Dancing Across The Lifespan

This book critically examines matters of age and aging in relation to dance. As a novel collection of diverse authors’ voices, this edited book traverses the human lifespan from early childhood to death as it negotiates a breadth of dance experiences and contexts. The conversations ignited within each chapter invite readers to interrogate current disciplinary attitudes and dominant assumptions and serve as catalysts for changing and evolving long entrenched views among dancers regarding matters of age and aging. The text is organized in three sections, each representing a specific context within which dance exists. Section titles include educational contexts, social and cultural contexts, and artistic contexts. Within these broad categories, each contributor’s milieu of lived experiences illuminate age-related factors and their many intersections. While several contributing authors address and problematize the phenomenon of aging in mid-life and beyond, other authors tackle important issues that impact young dancers and dance professionals.

This book critically examines matters of age and aging in relation to dance. As a novel collection of diverse authors’ voices, this edited book traverses the human lifespan from early childhood to death as it negotiates a breadth of dance experiences and contexts. The conversations ignited within each chapter invite readers to interrogate current disciplinary attitudes and dominant assumptions and serve as catalysts for changing and evolving long entrenched views among dancers regarding matters of age and aging. The text is organized in three sections, each representing a specific context within which dance exists. Section titles include educational contexts, social and cultural contexts, and artistic contexts. Within these broad categories, each contributor’s milieu of lived experiences illuminate age-related factors and their many intersections. While several contributing authors address and problematize the phenomenon of aging in mid-life and beyond, other authors tackle important issues that impact young dancers and dance professionals.

Exercise to Prevent and Manage Chronic Disease Across the Lifespan provides evidence-based insights into the clinical utility of exercise in the management of disease across a broad range of specialties and diseases. The book offers research informed strategies for the integration of exercise into standard practice in fields such as neurology, endocrinology, psychiatry and oncology, as well as decision-making pathways and clinical scenarios to advance patient care. The book is divided by specialty and includes clinical scenarios to allow for the integration of information within practice. The book's synthesized research evidence allows practitioners to safely and effectively begin to capitalize on the benefits of exercise in their patients. Provides broad insights into the evidence-based underpinnings of the use of exercise in a range of common diseases Coverage includes the immune system, musculoskeletal disease, oncology, endocrinology, cardiology, respiratory diseases, and more Includes a glossary, bibliography and summary figures for quick reference of information

Living Mindfully Across the Lifespan: An Intergenerational Guide provides user-friendly, empirically supported information about and answers to some of the most frequently encountered questions and dilemmas of human living, interactions, and emotions. With a mix of empirical data, humor, and personal insight, each chapter introduces the reader to a significant topic or question, including self-worth, anxiety, depression, relationships, personal development, loss, and death. Along with exercises that clients and therapists can use in daily practice, chapters feature personal stories and case studies, interwoven throughout with the authors’ unique intergenerational perspectives. Compassionate, engaging writing is balanced with a straightforward presentation of research data and practical strategies to help address issues via psychological, behavioral, contemplative, and movement-oriented exercises. Readers will learn how to look deeply at themselves and society, and to apply what has been learned over decades of research and clinical experience to enrich their lives and the lives of others.

Dancing Mind, Minding Dance encompasses a collection of pivotal texts published by scholar and researcher Doug Risner, whose work over the past three decades has emphasized the significance of social relevance and personal resonance in dance education. Drawing upon Risner’s breakthrough research and visionary scholarship, the book contextualizes critical issues of dance making in the rehearsal process, dance curriculum and pedagogy in 21st-century postsecondary dance education, the role of dance teaching artists in schools and community environments, and dance, gender, and sexual identity, especially the feminization of dance and the marginalization of males who dance. This book concludes with Risner’s prophetic vision for employing reflective practice in order to address social justice and inclusion and humanizing pedagogies in dance and dance education throughout all sectors of dance training and preparation. Beginning with his first book, Stigma and Perseverance in the Lives of Boys Who Dance (2009), Risner has distinguished himself as the leading education researcher, scholar, and practitioner to improve young dancers’ education and training and in humanistic ways. The book will appeal to dance educators and teachers, dance education scholars and researchers, choreographers, parents and care-givers of dance students, and those who work as teaching artists, arts administrators, private sector dance studio directors and teachers, as well as arts education researchers and scholars broadly. The chapters in this book, except for a few, were originally published in various Taylor & Francis journals.

This book investigates how arts-based research methods can positively influence people’s resilience and well-being, particularly in constraining environments. Using examples from arts-based research methods in different contexts and from across the globe, the book brings together a diverse range of perspectives to understand how both resilience and well-being can be supported in a world that is rarely stress free. Collectively they demonstrate how arts-based research methods can: provide agency through the foregrounding of participants’ voices; afford transformational learning opportunities; create opportunities for relationship building; support creativity and new ways of thinking; generate aspirations and hope; encourage forms of communication that expose ideas, emotions and feelings that previously might not have been known or known how to be expressed; and enhance reflection and reflexivity. The authors explore how art-based practices, such as clowning, collage, dramatisation, drawing, painting, role-play and sculpting, can be used to support the resilience and well-being of individuals and groups across the lifespan, and theorize how arts-based research methods can positively contribute to participants’ positive self-esteem, self-image and ability to cope with challenges and new circumstances. Academics, professional learning facilitators, higher education students, and anyone interested in resilience and well-being in the health and education sectors will find this an interesting and engaging text.

Dancing Motherhood explores how unique factors about the dance profession impact pregnant women and mothers working in it. Ali Duffy introduces the book by laying a foundation of social and cultural histories and systemic structures and power that shape the issues mothers in dance negotiate today. This book then reveals perspectives from mothers in dance working in areas such as performance, choreography, dance education, administration, and advocacy though survey and interview data. Based on participant responses, recommendations for changes in policy, hiring, evaluation, workplace environment, and other professional and personal practices to better support working mothers in dance are highlighted. Finally, essays from eight working mothers in dance offer intimate, personal stories and guidance geared to mothers, future mothers, policymakers, and colleagues and supervisors of mothers in the dance field. By describing lived experiences and offering suggestions for improved working conditions and advocacy, this book initiates expanded discussion about women in dance and promotes change to positively impact dancing mothers, their employers, and the dance field.

This pivot offers an innovative approach to dance education, bringing a creative and inclusive dance education pedagogy into Chinese dance classrooms. Associate Professor Ralph Buck’s experiences of teaching dance at the Beijing Dance Academy and the possible implications for dance education in China lie at the heart of this text. Through a critical examination of personal teaching practice, pedagogical issues, trends and rationales for dance education in the curriculum are highlighted. Informed by constructivist ideals that recognise dialogue and interaction, this pivot suggests that dance can be re-positioned and valued within educational contexts when pedagogical strategies and objectives are framed in terms of teaching and learning in, about and through dance education.