Circle Dancing

A description of every aspect of the Sacred/Circle dance movement.

The essays in this dynamic compilation are a testament to dance as a healing art. Widely interdisciplinary in nature and written by women dancers from around the world, they illustrate a rich array of dance practices, cultures, and disciplines and show how this expressive therapy can be both empowering and exhilarating. The women’s narratives all share a deep appreciation for the connection between mental, spiritual, and physical dimensions, offering dance as a transformative power of renewing and rebuilding that bond. Both personal and professional, the stories weave a vivid tapestry of lived experiences and insights, balance, and a community healed by dance.

As the nomadic hunters and gatherers of the ancient Near East turned to agriculture for their livelihood and settled into villages, religious ceremonies involving dancing became their primary means for bonding individuals into communities and households into villages. So important was dance that scenes of dancing are among the oldest and most persistent themes in Near Eastern prehistoric art, and these depictions of dance accompanied the spread of agriculture into surrounding regions of Europe and Africa. In this pathfinding book, Yosef Garfinkel analyzes depictions of dancing found on archaeological objects from the Near East, southeastern Europe, and Egypt to offer the first comprehensive look at the role of dance in these Neolithic (7000-4000 BC) societies. In the first part of the book, Garfinkel examines the structure of dance, its functional roles in the community (with comparisons to dance in modern pre-state societies), and its cognitive, or symbolic, aspects. This analysis leads him to assert that scenes of dancing depict real community rituals linked to the agricultural cycle and that dance was essential for maintaining these calendrical rituals and passing them on to succeeding generations. In the concluding section of the book, Garfinkel presents and discusses the extensive archaeological data—some 400 depictions of dance—on which his study is based.

Concentrating on the Caribbean Basin and the coastal area of northeast South America, Yvonne Daniel considers three African-derived religious systems that rely heavily on dance behavior--Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahamian Candomblé. Combining her background in dance and anthropology to parallel the participant/scholar dichotomy inherent to dancing's "embodied knowledge," Daniel examines these misunderstood and oppressed performative dances in terms of physiology, psychology, philosophy, mathematics, ethics, and aesthetics. "Dancing Wisdom offers the rare opportunity to see into the world of mystical spiritual belief as articulated and manifested in ritual by dance. Whether it is a Cuban Yoruba dance ritual, slave Ring Shout or contemporary Pentecostal Holy Ghost possession dancing shout, we are able to understand the relationship with spirit through dancing with the Divine. Yvonne Daniel's work synthesizes the cognitive empirical objectivity of an anthropologist with the passionate storytelling of a poetic artist in articulating how dance becomes prayer in ritual for Africans of the Diaspora." --Leon T. Burrows, Protestant Chaplain, Smith College'

As the global vicissitudes of migration unfold so does ethnic difference in the classroom, and this book offers a timely examination of teaching about culturally different dances. At a time when the world of dance is, on the one hand, seemingly becoming more like fusion cookery there is another faction promoting isolation and preservation of tradition. How, if at all, may these two worlds co-exist in dance education? Understanding teaching about culturally different dances from postmodern, postcolonial, pluralist and critical perspectives creates an urgent demand to develop relevant pedagogy in dance education. What is required to support dance educators into the next phase of dance education, so as to avoid teaching from within a Eurocentric, creative dance model alone? An ethnographic investigation with teachers in New Zealand lays a foundation for the examination of issues, challenges and opportunities associated with teaching about culturally different dances. Concerns and issues surrounding notions of tradition, innovation, appropriation, interculturalism, social justice and critical pedagogy emerge. Engaging with both practice and theory is a priority in this book, and a nexus model, in which the theoretical fields of critical cultural theory, semiotics, ethnography and anthropology can be activated as teachers teach, is proposed as informing approaches to teaching about culturally different dances. Even though some practical suggestions for teaching are presented, the main concern is to motivate further thinking and research into teaching about dancing with cultural difference. Cover photo: Photo credit: lester de Vere photography ltd. Dancing with Difference (2009). Directed and co-choreographed for AUT University Bachelor of Dance by Linda Ashley with Jonelle Kawana, Yoon-jee Lee, Keneti Muaiava, Aya Nakamura, Siauala Nili, Valance Smith, Sakura Stirling and dancers. Won first prize in the 2009, Viva Eclectika, Aotearoa’s Intercultural Dance and Music Biennial Challenge run by NZ-Asia Association Inc NZ and the NZ Diversity Action Programme.

Dances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can attest. The popularity of social dance transcends class, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture, dance offers crucial insights into debates about emancipation and acculturation. While traditional Jewish law prohibits men and women from dancing together, Jewish mixed-sex dancing was understood as the very sign of modernity––and the ultimate boundary transgression. Writers of modern Jewish literature deployed dance scenes as a charged and complex arena for understanding the limits of acculturation, the dangers of ethnic mixing, and the implications of shifting gender norms and marriage patterns, while simultaneously entertaining their readers. In this pioneering study, Sonia Gollance examines the specific literary qualities of dance scenes, while also paying close attention to the broader social implications of Jewish engagement with dance. Combining cultural history with literary analysis and drawing connections to contemporary representations of Jewish social dance, Gollance illustrates how mixed-sex dancing functions as a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions.