Danceplay

The creation of a professional therapist and former dancer, Danceplay brings to parents a new and wonderful way for interacting with their very young children--even before verbal exchange has fully begun. Designed for eighteen-month--to four-year-olds--and their mothers and fathers--it is a stimulating approach to fostering a child's social and intellectual growth through creative physical play. The exercises, based on the insights and knowledge of developmental psychologists, progress from simple movements suitable for the eighteen-month-old, to sequences involving complex ideas and actions for the four-year-old. Levell One begins with stretching adn limbering and gradually moves to an exploration of the body and its parts. In Level Two the child learns to distinguish self from environment through a variety of danceplays. And the focus of Level Three is integration, as games, music, and movement develop the ability to percieve a situation as a complex experience. Touching is emphasized throughout, and the fun and sharing add immeasurably to the everyday interaction between parent and child. Charming line drawings illustrate an easy-to-follow text, and necessary equipment is limited to simple household items. It is difficult to imagine an easier, more pleasurable way to help your child develop as he or she grows.

Investigating children’s learning through dance and drawing-telling, Dance-Play and Drawing-Telling as Semiotic Tools for Young Children’s Learning provides a unique insight into how these activities can help children to critically reflect on their own learning. Promoting the concept of dance and drawing-telling as highly effective semiotic tools for meaning-making, the book enlivens thinking about the extraordinary capacities of young children, and argues for the incorporation of dance and drawing in mainstream early childhood curriculum. Throughout the book, numerous practice examples show how children use movement, sound, images, props and language to imaginatively re-conceptualize their everyday experiences into bodily-kinesthetic and spatial-temporal concepts. These examples illustrate children’s competence when given the opportunity to learn through dance and drawing-telling, as well as the important role that teachers play in scaffolding children’s learning. Based on award-winning research, this insightful and informative book makes a sought after contribution to the field of dance education and seeks to reaffirm dance as a powerful learning modality that supports young children’s expressive non-verbal communication. Encouraging the reader to consider the significance of multi-modal teaching and learning, it is essential reading for researchers in the dance, drawing and education spheres; postgraduate students taking courses in early childhood; play and dance therapists; and all early childhood teachers who have a specific interest in arts education.

The third volume of Dramatherapy: Theory and Practice brings the reader up-to-date with the latest developments in the profession of dramatherapy and tackles key issues in contemporary social relationships. It shows how dramatherapy is evolving its own theory and methodology as well as specific models for supervision and assessment. Dramatherapy is now being used in a broad continuum of care and contributors give many examples of its practice in contexts of prevention, maintenance and cure. * Incorporates method, theoretical concepts and latest research * Covers major new themes of gender, race and politics * 29 international contributors

Drawing on the tools of game design to fix democracy. Anyone who has ever been to a public hearing or community meeting would agree that participatory democracy can be boring. Hours of repetitive presentations, alternatingly alarmist or complacent, for or against, accompanied by constant heckling, often with no clear outcome or decision. Is this the best democracy can offer? In Making Democracy Fun, Josh Lerner offers a novel solution for the sad state of our deliberative democracy: the power of good game design. What if public meetings featured competition and collaboration (such as team challenges), clear rules (presented and modeled in multiple ways), measurable progress (such as scores and levels), and engaging sounds and visuals? These game mechanics would make meetings more effective and more enjoyable—even fun. Lerner reports that institutions as diverse as the United Nations, the U.S. Army, and grassroots community groups are already using games and game-like processes to encourage participation. Drawing on more than a decade of practical experience and extensive research, he explains how games have been integrated into a variety of public programs in North and South America. He offers rich stories of game techniques in action, in children's councils, social service programs, and participatory budgeting and planning. With these real-world examples in mind, Lerner describes five kinds of games and twenty-six game mechanics that are especially relevant for democracy. He finds that when governments and organizations use games and design their programs to be more like games, public participation becomes more attractive, effective, and transparent. Game design can make democracy fun—and make it work.

Throughout history and in contemporary times, people worldwide have danced to cope with the stresses of life. But how has dance helped people resist, reduce, and escape stress? What is it about dance that makes it a healing art? What insights can we gain from learning about others' use of dance across cultures and eras? Dancing for Health addresses these questions and explains the cognitive, emotional and physical dimensions of dance in a spectrum of stress management approaches. Designed for anyone interested in health and healing, Dancing for Health offers lessons learned from the experiences of people of different cultures and historical periods, as well as current knowledge, on how to resist, reduce, and dance away stress in the disquieting times of the 21st century. Anthropologists and psychologists will benefit from the unique theoretical and ethnographic analysis of how dance affects communities and individuals, while dancers and therapists will take away practical lessons on improving their and their patients' quality of life.

This book investigates Yeats's experiments with the media of language and dance in his plays. He was allied to other artists of the 1890s in his fascination with the biblical dancer Salome and in his preoccupation with things Japanese, particularly 'Noh' Theatre with its central dance. The impact of Diaghliev's Ballets Russes also played its part in influencing Yeats's drama, and his interest in the 'dance-as-meaning' debate places him firmly not only in his time but also in our own.

Exploring dance from the rural villages of Africa to the stages of Lincoln Center, Judith Lynne Hanna shows that it is as human to dance as it is to learn, to build, or to fight. Dance is human thought and feeling expressed through the body: it is at once organized physical movement, language, and a system of rules appropriate in different social situations. Hanna offers a theory of dance, drawing on work in anthropology, semiotics, sociology, communications, folklore, political science, religion, and psychology as well as the visual and performing arts. A new preface provides commentary on recent developments in dance research and an updated bibliography.

As arts therapists are increasingly working in schools, there is growing interest in identifying applicable therapeutic approaches and expanding on relevant research evidence. This book outlines the potential uses of music, art, drama and dance movement therapies in educational settings, and the contribution they have to make to the emotional and social development of children and adolescents. Drawing on international evidence, the book outlines a wide range of innovative applications of arts therapies across a range of settings, including mainstream classrooms, special schools and student support units. Examples of subjects covered include solution-focused brief dramatherapy groupwork in mainstream education, art therapy for children with specific learning difficulties who have experienced trauma and music therapy in special education. Particular emphasis is placed upon collaborative work, whether it be between arts therapists from different disciplines, arts therapists and teaching staff or arts therapists and researchers. Arts Therapies in Schools will be of great interest to arts therapists, and will also be useful to others who want to know about the potential of arts therapies in the classroom, including teachers and other education professionals, health professionals, educational psychologists, school counsellors and policy makers.