Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
¶ … Gerald Jonas' text Dancing -- the Pleasure, Power, and Art of Movement attempts the difficult feat of conveying "The power of dance," a kinesthetic practice, into prose. Perhaps this is why the book was originally issued as a companion to a PBS video series of the same title, so the concepts Jonas talks about could be illustrated in lived, visualized, moving form on television. The first chapter of Dancing -- the Pleasure, Power, and Art of Movement stresses that dance a multifaceted practice. Dance is, paradoxically a classical art form, a cultural expression, a creative individualistic way of expressing emotion with the body and also a cultural, larger 'heart beat' of national life and religious and social ritual practices.
The intellectual maneuverings involved in understanding the bodily movement involved in dancing thus involve four, somewhat contradictory elements. First of all dance is a natural practice, beyond culture. The chapter of the book begins with how kinesthetic movement...
To move is to be alive. Also, the desire to move in time to music is a cross-cultural and transnational phenomenon, more so than even written and recorded literacy. How one moves, of course, varies from culture to culture -- from the different dances done at weddings, to simply the different way an African vs. An American person may walk around the marketplace of a home village.
Secondly, while dance is universal, it is also intensely individualistic. Because no one has the same body no one dances the same. Even in the most homogeneous of cultures, interpretations of music and musical likes and dislikes will vary. Also, "meaning as well as beauty is in the eye of the beholder." (Jonas 12) Even within a culture, the meaning of a dance may be different to one person than another. A modern dancer may see ballet as stifling, while a classical ballerina may see it as her mode of expressing herself, through art. A father may see the…
Work Cited
Jonas, Gerald. Dancing: The Pleasure, Power, and Art of Movement. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998.
Dancing -- the Pleasure, Power, and Art of Movement. PBS Video Series. 1993
Hasidic Judaism Culture Hasidic Judaism-primarily Boro Park Literature suggests that people often refer the Jewish people as the chosen people, which is common knowledge. In fact, the bible supports this because it refers to them as the Holy people or the Holy Community. In this respect, during the provision of the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai, it was a requirement by God that the Jews live a holy life. In the context
Jonas (1992) points to the first signs of life as the quickening of an unborn person in the womb. From prenatal quickening, a person soon learns self-expression in different ways. One is in the form of a meaningful series of bodily activities or motions called dance. It has evolved into both a tradition and an unconscious external display of purpose, emotion or message. Through history, it can be a
While not entirely Puerto Rican, the song has distinctly Latin tones that make it kind of a generic Hispanic song. It doesn't entirely embrace Puerto Rican culture specifically, but groups the Puerto Ricans in with Mexicans and other Hispanic cultures as a whole. This was not uncommon for the 1950s, and is still not uncommon today, as American society has had a lack of interest in distinguishing between the
Dance Peters The Pop Music Choreography of Michael Peters Few forms of dancing are more present in our popular culture than that associated with popular music. While the forms of tap, ballet and ballroom all occupy an obvious place in our academic understanding of dance, these are for the large part only seen in specialized contexts such as theatres and formal events. This contrasts the style of dance and choreography that accompanies
Both forms of dancing however are exciting and involve thrilling movements to heady, rhythmically pounding music. Although raves are not usually informal clubs, there is some similarity between the settings of salsa night clubs and raves. Plus, there is some element of flirtation in glove light show dancing; this element seems to figure prominently in salsa. I think that the main similarity between my dancing and salsa is the
Changes in smoking and in the consumption of fruits and vegetables probably played a minor role in this decrease." (Disease Priorities in Developing Countries, nd) This information is shown in the following chart labeled Figure 1. Source: Willet et al. (nd) The work of Beblo and Lauer (2002) reports an analysis of the "intergenerational transmission of poverty from Polish parents to their children through children's educational attainment during the transition process