Tag: dance

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2012 Abstracts Stage 3

The Power of Dance: what are We Engaged in When We Dance and What Does This Mean When the Autistic Child Dances Both Individually and Alongside Others?

CONCEPT: How dance can affect the autistic child’s sense of self, and whether this is more beneficial in a segregated or integrated setting

PHILOSOPHY: Sparshott’s A Measured Pace: Toward a Philosophical Understanding of the Arts of Dance, supported by such thinkers as Havelock Ellis and criticised by Graham McFee

SOURCES: interviews with teachers, factual research on Autism, case studies on dance for Autistic children, secondary texts on dance such as Thomas’ Dance, Modernity and Culture, and secondary texts on special needs children and the arts such as Roberts’ Encouraging Expression: The Arts in the Primary Curriculum.

Thesis: As an individual experience, dance can be the most direct way for the autistic child to access the self; giving way to more stable connections with the world and others.

The most central emotion for an autistic child is fear. The autistic child’s communication difficulties and confused concept of self means fear is associated with situations where the child has to apply the self to the world and to others.

Sparshott’s philosophy of dance argues when dance is done for its own sake, the individual is ‘self-transformed’ into the dancing body.

The most powerful and significant outcome of dance as an individual experience for the autistic child, above all the other arts, seems to be the potential it has to unlock something within their mind. As Sparshott says, it is in the immediacy of dance that engages the individual in a self-transforming experience where the self is in absolute connection with the body.

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2008 Abstracts Stage 2

The Transforming Role of Dance

Having danced for 15 years before coming to University I wanted to grasp the opportunity to study dance in a different light with both hands. In this project I got the chance to explore dance in its different forms at different points throughout history. Tribal and ritual dance, dance in ancient Greece, Folk dance, Ballet dance, Ballroom, Modern and Contemporary Dance. Each dance form has played a different social role and has contributed to individuals’ lives: ritual dance attempted to bring about results when there was nothing else a community had the power to do, Folk dance brought the community together. Dance also has a role as an art form and as a means of expression, it can also provide structure and discipline through tuition or become a means of channelling emotion or aggression or even be an escape from the world. I wanted to explore this changing role of dance throughout time and within varying cultures and societies. Why is there no fixed role for dance? I wanted to look at how dance’s role alters depending on the historical or social context. Do we take from dance what we need from it at that particular time and place in history? Did we turn to dance rituals because we had no other answers? Did we use freer more provocative dance as an outward expression of women’s liberation? Is the discipline in dance tuition useful now to focus our young generation that seems to have gone off the rails? Is it necessary now as a creative outlet in a society obsessed with standardisation? It seems that we cannot escape dance, it has existed in varying forms throughout most of history and I believe it always will do. Dance can transform to suit whatever our culture or society needs from it and it can also transform us. This is part of the beauty of dance; it is a tool for us as individuals and as a society. Philosophical Sources: Nietzsche on Art; Helen Thomas’s Sociology of Dance; Peter Brinson’s Dance as Education, Towards a National Dance Culture; Susan Leigh Foster; Francis Sparshott.

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2004 Abstracts Stage 2

The Evolution of Dance

Objectives 1. To explore how styles of dance have progressed from rudimentary stamping and clapping to intricate and complex steps considering the evolution of the language of dance and the crossing of boundaries between styles and moves, and a progression from freestyle, expressive dance to more formal, conceptual dance such as Ballet, then the application of forms to again, more freestyle, expressive dance. 2.How dance’s role in expressing religious, ethnic, and aesthetic paradigms throughout the history of our civilisation has evolved, and how the development of technology and communication has allowed a new level of interaction and sharing of knowledge, enabling avante garde dance forms to spread beyond their cultural boundaries through the sharing of abstract knowledge. 3. To explore dance as a cathartic and expressive means and the relation humans have to visual expression throughout the ages, breakdown of dualistic mentality allows bridge between mind and matter to be crossed, where both abstract ideas and subjective emotions can be expressed in movement. Look secondarily at physical comedians, mime-artists, free-running, how objects can be implied and their very nature changed by miming a door or turning a city into your playground. The meaning of expression and movement in the arts. 4. To explore the places associated with the dance: theatres, clubs, music videos, streets, studios and all-important practice spots, exploring the connections these places have to the dancer and the origins of the dance, i.e. Ballet in the theatre, Breaking in the streets. To create a video with philosophical commentary juxtaposing different styles and areas. Field / territory Contemporary Dance forms, performance and practice locations. Key Concepts To what extent conditions and paradigms mould the form of a dance, the age of expression, how popular dance forms are an expression of the times, the commercialisation of dance forms Sources Expression and Movement in the Arts, David Best, America Dancing, John Martin; The Male Dancer, Bodies, Spectacles, Sexualities, Ramsay Burt, Understanding Dance, Graham Mcfee, A Short History of Classical Theatrical Dancing, Lincoln Kirstein, Web based articles and downloadable clips, Videos, Style Wars DVD, The Freshest Kids DVD, Interviews of dancers, choreographers and spectators, BBC1 Documentary.