Practicing Dance


Book Description

Within the framework of the research project InnoLernenTanz at the Palucca University of Dance Dresden, in this book Jenny Coogan – professor of contemporary dance at the same institution – offers a forum in which she and guest authors consider questions such as: How are the parameters crucial to the understanding of contemporary dance, such as personal agency, actually embodied? How does the German system of dance education foster such parameters? How can somatic approaches contribute to encouraging dancers to experience their education from a first-person perspective of authority with enhanced self-reliance, self-reflection, and social consciousness? Practicing Dance: A Somatic Orientation includes accounts of field research, essays and interviews, as well as suggestions for studio practice that demonstrate the synergy between contemporary dance and the Feldenkrais Method. The range of perspectives offered invites critical reflection on methods to support young dance artists in embracing the twenty-first century challenges of professional performing careers.




Dancing Age(ing)


Book Description

How can contemporary dance contribute to a critical discourse on age and ageing? Built on the premise that age(ing) is something we practice and perform as individuals and as a society, Susanne Martin asks for and develops strategies that allow dance artists to do age(ing) differently. As a whole, this project is an artistic research inquiry, which draws on and contributes to dance practice. The study develops, discusses, and stages practices and performances of age(ing) that offer alternatives to stereotypical and normative age(ing) narratives, which are not only part of dance but also of everyday culture.




Discovering Dance


Book Description

Discovering Dance, Second Edition, is the premier introductory dance text for high school students. Whether they are new to dance or already have some experience, students will be able to grasp the foundational concepts of dance as they consider where dance movement comes from and why humans are compelled to move, and they will explore movement activities from the perspectives of a dancer, a choreographer, and an observer. The result is a well-rounded educational experience for students to build on, whether they want to further explore performance or choreography or otherwise factor dance into their college or career goals. Specifically designed to meet national and state dance education standards, Discovering Dance offers a ready-to-implement dance curriculum that is foundational and flexible. It fosters students’ discovery of dance through creating, performing, analyzing, understanding, responding to, connecting to, and evaluating dance and dance forms. The book is divided into four parts and 17 chapters. Part I focuses on the foundational concepts of dance and art processes, wellness, safety, dance elements, and composition. Part II delves into dance in society, including historical, social, traditional, and cultural dances. In part III, students explore dance on stage—including ballet, modern dance, jazz dance, tap, and hip-hop—and examine aspects of performance and production. Part IV rounds out the content by preparing students for dance in college or as a career and throughout life. The chapter content helps students discover dance genres; explore each genre through its history, artists, vocabulary, and significant works; apply dance concepts through movement and through written, oral, visual, technology, and multimedia assignments, thus deepening their knowledge and abilities; enhance learning by completing a portfolio assignment and review quiz for each chapter; and gain insight into dance artists, companies, and events through the Did You Know? and Spotlight elements. Learning objectives, vocabulary terms, and an essential question open each chapter. Throughout the chapters are four types of activities: Discover, Explore, Journal, and Research. The activities and assignments meet the needs of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners and help students explore dance through vocabulary, history, culture, creation, performance, and choreography. A comprehensive glossary further facilitates learning. The personal discovery process is greatly aided by technology—including video clips that demonstrate dance genres, forms, styles, and techniques as well as learning experiences that require taking photos and creating time lines, graphs, drawings, diagrams, or soundscapes.




Qaluyaarmiuni Nunamtenek Qanemciput / Our Nelson Island Stories


Book Description

In this volume Nelson Island elders describe hundreds of traditionally important places in the landscape, from camp and village sites to tiny sloughs and deep ocean channels, contextualizing them through stories of how people interacted with them in the past and continue to know them today. The stories both provide a rich, descriptive historical record and detail the ways in which land use has changed over time. Nelson Islanders maintained a strongly Yup'ik worldview and subsistence lifestyle through the 1940s, living in small settlements and moving with the seasonal cycle of plant and animal abundances. The last sixty years have brought dramatic changes, including the concentration of people into five permanent, year-round villages. The elders have mapped significant places to help perpetuate an active relationship between the land and their people, who, despite the immobility of their villages, continue to rely on the fluctuating bounty of the Bering Sea coastal environment.




Ethical Agility in Dance


Book Description

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.




