Description
Book SynopsisThis is a collection of works by internationally recognized women leading the field of dance research and spirituality across the globe. Building on current soulful research scholarship in the discipline, these authors offer extensive and detailed research into spirituality, dance, gender, religion, somatics and women-centred dance research. Written by women dance scholars in higher education, this evocative and illuminating work highlights a growing discourse on gendered leadership in dance research. Spiritual Herstories provides new pathways and innovative research methods that respond to the educational needs of women emerging in male-centric socio-historic research traditions.
Trade Review'This is an important publication for advancing research in dance and reinforcing the scholarly lens, giving voice to the body, mind, and soul as partners in exploration. The preface, “Dancing Incantations” by Celeste Snowber, beautifully sets up the reader’s adventure: “Be prepared to let this anthology sit with you for a long time. Each chapter stands alone in its beauty, depth and breadth of knowledge; it is truly a transdisciplinary conversation, which draws you back over and over again to nourish your whole being” (ix).'
-- Adrienne M. Wilson, Journal of Dance Education
'[The] many facets of this transdisciplinary and intersectional collection are also marked by a great variety of perspectives and backgrounds of the authors, which allows this volume to become a celebration of diversity and interdisciplinarity. As such, Spiritual Herstories offers a kaleidoscope of experiences that shed light on embodied understandings and sensuous research whilst illuminating both academic insights and ‘bodysights’.
This book speaks to calls for writing differently and the writing of narratives centred around the body to explore the ‘bodiliness’ and emotions of academic work and writing (Essén and Värlander, 2012). This type of writing renders embodied research a feminist project in its explorations against the grain of masculine hegemonic practices in academic scholarship (Boncori and Smith, 2019). [...] These contributions, pollinated by photographs and changes to the text in terms of form, register and tone, are joyful and inspiring, even when addressing marginalisation and limits imposed by patriarchal structures. The reader is ‘moved’ both through an intellectual dance across interdisciplinary perspectives, and via narratives that value affect, embodiment and personal herstories. The narratives, experiments and explorations presented in the chapters are an invitation to seek embodiment and spirituality away from distinctions between psyche and soma, in an attempt to free creativity, knowledge and the sense from unnecessary inhibitions. More importantly, this edited book advocates the importance of daring to step away from traditional ‘scientific’ research in pursue of scholarship that highlights the value and centrality of affect, intuition, embodiment and spirituality in the processes of research development and knowledge creation.'
-- Ilaria Boncori, Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion
Table of ContentsPreface: Dancing Incantations – Celeste Snowber
Introduction – Amanda Williamson and Barbara Sellers-Young
Part One: Patriarchal Critique and Spiritual Feminist Perspectives – Amanda Williamson
1: Woman, body, earth and spirit – Linda Hartley
2: Informed by the Goddess – Jane Bacon
3: Until The Lions – Jayne Stevens
4: Symbols of the Goddess in Balkan Women’s Dance – Laura Shannon
5: Spirals and circles – Amanda Williamson
6: Soul loss and retrieval – Eline Kieft
7: Reclaiming our innate vitality – Caroline Frizell
Part Two: Somatic Ethnography, Diasporic Spiritualities and Postcolonial Voices – Barbara Sellers-Young
8: Dancing bodies and ritual spaces – Yvonne Daniel
9: ‘Niimikaage’ into the twenty-first century – Sandra Laronde and Elaine Keillor
10: Unearthing the presence of African women dancers in Nyanza province, 1900–40 – Seonagh Kummer
11: Love Poems to God – Veta Goler
12: Dancing the Four Directions – Rosalie Jones
13: Souls, soil and soma – Ojeya Cruz Banks and Miriam Marler
14: Dancing through myself – Barbara Sellers-Young
Part Three: Spiritual Journeys in Dance Research – Amanda Williamson and Barbara Sellers-Young
15: Writing Why We Dance – Kimerer L. LaMothe
16: Mystery, magic and the mundane – Celeste Snowber
17: Creativity as medicine – Janet Lynn Roseman
18: Dancing evolutionary spirituality – Cheryl Pallant
19: Attunement and evanescence – Sondra Fraleigh
20: Awakening the spirit through dance, somatics and Scaravelli Yoga – Sara Reed
21: Spirituality in Aurelia Baumgartner’s Tanzphilosophie – Aurelia Baumgartner and Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe
