Dancing my true dance
Reflections on learning to express myself through ecstatic dance in Hawai'i
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12930643 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lucy Pickering (0009-0007-2025-2124, Oxford Brookes University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1970 |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 1970-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Anthropology Matters (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1758-6453 • E-ISSN: 1758-6453 |
| Publisher | NomadIT (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.22582/am.v11i1.29 |
| OpenAlex | W1490447561 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 7 |
While I was doing fieldwork with hippies and drop outs in Hawai'i, my mother came to visit. During her visit I took her to an ecstatic dance. At this dance one of my research participants, Stan, told me, "Lucy, I've been watching you dance today and you've really learned to express yourself". Discussing it later, my mother remarked, "Yes, but what he meant was that you've learned to dance like everyone else". In this paper I explore how the same piece of dance could be interpreted so differently by these two observers. I identify the importance of "acquired movement vocabulary" for rendering improvised dance intelligible to observers, so that Stan, trained to identify the point of such a dance - self-expression - through my dance could see self-expression where my mother, trained in observing how well her daughter fits in with others, saw something entirely different
Aesthetics · Art · Concert dance · Contemporary dance · Dance · Dance education · Expression (computer science · Linguistics · Movement (music · Visual arts · Vocabulary · Computer Science · Education, Healthcare and Sociology Research · Philosophy · Psychology · Research in Social Sciences · Social and Educational Sciences
| Citations per year | 0.02 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1970 - 1970 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |