Dancing Identity: Metaphysics in Motion Book

According to renowned performer, teacher, and dance scholar Sondra Fraleigh, "to value dance at all is to value the human, the beautiful, and the playful amid the erotic pulse of life. Dancing gives us the forms of our mind in movement, and it teaches us how to reconnect with our emotions, living them over again, sweeping clean their cellular foundations." Dancing Identity, her latest book, is a celebratory fusion of philosophy and movement. Combining critical analysis with personal history and poetry, Fraleigh presents a series of interconnected essays composed over a period of fifteen years. Taken as a whole, these meditative reflections on the ways we perceive and construct our lives represent a journey toward self-definition informed by art, ritual, feminism, phenomenology, poetry, autobiography, and-always-dance. While aesthetic discourse is often dissociated from lived experience, Dancing Identity examines dance as an inherently gendered reality and exposes the political terrain of movement. In these brilliantly inventive meditations, Fraleigh clarifies complex philosophical issues by applying them to dance history and aesthetics. She illustrates her discussions with images, descriptions, and personal stories in order to bridge dance with everyday movement, showing how dance stems from such sensate human actions as walking, crawling, riding, leaping, and whirling. Seeking to integrate the fractured notions of the body and senses that dominate much Western discourse, Fraleigh reveals how metaphysical concepts are embodied and presented in dance, both on stage and in therapeutic settings. She redefines dance as neither entertainment nor art-making, but as the struggle to voice the body through imaginative movement. As a pioneer of somatic movement therapy, she lays aside the external experience of the body-the person we believe others see when they look at us-in favor of an expressive one, in which the body is perceived in terms of its potential. As she examines the role of movement in personal and political experiences, Fraleigh reflects on her major influences, including Moshe Feldenkrais, Kazuo Ohno, and her teacher, German expressionist dancer Mary Wigman. She draws on such varied sources as philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Martin Heidegger, postmodern dancer Twyla Tharp, Japanese Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata, Hitler, Miss America, Balanchine, Butch Cassidy, and the goddess figure of ancient cultures. Dancing Identity offers new insights into modern life and its reconfigurations in postmodern dance.Read More