Making Meaning of Repetitious Movement Patterns: A Heuristic Inquiry

The purpose of this research study was to explore how I, an emerging dance/movement therapist, understand and embody my own and my clients’ repetitious movement patterns. Through a heuristic inquiry, I explored how my body knowledge/body prejudice informs my observations and assessments of repetitious movement patterns exhibited in others. I also investigated how I may use my findings to create unbiased dance/movement therapy interventions. I collected data in the form of journal responses following individual dance/movement therapy sessions where I observed repetitious movements in children at my internship site, a medical unit at a children’s hospital. Secondly, I collected movement data in the form of video recordings of improvisational movement that explored my repetitious movement pattern preferences. To aid me in this data collection process, I requested the support of a certified movement analyst who served as a movement collaborator. Lastly, I collected art data, created through repetitive motions of the hands, wrists, and arms, in response to my kinesthetic experience of repetitious movement patterns. To analyze the data, I utilized Forinash’s qualitative data analysis on each set of data separately. A resonance panel served as a source of validation by acting as consultants to help me clarify my preliminary findings. The research findings indicate that repetitious movement patterns exist in everybody, and body knowledge/body prejudice plays a role in one’s observations, assessments, meaning making of repetitious movement patterns, and development of interventions. Acknowledging this broader prevalence of repetitious movement patterns, the research shows that increasing awareness of one’s own body knowledge of repetitious movement patterns helps mitigate body prejudice. Through the analysis, I discovered personal propensities toward inner-outer awareness, stabilize to mobilize, flow, growing and shrinking, space and cognition, and time and intuition. 109 pages

Maine Dance Curriculum Guide

Maine Dance Curriculum Guide by Dance Education in Maine Schools Department of Education, Augusta, Maine 1994. Contents: Message from the Commissioner / Forward / Acknowledgements / Preface - Maine Dance Heritage / Introduction / Pedagogy / Students with Special Needs / Major Premises / Evaluation / Scope and Sequence / App.A: Glossary of Terms / App.B: How to Establish Your School Dance Program / App.C: Complimentary Movement Disciplines / App.D.: Resource List / App.E.: Dance Education in Maine Schoolshttps://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/me_collection/1056/thumbnail.jp

Signs of Morality in David Bowie's "Black Star" Video Clip

“Black Star” music video was released two days before Bowie’s death. It bears various implications of dying and the notion of mortality is both literal and metaphorical. It is highly autobiographical and serves as a theatrical stage for Bowie to act both as a music performer and as a self-conscious human being. In this paper, we discuss the signs of mortality in Bowie’s “Black Star” music video-clip. We focus on video’s cinematic techniques and codes, on its motivic elements and on its narrative in relation with music, lyrics, characters, and gestures. We also discuss the video’s intertextual references and the broader signification of the black star figure. We adopt a quasi-semiotic approach considering “Black Star” music video-clip as a text which can be investigated through its signs, codes, and conventions of the musical, visual, and cinematic languages as well. Our interdisciplinary tools derive from visual semiotics and audiovisual analysis models, without leaving outside Bowie’s musical-artistic and personal history. As it turns out, Bowie created a video clip that is philosophical in nature and poetic in structure, preserving the role of protagonist. With the visuals creating a psychedelic atmosphere, the lyrics often are heard as a personal confession. They both generate cognitive and emotional responses that influence the way the viewers-listeners may experience, decompose, and interpret Bowie’s artistic endeavor bridging life and death

Electronic Dance Music in Narrative Film

As a growing number of filmmakers are moving away from the traditional model of orchestral underscoring in favor of a more contemporary approach to film sound, electronic dance music (EDM) is playing an increasingly important role in current soundtrack practice. With a focus on two specific examples, Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998) and Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (1998), this essay discusses the possibilities that such a distinctive aesthetics brings to filmmaking, especially with regard to audiovisual rhythm and sonic integration

Finding the Rhythm in Dance/Movement Therapy: The Use of Tap Dance in Residential Treatment

This thesis project was inspired by this researcher’s passion and interest in rhythm and more specifically tap dance. There is currently no literature on the use of tap dance in dance/movement therapy. The project was guided by the research question: How can tap dance be used as a dance/movement therapy (DMT) technique? By combining tap dance and dance/movement therapy the purpose of this thesis is to provide the DMT community (clients and dance therapists) with more knowledge and tools to use for facilitation and to further deepen the process in DMT sessions. The research will be presented in a clinical case study, with data collected from 10 weeks of sessions with two participants. The data takes the form of clinical notes and personal journal entries. Results show that the tap dance based DMT group helped to create group cohesion, a strong therapeutic relationship between therapist and clients, courage and self-expression. The clinical work was presented in a tap dance performance at an annual residential talent showcase

The artistic infant directed performance: a mycroanalysis of the adult’s movements and sounds

Intersubjectivity experiences established between adults and infants are partially determined by the particular ways in which adults are active in front of babies. An important amount of research focuses on the “musicality” of infant-directed speech (defined melodic contours, tonal and rhythm variations, etc.) and its role in linguistic enculturation. However, researchers have recently suggested that adults also bring a multimodal performance to infants. According to this, some scholars seem to find indicators of the genesis of the performing arts (mainly music and dance) in such a multimodal stimulation. We analyze the adult performance using analytical categories and methodologies of analysis broadly validated in the fields of music performance and movement analysis in contemporary dance. We present microanalyses of an adult-7 month old infant interaction scene that evidenced structural aspects of infant directed multimodal performance compatible with music and dance structures, and suggest functions of adult performance similar to performing arts functions or related to them.Facultad de Arte

Time as a strand of the dance medium

Time and space are at the core of our aesthetic experiences of dance performances, yet dance has been frequently categorised as a space-based art. In this paper I revise the choreological perspective developed by Preston-Dunlop and Sánchez-Colberg that conceives dance as an embodied performative art articulated in a multistranded medium (performer, movement, sound, space). I argue that time should be allowed a distinct place in the choreological discourse since its presence is key to the expressivity of a dance piece. I conceptualise the meaning of the time strand and expose how different substrands emerge, connect with others and become expressive in dance performances. My investigation considers in particular the aesthetics of time in live performances in the theatre compared to dances created for the camera, focusing specifically on instances of contemporary transpositions from one context to the other

Embodied listening and the music of Sigur Ros

In 1990 Susan McClary and Robert Walser appealed for a musicology which could account for the effects of rock, or as they put it: ‘a greater willingness to try to circumscribe an effect metaphorically, to bring one’s own experience as a human being to bear in unpacking musical gestures, to try to parallel in words something of how the music feels’ (McClary and Walser 1990, 288-9). McClary and Walser were arguing for attempts to validate ‘physically and emotionally oriented responses to music’ (287), which they saw as crucial to any understanding of rock, but uncomfortable modes of response for musicology to deal with. Around the time of the McClary/Walser article, musicologists were questioning the body’s exclusion from discourse, and theorising ways in which it might be better integrated into musicological thought (Leppert 1993, Walser 1991). Since that time much scholarly work has been produced which interrogates the role of the body in musicking, work represented for instance by an examination of the idea of gesture (Gritten and King 2006, Davidson 1993). The bodies under examination in this discourse have been those of performers, but increasing attention is being focused on how performers experience the production of music. Fred Everett Maus has recently termed this approach an ‘analytical somaesthetics’, following Richard Shusterman (Maus 2010). This article uses facets of embodiment theory to interrogate the music of Icelandic band Sigur Rós, a group who seem to affect audience and critics alike in a way that is highly unusual for rock music. One of the questions their music poses echoes one that McClary and Walser asked in 1990, namely how we might account for the expressive effect of rock music. I will begin by theorising embodied listening, and accounting for how it might apply to rock music, before presenting readings of two Sigur Rós songs premised on interrogating how the listener is afforded opportunities for embodied participation

Clubbing masculinities: Gender shifts in gay men's dance floor choreographies

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Journal of Homosexuality, 58(5), 608-625, 2011 [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00918369.2011.563660This article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the intersections of gender, sexuality, and dance. It examines the expressions of sexuality among gay males through culturally popular forms of club dancing. Drawing on political and musical history, I outline an account of how gay men's gendered choreographies changed throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Through a notion of “technologies of the body,” I situate these developments in relation to cultural levels of homophobia, exploring how masculine expressions are entangled with and regulated by musical structures. My driving hypothesis is that as perceptions of cultural homophobia decrease, popular choreographies of gay men's dance have become more feminine in expression. Exploring this idea in the context of the first decade of the new millennium, I present a case study of TigerHeat, one of the largest weekly gay dance club events in the United States