The intent of this study was to use an experimental model to investigate the use of dance training for improving the self-esteem of women over the age of 35. Sixteen women over the age of 35 were taught jazz dance over a 10 week period. A pre and post test of the Tennessee Self Concept Scale was used on both a dance group and a no dance group. It was hypothesized there would be positive changes in three of the 10 scores in the TSCS for the dance group, but not for the no dance group. The scores predicted to were Physical Self, Personal Self, Self Satisfaction. Analysis of covariance confirmed change in the Physical and Personal scores for the dance group but no change in the Self Satisfaction score. Behavioral Self and Total P scores also changed for the dance group.

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This dissertation is an attempt to articulate the conviction, born of ten years of intensive experience in learning and practicing to be a dance performer, that the dance performer, through collaboration with the choreographer, makes an important contribution to how we can and do understand artistic dance performance. Further, this contribution involves on-the-fly-thinking-while-doing in which the movement of the dancer's body is run through by consciousness. Some of this activity of "consciousness" in movement may not be part of the deliberative mentality of which the agent is aware; it may instead be something that is part of our body's natural and acquired plan for how to move in the world that is shaped by years of artistic and cultural training and practice. The result is a qualitative and visceral performance that can, although need not, be a representation of some deliberative thought or intention that a dancer can articulate beforehand. It is also the sort of thinking movement that in many cases can be conceived as expression; an utterance of dance artists that is not limited to the communication of emotion that can be appreciated and understood, at least in principle, by a public or audience. What this means for the Philosophy of Dance as Art includes the following: 1) there may not always be a stable, fixed "work" of dance art that can be identified, going forward, as the only relevant work on which critical and philosophical attention should be focused because of variable, contingent and irreducibly individual features of live dance performances, attributable in large part to the efforts, style and improvisation of particular dance performers; 2) the experience of dance artists is relevant to understand dance as art because experiential evidence of practice can supplement and ground the appreciable properties that we can detect in artistic dance performances; 3) artistic dance performance can be conceived as expression without being expressive of either an artist's felt emotion or of human emotion in general - no particular content is needed as long as there is a content; 4) artistic dance performance conceived as expression can, but need not, function as representation in both the strong (imitative) and weak (referential) sense; and 5) artistic dance performance is real, not illusory and not necessarily either a transformation or transfiguration of the real. Dance as art, like theatre, like music and even, perhaps, like painting, sculpture and architecture, although in less clearly artist-present, extemporaneous and embodied ways, is human-constructed, human-understood, human-driven and a full, rich, interactive and meaningful part of human life. / Philosophy

This study examines dance and dance-like sacred performance in four texts by or about the thirteenth-century beguines Elisabeth of Spalbeek, Hadewijch, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Agnes Blannbekin. These women wrote about dance as a visionary experience of the joys of heaven or the relationship between God and the soul, and they also created physical performances of faith that, while not called dance by medieval authors, seem remarkably dance-like to a modern eye. The existence of these dance-like sacred performances calls into question the commonly-held belief that most medieval Christians denied their bodies in favor of their souls and considered dancing sinful. In contrast to official church prohibitions of dance I present an alternative viewpoint, that of religious Christian women who physically performed their faith. The research questions this study addresses include the following: what meanings did the concept of dance have for medieval Christians; how did both actual physical dances and the concept of dance relate to sacred performance; and which aspects of certain medieval dances and performances made them sacred to those who performed and those who observed? In a historical interplay of text and context, I thematically analyze four beguine texts and situate them within the larger tapestry of medieval dance and sacred performance. This study suggests that medieval Christian concepts of dance, sacred performance, the soul, and the body were complex and fluid; that medieval sacred performance was as much a matter of a correct inner, emotional and spiritual state as it was of appropriate outward, physical actions; and that sacred performance was a powerful, important force in medieval Europe that various Christians used to support their own beliefs or to contest the beliefs and practices of others. / Dance

<p> The performativity of dance relies on the the power that different dance practices and choreographies have to shape culture, &ldquo;making and unmaking&rdquo; identities by &ldquo;molding&rdquo; the moving body (Franko, 2012). While theorists have connected dance technique and instruction to the perpetuation of larger cultural and historical ideologies, few methods yet have attempted a critical study of how performative impact is connected to a dancer&rsquo;s own embodied experience. </p><p> Working from an understanding of embodied experience as central to the performative impact of dance, my research examines the dancing body&rsquo;s role in constructing its own performativity. I begin with an analysis of how choreography &ldquo;does&rdquo; performativity, looking at historical changes in dance theory over time that have led to the imperative to examine agency specifically in relation to individually experienced embodiment. Current scholarship on the status of the 21st century contemporary dancer recognizes this need to study individual embodiment; dancers are creative agents within the choreographic process, able to alter the performative impact of a piece on the basis of how they learn or embody the movement. In order to substantiate this understanding of the dancing body&rsquo;s agency, my research culminates in an interview project that includes dancers&rsquo; voices and lived experiences together with scholarship that prescribes agency and performativity to the moving body. Tracking a group of dancers through the process of learning new choreography, I attempt a method of understanding the moving body itself as communicative agent. The philosophical field of phenomenology supports such an understanding, viewing the body as having its own consciousness and perspective. In addition to phenomenology, I use critical ethnography and oral history practices to construct a reflexive interview process and affect theory to conduct a deep analysis of the dancers&rsquo; descriptions. Affect, being defined as those intensities, feelings and forces at the base of personal experience and social patterns, offers a way of comprehending dancers&rsquo; felt sense of embodiment from their own perspective. </p><p> An examination of affect within the dancers&rsquo; descriptions shows how the dancers&rsquo; linguistic moves parallel their diverse kinesthetic experiences of learning movement. The dancers&rsquo; heightened kinesthetic awareness throughout the process of learning choreography demonstrates how they experience their bodies in a different phenomenological way and ultimately how they enact performative impact through their very processes of embodiment. The resulting interviews, transcriptions and discussion in this project support practice-based research, in the form of phenomenologically-centered and analyzed interviews, as a way to include dancers&rsquo; embodied experiences in studies of the dancing body&rsquo;s performativity. </p><p> Reference: Franko, Mark. "Dance and the Political: States of Exception." Dance. Ed. Andr&eacute; Lepecki. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2012. 145-48. Print.</p>