Dance Teaching Methods and Curriculum Design


Book Description

This new edition of Dance Teaching Methods and Curriculum Design is ideal for preparing undergraduate students to teach dance education. Students will learn a conceptual and comprehensive model of dance education that embraces dance as an art form and a lifelong physical activity. Students will gain the tools they need to teach various dance forms, create effective lesson and unit plans, and develop a curriculum that meets arts and education standards. The second edition of this foundational text uses a holistic approach to dance pedagogy for teaching children through adults in school and community environments. It also introduces theories from multiple disciplines and helps students apply those theories and processes when creating lesson and unit plans. New Material Dance Teaching Methods and Curriculum Design offers much new material: Four new sample dance units (up from 10 in the previous edition) Many useful instructor ancillaries, including an instructor guide, a presentation package, and a test package; students can submit their work electronically, and quizzes are automatically graded Resources delivered on HKPropel, including a variety of projects, printable forms, and video clips that demonstrate selected steps, movements, exercises, and combinations of different dance forms Beyond Technique assignments, which have been field tested in university courses, to help students see firsthand what a dance teacher does The sample dance units offer a comprehensive guide for teaching popular dance forms, and they now cover a greater diversity of styles, including hip-hop, Mexican folkloric, African, and line dance. In addition, the new ancillaries offer scope and sequence plans and block time plans for all 14 dance units, as well as all printable forms from the book. Dance Portfolio Another great feature of the book is the dance portfolio that students will create as they work through the text. This portfolio will help them demonstrate their ability to create lesson plans, a unit plan, and a complete dance curriculum. The students will develop these abilities as they complete chapters 1 through 13. Chapter 14 then walks students through assembling the sections of the portfolio. Projects the student can complete to include within their portfolio are available on HKPropel. Step-by-Step Approach Dance Teaching Methods and Curriculum Design offers students a step-by-step course of study for how to teach dance and create sustainable dance programs in schools. The authors synthesize a wide variety of research and resources to support dance pedagogy and curriculum development, provide the infrastructure to meet the changing needs of students to teach dance in the 21st century, and supply extensive references for students to use to increase their dance education knowledge. Book Organization The text is organized into three parts. Part I covers information specific to teaching dance and understanding learners from grades preK through 12. Part II focuses on applying the dance knowledge gained from part I to the teaching and learning process in the four categories of dance forms. In part III, students learn how to develop unit plans and choose a curriculum design for their dance programs. Filling a Void Dance Teaching Methods and Curriculum Design, Second Edition, addresses the knowledge, skills, processes, and content that students need as they prepare to teach dance in various settings. This text fills a void in dance education literature, studying all the steps as it provides students the foundational knowledge and practical know-how they need to confidently begin teaching dance in schools, recreation programs, or private dance studios. Note: A code for accessing HKPropel is not included with this ebook but may be purchased separately.




The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect


Book Description

The study of affect is one of the most exciting and wide-ranging topics to have emerged in the humanities and social sciences in recent years and continues to generate research and debate. It has particularly important implications for the study of gender, as this outstanding handbook amply demonstrates. It is the most comprehensive volume to date, engaging with the intersections between gender and affect studies. A global and interdisciplinary range of contributors articulate the connections (and disconnections) between gender, sexuality, and affect in a range of geographical and historical contexts. Comprising over 40 chapters, the Companion is divided into six parts: Affects of Gender Affective Relations, Relational Affects Affective Practices Representing Affects Geographical and Spatial Affects Affects of History, Histories of Affect Topics examined include intersections between gender and affect over topics including queerness, trans*, feminism, masculinity, race/ethnicity, disability, animality, media, posthumanism, technology, sound, labor, neoliberalism, protest, and temporality. This is an outstanding collection that will be invaluable to scholars and students across a range of disciplines, including gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, literature, media, and sociology.




Dance Leadership


Book Description

This “what is”—rather than “how to”— volume proposes a theoretical framework for understanding dance leadership for dancers, leaders, and students of both domains, illustrated by portraits of leaders in action in India, South Africa, UK, US, Brazil and Canada. What is dance leadership? Who practices it, in what setting, and why? Through performance, choreography, teaching, writing, organizing and directing, the dance leaders portrayed herein instigate change and forward movement. Illustrating all that is unique about leading in dance, and by extension the other arts, readers can engage with such wide-ranging issues as: Does the practice of leading require followers? How does one individual’s dance movement act on others in a group? What does ‘social engagement’ mean for artists? Is the pursuit of art and culture a human right?




Why We Dance


Book Description

Within intellectual paradigms that privilege mind over matter, dance has long appeared as a marginal, derivative, or primitive art. Drawing support from theorists and artists who embrace matter as dynamic and agential, this book offers a visionary definition of dance that illuminates its constitutive work in the ongoing evolution of human persons. Why We Dance introduces a philosophy of bodily becoming that posits bodily movement as the source and telos of human life. Within this philosophy, dance appears as an activity that humans evolved to do as the enabling condition of their best bodily becoming. Weaving theoretical reflection with accounts of lived experience, this book positions dance as a catalyst in the development of human consciousness, compassion, ritual proclivity, and ecological adaptability. Aligning with trends in new materialism, affect theory, and feminist philosophy, as well as advances in dance and religious studies, this work reveals the vital role dance can play in reversing the trajectory of ecological self-destruction along which human civilization is racing.




Everybodys Self Interviews


Book Description

everybodys self interviews is a collection of 20 self interviews in which various contemporary choreographers and performance makers question their own work, offering a wide panorama of the thoughts, questions and practices that are taking place within the performing arts today. everybodys is an artist-initiated open platform created in order to share ideas and strategies that could expand the understanding of performance.It consists of a collection of workshop games, performance scores, texts and performance videos.