Resources

To be updated summer, 2010... (soon!)

Moving Dharma Writings

Abstract

This paper seeks to establish kinesthetic learning as an effective medium for religious studies education. A historical overview of the presence, and absence, of movement and dance in Christian worship and the academic study of religion is followed by illustrations of embodied commonalities between the dance experience and the religious experience. A discourse on the general efficacy of kinesthetic learning is followed by testimony specifically supporting its inclusion in the study of religion.  The paper concludes with examples of the author’s own work in embodied religious studies teaching and what implications such methods could hold for the discipline of religious studies.

Books to Support Your Dharma Dancing

my body, the buddhist by Deborah Hay.  2000.

Experimental choreographer Hay shares insights into her dance process.

"the label 'sacred dancing' is redundant.  Dancing is always and already sacred in the way that it conjoins body and consciousness."

"I study riddles, some of which are what ifs that arise when I am dancing.  For example, what if where I am is what I need?  As a dancer, I will notice what occurs when I imagine every cell in my body at once is getting what it needs moment by moment.  The manner in which these what ifs can thrill and annihilate the body's reasoning process, overwhelming it with self-reflection, is similar to the experience of beginner's mind in Zen Buddhism."

Dance and the Lived Body: A Descriptive Aesthetics by Sondra Horton Fraleigh.  1987.

Philosopher-choreographer Fraleigh expounds the metaphysics of dance as sacred.

"Dance points toward our moving and perishable embodied existence, holding it before us, filling and freeing present time that we may dwell whole within it."

"At the ritual foundations of Western dance and in the religions of the East, dance was viewed in its power to embody cosmological theory and to link human essence to origins.  What could not be explained by other means could be either demonstrated in dance or imagined as a dance that could spin the world into being."

Kazuo Ohno's World: from without & within by Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno, translated by John Barret.  2004.

An overview of Butoh co-founder Kazuo Ohno's work, including workshop notes.

"Your movements are not just an expression of your life's superficial facets.  Rather, they must clearly indicate how you're connected with your inner life force.  So, whether you use a fingernail, raise your small finger, or move any part of the body, harness that energy at all times."

"Your dance is worthless unless you succeed in engaging the audience on a spiritual level.  It's simply not a case of physically moving from one spot to another; the essential thing is that your movements, even when you're standing still, embody your soul at all times."

Articles to Support Your Dharma Dancing

Why Dance? Towards a Theory of Religion as Practice and Performance by Kimerer L. LaMothe. 2005.

Dancer-choreographer-scholar LaMothe examines sacred dance as religious experience and in religious study, including a focus on Isadora Duncan.

"[Duncan's] Religion involves practicing patterns of physical consciousness, educating sensory awareness, and cultivating vulnerability to currents of will, desire, and idea.  It involves generating, performing, and thus enacting kinetic images of self in relation to others and world."

"An approach to religion focused through bodily movement...promises resources for imaginatively recreating the meaning of transformations affected by religious belief and action as a function of how people enact a logic of bodily becoming - scholars included."