement and somatic process as an important foundation for her own work. Training in Dance Movement Therapy, the transpersonal psychotherapy of Psychosynthesis, and Process-Oriented Psychology have further deepened Hartley's awareness of the relationships between psyche, soma and spirit, and the need to respond to all levels of experience in therapeutic work.
Download or read book Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo written by Sondra Fraleigh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-11-22 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of the "Routledge Performance Practitioners" series, this book deals with the contribution of two of modern theatre's most charismatic innovators. Including a glossary of English and Japanese terms, it presents an account of the founding of Japanese butoh through the partnership of Hijikata and Ohno.
Download or read book Dance and the Lived Body written by Sondra Horton Fraleigh and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 1996-05-15 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her remarkable book, Sondra Horton Fraleigh examines and describes dance through her consciousness of dance as an art, through the experience of dancing, and through the existential and phenomenological literature on the lived body. She describes, with performance photographs, specific imagery in dance masterworks by Doris Humphrey, Anna Sokolow, Viola Farber, Nina Weiner, and Garth Fagan.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater written by Nadine George-Graves and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-13 with total page 1057 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater collects a critical mass of border-crossing scholarship on the intersections of dance and theatre. Taking corporeality as an idea that unites the work of dance and theater scholars and artists, and embodiment as a negotiation of power dynamics with important stakes, these essays focus on the politics and poetics of the moving body in performance both on and off stage. Contemporary stage performances have sparked global interest in new experiments between dance and theater, and this volume situates this interest in its historical context by extensively investigating other such moments: from pagan mimes of late antiquity to early modern archives to Bolshevik Russia to post-Sandinista Nicaragua to Chinese opera on the international stage, to contemporary flash mobs and television dance contests. Ideologically, the essays investigate critical race theory, affect theory, cognitive science, historiography, dance dramaturgy, spatiality, gender, somatics, ritual, and biopolitics among other modes of inquiry. In terms of aesthetics, they examine many genres such as musical theater, contemporary dance, improvisation, experimental theater, television, African total theater, modern dance, new Indian dance theater aesthetics, philanthroproductions, Butoh, carnival, equestrian performance, tanztheater, Korean Talchum, Nazi Movement Choirs, Lindy Hop, Bomba, Caroline Masques, political demonstrations, and Hip Hop. The volume includes innovative essays from both young and seasoned scholars and scholar/practitioners who are working at the cutting edges of their fields. The handbook brings together essays that offer new insight into well-studied areas, challenge current knowledge, attend to neglected practices or moments in time, and that identify emergent themes. The overall result is a better understanding of the roles of dance and theater in the performative production of meaning.
Download or read book Butoh written by Sondra Fraleigh and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-09-09 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Both a refraction of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a protest against Western values, butoh is a form of Japanese dance theater that emerged in the aftermath of World War II. Sondra Fraleigh chronicles the growth of this provocative art form from its midcentury founding under a sign of darkness to its assimilation in the twenty-first century as a poignant performance medium with philosophical and political implications. Employing intellectual and aesthetic perspectives to reveal the origins, major figures, and international development of the dance, Fraleigh documents the range and variety of butoh artists around the world with first-hand knowledge of butoh performances from 1973 to 2008. Her definitions of butoh's morphology, alchemy, and philosophy set a theoretical framework for poetic and engaging articulations of twenty butoh performances in Japan, Europe, India, and the West. With a blend of scholarly research and direct experience, she also signifies the unfinished nature of butoh and emphasizes its capacity to effect spiritual transformation and bridge cultural differences."--Publisher.
Download or read book Dancing Identity written by Sondra Horton Fraleigh and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2004-10-31 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining critical analysis with personal history and poetry, Dancing Identity presents a series of interconnected essays composed over a period of fifteen years. Taken as a whole, these meditative reflections on memory and on the ways we perceive and construct our lives represent Sondra Fraleigh's journey toward self-definition as informed by art, ritual, feminism, phenomenology, poetry, autobiography, and-always-dance. Fraleigh's brilliantly inventive fusions of philosophy and movement clarify often complex philosophical issues and apply them to dance history and aesthetics. She illustrates her discussions with photographs, dance descriptions, and stories from her own past in order to bridge dance with everyday movement. Seeking to recombine the fractured and bifurcated conceptions of the body and of the senses that dominate much Western discourse, she reveals how metaphysical concepts are embodied and presented in dance, both on stage and in therapeutic settings. Examining the role of movement in personal and political experiences, Fraleigh reflects on her major influences, including Moshe Feldenkrais, Kazuo Ohno, and Twyla Tharp. She draws on such varied sources as philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Martin Heidegger, the German expressionist dancer Mary Wigman, Japanese Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata, Hitler, the Bomb, Miss America, Balanchine, and the goddess figure of ancient cultures. Dancing Identity offers new insights into modern life and its reconfigurations in postmodern dance.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Wellbeing written by Vassiliki Karkou and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 1009 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, a growth in dance and wellbeing scholarship has resulted in new ways of thinking that place the body, movement, and dance in a central place with renewed significance for wellbeing. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Wellbeing examines dance and related movement practices fromthe perspectives of neuroscience and health, community and education, and psychology and sociology to contribute towards an understanding of wellbeing, offer new insights into existing practices, and create a space where sufficient exchange is enabled. The handbook's research components includequantitative, qualitative, and arts-based research, covering diverse discourses, methodologies, and perspectives that add to the development of a complete picture of the topic. Throughout the handbook's wide-ranging chapters, the objective observations, felt experiences, and artistic explorations ofpractitioners interact with and are printed alongside academic chapters to establish an egalitarian and impactful exchange of ideas.
Download or read book Improvised Dance written by Nalina Wait and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-04-14 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book elucidates the technical aspects of improvised dance performance and reframes the notion of labour in the practice from one that is either based on compositionally formal logic or a mysterious impulse, to one that addresses the (in)corporeal dimensions of practice. Mobilising the languages and conceptual frameworks of theories of affect, embodied cognition, somatics, and dance, this book illustrates the work of specialist improvisers who occupy divergent positions within the complex field of improvised dance. It offers an alternative narrative of the history and current practice of Western improvised dance centred on the epistemology of its (in)corporeal knowledges, which are elusive yet vital to the refinement of expertise. Written for both a disciplinary-specific and interdisciplinary audience, this book will interest dance scholars, students, and practising artists.
