Spirit of Dance and Christian Spirituality in 21st-century Scotland (original) (raw)

Why Dance? Towards a Theory of Religion as Practice and Performance

Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 2005

This article engages the dancing and writing of the American modern dance pioneer, Isadora Duncan (1877-1927), and the phenomenology of religion and dance authored by the Dutch phenomenologist, theologian, and historian of religion, Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890-1950), in order to argue that "dance" is a valuable resource for developing theories and methods in the study of religion that move beyond belief-centered, text-driven approaches. By setting the work of Duncan and van der Leeuw in the context of the emergence of the field of religious studies, this article not only offers conceptual tools for appreciating dance as a medium of religious experience and expression, it also plots a trajectory for the development of a theory of religion as practice and performance. Such a theory will benefit scholars eager to attend more closely to the role of bodily being in the life of "religion."

Dance in the Christian Traditions

This paper will explore the practice and perspective of dance within the Christian traditions, specifically the emergence of dance as a ritual practice and the conflicting views of dance as sacred or as sinful.

Journal of Contemporary Religion Dancing faith: contemporary Christian dance in Norway

Although dance is a common religious expression, its place in the Christian tradition has been contested. In modern Protestant Norway, dance has mostly been considered irrelevant to church life or even sinful. In recent decades, however, dance has become increasingly common in Norwegian churches. The present analysis of empirical data on dance in Christian settings in contemporary Norway is based on participant observation and interviews. While younger dancers (born after 1990) consider it natural to dance in church, and are usually welcome to do so, older participants have met significant resistance. When dancing, dancers find personal meaning (wellbeing, processing emotions and life events), social meaning (communication, belonging), and religious meaning (contact with God, prayer, growth). Dance emerges as a part of lived religion that clearly highlights how bodies matter, and how spiritualities are gendered, in this contribution to understanding the embodied dimensions of religion.

Dancing Faith: Contemporary Christian dance in Norway

Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2019

Although dance is a common religious expression, its place in the Christian tradition has been contested. In modern Protestant Norway, dance has mostly been considered irrelevant to church life, or even sinful. In recent decades, however, dance has become increasingly common in Norwegian churches. This empirical analysis of dance in Christian settings in contemporary Norway is based on participant observation and interviews. While younger dancers (born after 1990) consider it natural to dance in church, and are usually welcome to, older participants have met significant resistance. In dancing, dancers find personal meaning (wellbeing, positive emotions, processing life), social meaning (communication, belonging) and religious meaning (contact with God, prayer, growth). Dance emerges as a part of lived religion that clearly highlights how bodies matter, as well as how spiritualities are gendered, in this contribution to understanding the embodied dimensions of religion. Keywords: dance; embodied faith; lived religion; Christianity; religious experience; gendered spiritualities

“Putting the dirt back in” - an investigation of step dancing in Scotland'

Russell, I. and Guigné, A. K., eds., Crossing Over: Fiddle and Dance Studies from Around the North Atlantic 3, 2010

Since about 1990 musicians and step dancers from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada have been invited to Scotland to share, through workshops and concerts, their style of music and dance. As a result a relatively small number of the traditional music and dance community in Scotland has taken a great interest in this style and the historical links between Highland (Gaelic) Scotland and Cape Breton Island, and as a result a small resurgence of percussive step dancing has since taken place. This paper looks at some of the aspects of why some Scots took an interest in the Cape Breton tradition and subsequently what impact these invitations have had on the current Scottish music and dance tradition.

Dancing Faith: Narrative and Embodiment in American Evangelical Dance

In Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global City, Judith Hamera explores concert dance and amateur practices in Los Angeles as sites of the confluence of gender, race, class, and culture in urban communities. Hamera asserts that aesthetics in general and dance techniques in particular can be framed as practices of everyday urban life that shape and are shaped by the processes of building dancing communities. In a similar fashion, scholars of American religion are exploring the ways in which religious communities employ narrative and embodied strategies as co-constructive and mutually dialogic producers of particular kinds of religious communities. This presentation gathers the strands of inquiry in dance and religious studies to explore the construction of meaning in American evangelical Christian dance communities. To that end, this presentation will examine the narrative and embodied strategies of a religious university dance ensemble to demonstrate the ways in which a community emerges from the convergence of narrative and embodied practices at the confluence of faith and art making. Finally, this presentation asks what this type of approach to studying dance does for the field: What kinds of meanings are produced/enabled through an inquiry that combines narrative and embodied approaches? What are the advantages and/or limitations to such an approach?

Th'owd pagan dance': ritual, enchantment, and an enduring intellectual paradigm

2002

In writings that have been untouched by tvventieth century anthropology, the interpretation of dances and dancing as 'ritual' has long provided misapprehensions about the status of dancing as the most ancient of artistic activities. Indeed, dances performed as 'calendar traditions' in modern Europe have frequently been held up as Tylorian "cultural survivals" which are thought to provide evidence of earlier stages of human development. Often tied to a pre-industrial calendar, these customary enactments of particular dances at a specific point in the year are construed as pre-modem relics of former pagan rituals.

The Sacred and The Secular in Dance: One Dance, Two Different Functions

European Journal of Theology and Philosophy

The aim of this paper is to highlight the "sacred" and "secular" character of the Xesyrtos or Gikna dance in the community of Asvestades in Thrace in Greece. In particular, this paper intends to highlight the difference between the "sacred" and the "secular" and the way this dichotomy is reflected in the dance under study. Data was gathered through the ethnographic method. The sacred/secular dichotomy, as proposed in Leach's (1976) theoretical model, is used to analyze the data. Further, Laban's notation system (Hutchinson, 2005; Koutsouba, 2005), was used to record the choreographic compositions of Xesyrtos or Gikna dance, while for the analysis of their structure and form, as well as their codification, the structural-morphological and typological method of analysis was applied. Finally, for the presentation and interpretation of the data, Geertz’s model of "thick description" (2003) was adopted. From the data analysis it w...