Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Dancing bodies'

This thesis considers the relationship between dance and digital media, and considers a specific type of case regarding this relationship: live and mediated. My motivation has been to identify and investigate, through practice, some of the difficulties presented when live and mediated bodies are placed within the same performance environment. In order to challenge some of the difficulties of what I consider as the problematic medium of digital dance, this thesis offers an examination of the ways in which digital media can positively transform the processes of making movement, and explores how the assimilation of media, as an integral agent within movement generation, can counter the dominance of the digital. Such dominance has been considered using a Practice As Research (PaR) model, and thus the thesis exemplifies both the creation of, and a deep reflection on, three works: Shift (2010-11), Betwixt & Between (2012-13) and Modulation_one (2013-14). Through the development of these works, I have sought to formally analyze and illuminate how media technologies, and in particular projection, can enrich the processes for making movement. This has been done in the context of a proliferation of digital technologies being available within a studio setting. In particular, the works have been established from the perspective of the dancer, which represents a specific case study for challenging the dominance of the digital. What follows in the written thesis is an analysis of what is a continuing and emerging practice. The written thesis therefore serves as both a document of the process and presents an illustration of a methodological approach for generating synergistic relationships with movement and projection. This relationship is proposed as a concept for live-digital dancing, which represents the main contribution to knowledge. The term live-digital advances the idea that a dancer is neither bound or restricted by either a live or digital construct, rather she is inspired to move and respond, in the moment of performance, to an unfolding assemblage of live and digital materials. Significantly, this has been established through the experiential encounters of the dancer moving with simultaneous projections of self. Live-digital therefore offers a methodological approach for constructing digital dance performance environments, which place perception and experience at the fore.

This thesis revolves around social dance movements in the form of raving and clubbing in Berlin, and how this performative scene is affected by social distancing measures due to the current situation of Covid-19. As an important moment in history, online body performances and virtual spaces aim to complement and substitute social experiences in physical environments. The field of study relating digital technology to club cultures is timely, as virtual raving is changing social bodies’ interactions. Life has gone online for the sake of upholding socialization, as people find themselves in isolation – in a hybrid experience of the digital and material. To assess these changes in social life, this thesis uses an auto ethnographical case study on virtual raving and interviews with rave participants, and deploys Affordance Theory. The affordances accounted for are those of ‘settings’, ‘socialization’, ‘entertainment’, and ‘mobility’. The analysis demonstrates the possibilities and problems of transferring the meditative and social bodily experiences associated with raving, to virtual environments. The resulting discussion addresses issues of global accessibility, virtual raves, and what these mean for a techno raving sub culture, and the people who participate in it.

Despite concerns regarding working conditions in Scottish lap-dancing venues being raised in the 2006 report published by the then Scottish Executive’s Adult Entertainment Working Group, women’s experiences of working inside these venues remains under-researched. This thesis provides an up-to-date snapshot of working conditions in the Scottish lap-dancing industry. The study utilised in-depth, semi-structured interviews with dancers which benefitted from the researcher’s involvement in the industry. The inclusion of women’s voices led to the conclusion that wider cultural and economic changes are impacting negatively upon working experiences in venues by adversely altering the dynamics of supply and demand. This means power is felt to be partially shifting from workers to owners, and to a lesser extent, customers. Participants suggest that venues have changed from being enjoyable working environments where money could be made relatively easily to ones where the work embodies the characteristics of precarious labour where competition is rife and projected income is far less certain. A feminist and Foucoudian analysis assists in understanding and explaining these changes. The thesis suggests that simply improving working conditions for women may prove ineffective in the facilitation of a more satisfactory workplace, due to the overriding desire for profit held by both dancers and owners in an industry which has become less financially lucrative. Ultimately, the thesis reveals and explains how shifts outside the lap-dancing venues have affected dancers negatively in different ways, affecting relationships inside the venue, and the actual experience of carrying out the labour. This thesis argues that these shifts have been assisted by the provision of State policy that fails to recognise lap-dancing as a form of labour and is not concerned with dancers safety at work.

La cueca est un genre musical, poétique et chorégraphique dit traditionnel pratiqué dans certains pays d'Amérique du Sud tels que le Pérou, la Bolivie, l'Argentine et le Chili, qui revêt des caractéristiques spécifiques dans chacun d'eux. D'un point de vue chorégraphique, il s'agit d'une danse de couple qui représente le jeu de la séduction amoureuse par des mouvements en cercles et demi-cercles et où ses interprètes tiennent dans leur main droite un foulard qu'ils font tournoyer au-dessus de leur tête. Notamment au Chili, au cours des XIXe et XXe siècles, la pratique de la cueca a été influencée par des contextes sociopolitiques particuliers qui ont déclenché des processus successifs d'appropriation par différents acteurs sociaux. À la fin du XXe siècle - début du XXIe, un nouveau phénomène d'appropriation de la cueca émerge à la suite d'une conjoncture sociale et politique particulière, en l'occurrence un changement culturel après une longue période de dictature militaire (1973-1989). Cette recherche vise à analyser la gestuelle des corps dansants de cueca chilienne en tant que langage discursif qui permet de comprendre la construction d'identités plurielles pendant la période post-dictature. L'ancrage théorique de cette analyse considère trois axes : la gestuelle des corps dansants, leur dimension discursive dans la représentation des identités et la circulation et l'appropriation des styles. En ce qui concerne l'approche méthodologique, des références historiques ont été confrontées et mises en dialogue avec des enquêtes de terrain et ma propre expérience, en tant que danseuse et actrice sociale de la période étudiée. L'analyse comparative des différents types de discours, c'est-à-dire textuel, oral et corporel nous permet d'aborder l'analyse du corps dansant de cueca dans une perspective complémentaire, en cherchant à répondre à la nature socio-esthétique du problème central posé dans cette recherche
The cueca is a "traditional" musical, poetic and choreographic genre practiced in some South American countries such as Peru, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile, which has specific features in each of them. From a choreographic point of view, it is a couple's dance that represents the game of love seduction with movements in circles and semicircles, in which its interpreters hold in their right hand a scarf that they spin above their head.Particularly in Chile, during the 19th and 20th centuries, the practice of the cueca was influenced by socio-political contexts that triggered successive processes of appropriation by different social actors. At the end of the 20th century - beginning of the 21st, a new phenomenon of appropriation of the cueca emerges because of a social and political conjuncture, in this case a cultural change after a long period of military dictatorship (1973-1989). This research aims to analyze the gestures of Chilean cueca dancing bodies as a discursive language that allows us to understand the construction of plural identities during the post-dictatorship period. The theoretical anchorage for the development of the analysis considers three axes: the gesture of the dancing bodies, their discursive dimension in the representation of identities and the circulation and appropriation of styles. As far as the methodological approach is concerned, historical references have been confronted and put in dialogue with fieldwork and my own experience as a dancer and social actor of the studied period. The comparative analysis of the different types of discourse, i.e. textual, oral and corporal, allows us to approach the analysis of the dancing body of cueca in an integral and complementary perspective, seeking to respond to the socio-aesthetic nature of the central problem posed in this research

碩士
中國文化大學
藝術研究所美術組碩士在職專班
90
Abstract What does the “beauty” definitely refer to? “Beauty” is an abstract noun, which can be hardly explained and defined. The truth of beauty has been a life-long knowledge that artists aggressively want to explore and pursue. Respecting to many artworks come from the ideas of female bodies in the western art history, the purpose of this study was to explore the beauty of the delighted female bodies. Since there are many artworks made by the subjects of naked bodies in the western art history, the art workers cannot ignore the subjective and objective factors of its existence to analyze and explore some aspects of its performances in the beauty of art. It is undoubtedly that the art performance is “the products of history under certain conditions.” The developments of painting of human bodies will be a popular issue. “How to absorb the beauty factors from the traditional eastern and western cultures to be the creative motivation” is the main interest of the study. This study explored the nature of beauty from female bodies and specify the importance of “even and harmony.” By observing the female paintings made in different ages, it can be known how the experts in the fine art history looked the nature of females and classified the gene of the beauty of female bodies. Then, through the enlightenment and original opinions of eastern and western thoughts of beauty, the author depicted his creative ideas about the beauty of delighted female bodies, and explained his realization about it during making his creation of “dancing the life” — the beauty of delighted female bodies. It is expected that the study will explore and open another creative direction and painting performance.

碩士
國立東華大學
課程設計與潛能開發學系
99
Abstract "Formosa Aboriginal Song and Dance Troupe", as known as "FASDT" , is one of Taiwanese aboriginal performing arts groups with performances of its unique mode generally different from the tourist-oriented model with innovations of the indigenous music and dance. "FASDT" learns and inherits the traditional indigenous dance and music through field research collected from a long period of tribal cultural immersion and then performs on stage. Furthermore, instead of performing in tribes traditionally, "FASDT" combines traditional indigenous music and dance and steps into theatre venues which in general were designed for Han cultural performances and Western theatres, so that the general public will be more aware of traditional music and dance of aboriginal culture. In music and dance performances, "FASDT" emphasizes to enter the core of ritual music and dance, which means the "communion" and "whole" state of music, dance, and body. The atmosphere of ritual contexts is developed through daily physical training and practices in theatre. The researching perspective is focused on the body of "FASDT"’s music and dance performances. Apart from participating "FASDT" to study from inner about how to use and train dancers’ bodies, and how to become a ritual body during the performance, the interviews of the dancers, including former and present members in two decades, will be another way to understand their thoughts of "FASDT"’s music and dance to be seen, and their body experience of "FASDT". Singing and dancing are alive and flowing, not with no feelings or awareness. In traditional aboriginal music and dance forms (hand in hand, dancing around the circle, etc.), how can those forms shape "FASDT"’s members of group identity and "FASDT" dancers’ common body language, build up the sharing memory even between different generations, and create the emotional belonging of "FASDT"?

Contemporary neuroscientific evidence indicates that unrestricted movement and gesture enhance children’s physical, social and cognitive development by engaging them with the external properties of their environments. Current understanding of children’s engagement with indoor environments is limited. This knowledge gap matters because children’s health, social abilities and cognitive development may be compromised in physical environments that inhibit rather than enhance their movement capacities. This gap is especially problematic for physically disabled children because their motor impairments, exclusionary societal attitudes, safety concerns and environmental barriers curtail their movement. In this study, I describe and interpret the relationship between disabled and non-disabled children’s movement and a kindergarten classroom. Their bodies were conceptualized according to Deleuze’s premise that nothing can be known about bodies until they demonstrate what they can do (1988). The classroom was conceptualized according to Gibson’s theory of affordances, which posits that people and environments are inextricably related (1979). I used a choreographic perspective underpinned by Manning’s philosophy of relational movement (2009) to accentuate the dynamic reciprocity between children’s bodies and the classroom. Eight disabled and 12 non-disabled children participated in this interdisciplinary, ethnographic study. Data were elicited through observations, video recordings and semi-structured interviews. I developed a taxonomy of indoor affordances or ‘compositional elements’ to categorize classroom objects/features that children discovered and actualized through their movement interactions. Subsequently, I observed a dance-in-the-making that led to deeper understandings of the relational and emergent properties of these interactions. Findings suggest that assemblages of bodies, objects and features trigger dynamic movement, and indicate that disabled and non-disabled children alike discover and creatively assemble affordances to facilitate their movement. Overall, my findings recast children’s body-environment interactions and contribute to understandings about environmental features that enhance or inhibit movement capacities. This knowledge could be used to design i) learning environments that are redolent of movement possibilities, ii) interventions to enhance children’s physical, social and cognitive capacities, and iii) education and rehabilitation strategies that encourage them to explore, navigate and shape their environments.

碩士
國立臺灣師範大學
大眾傳播研究所
101
This paper tended to regard K-pop’s role as a resource for configuring emotional and embodied agency, focusing on the consumption of K-pop among Taiwanese young female. Considering the importance of consumption of images, dancing and performances which come from K-pop music videos and live performance especially, the consumption of K-pop could be viewed as physical experience instead of audio experience only that “cover dance” became one of the prominent and significant localized dance practices of K-pop among Taiwanese young female. 　The intention of this paper was to discover how Taiwanese young females recognized or reconstructed the femininity performed from K-pop, what embodied experiences and bodily practices were produced while consuming K-pop and how they made music personalized though the appropriation of K-pop. 　By identifying two different kinds of dance practices: the cover dance practice of dance groups and individuals , this paper tended to highlight the alternative senses of selves which may claim to experience within different bodily practice when “dancing with” K-pop, and a network-oriented dancing culture which related to body consciousness, gender and spaces.