Circle Dance Research Articles

A dança circular na resolução de situações-problema em aulas de Educação Física

Entender como o ser humano se organiza e tao complexo quanto entender como a Natureza interage com essa organizacao. A danca compreende uma das mais antigas atividades humanas cujas origens se confundem com a origem da propria humanidade, o que remete a epoca em que o homem vivia em estreita relacao com a natureza. Nosso trabalho consistiu em realizar inferencias sobre o processo de auto-organizacao do comportamento de criancas quando colocadas para solucionar situacoes-problema no contexto das dancas circulares. Realizamos atividades que contassem com situacoes da danca circular utilizando materiais como: elastico, tecido, jornal, papel pardo, giz de cera. Atraves das dancas circulares percebemos como a organizacao aparece e desaparece de forma muito dinâmica. E importante assinalar que o processo de constituicao de um grupo dancante nao e linear. Tal qual a roda, que vai e vem, requer tempo para girar num ritmo compassado, sintonizado, centrado.

Making dancing circles

During the last 15 to 20 years, a strong circle dance movement has evolved. Bernard Wosien started collecting circle dances from different cultures and began to teach them to others. There are now many groups and teachers all over Britain. I first came across circle dancing when my children were very little, and was delighted to fi nd that at many of the events, children were not only welcome, but were encouraged to join in.

Go round and round!

During the last 20 years, a strong circle dance movement has evolved. Bernard Wosien started collecting circle dances from different cultures and began to teach them to others. There are now many groups and teachers all over Britain. I first came across circle dancing when my children were very little, and was delighted to find that at many of the events, children were not only welcome, but were encouraged to join in.

Corposcopio: an interactive installation performance in the intersection of ritual, dance and new technologies

Corposcopio is a collaborative project that integrates two different worlds or territories: circle dances and new media technologies. Ancient circle dances are cultural manifestations present in different countries around the world. They have a great power of community integration and provide a unique experience of extended consciousness. In Brazil there are a number of amazing circle dances and one of the most popular is called ciranda, whose movements are inspired by sea waves. Ciranda is performed by hundreds of people and some participants fall into a trance. The purpose of the interactive performance is to stimulate, simultaneously, the perception of the media in contemporary reality and the collective body emergence. Corposcopio invites the participants to experience some circle dances and aggregates real-time image manipulation, software art, VJ and remix aesthetics. The transparent, ubiquitous and pervasive presence of computer systems in contemporary spaces is a quotidian fact. Nevertheless, the emergence of digital communities demonstrated the power of the human factor in the disruptive use of technologies. Human beings are social beings. Our depart point is to invite the participants to dance within the scenery of real-time image manipulation, ubiquitous computing and mixed reality. The performance itself deals with co-creation development and uncertainty. Each performance has peculiar characteristics hence it is an open system, open to receive the group interaction and participation. The experience stimulates an extended consciousness, a simultaneous perception of the individual body and the collective body. Our hypothesis is that each group will catalyze the emergence of an embodied consciousness of our mediated situation in a different way. As Bernhard Wosien (1988), one of the pioneer researchers on circle dance, has said, dance is a path to totality. In Wosien's view, circle dance has deep ritual characteristics and evokes a tremendous collective enthusiasm.

The joy dance: Specific effects of a single dance intervention on psychiatric patients with depression

This study investigated the specific effects of a dance intervention on the decrease of depression and the increase of vitality and positive affect in 31 psychiatric patients with main or additional diagnosis of depression. Patients participated in one of three conditions: a dance group performing a traditional upbeat circle dance, a group that listened just to the music of the dance (music only), and a group that moved on a home trainer bike (ergometer) up to the same level of arousal as the dance group (movement only). While all three conditions alleviated or stabilized the condition of the patients, results suggest that patients in the dance group profited most from the intervention. They showed significantly less depression than participants in the music group ( p < .001) and in the ergometer group ( p < .05), and more vitality ( p < .05) than participants in the music group on post-test self-report scales immediately after the intervention. Stimulating circle dances can thus have a positive effect on patients with depression and may be recommended for use in dance/movement therapy and other complementary therapies.

Ohuokhai: Sakhas’ Unique Integration of Social Meaning and Movement

Abstract This article explores the forms and functions of Sakhas’ ohuokhai circle dance. Historically, Sakha are Turkic-speaking agropastoralists inhabiting the subarctic Sakha Republic of Russia. Originating as the opening communal prayer during Sakhas’ yhyakh festival, ohuokhai has both maintained an original sacred function and, over time, assumed others. This article defines ohuokhai origins and its evolving functions through the pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet times and reveals that, despite continuing post-Soviet threats, ohuokhai continues because of the commitment and initiative of Viliui Sakha inhabitants.

Ohuokhai : Sakhas' Unique Integration of Social Meaning and Movement

This article explores the forms and functions of Sakhas' ohuokhai circle dance. Historically, Sakha are Turkic-speaking agropastoralists inhabiting the subarctic Sakha Republic of Russia. Originating as the opening communal prayer during Sakhas' yhyakh festival, ohuokhai has both maintained an original sacred function and, over time, assumed others. This article defines ohuokhai origins and its evolving functions through the pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet times and reveals that, despite continuing post-Soviet threats, ohuokhai continues because of the commitment and initiative of Viliui Sakha inhabitants.

Circle dance: the art of John T. Scott

Circle dance: the art of John T. Scott

The Body Can Speak: Essays on Creative Movement Education with Emphasis on Dance and Drama (review)

Reviewed by: The Body Can Speak: Essays on Creative Movement Education with Emphasis on Dance and Drama Henderson Heidi The Body Can Speak: Essays on Creative Movement Education with Emphasis on Dance and Drama. Edited by Annelise Mertz. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002; pp. xiv + 148. $40.00 cloth, $20.00 paper. In The Body Can Speak, edited by distinguished dance educator Annelise Mertz, a collection of writers contributes to a celebration of the value of movement in education. Most of the authors are Mertz's colleagues and former students and find their commonality in the educational philosophies that Mertz set forth in her tenure as dance department chair at Washington University in St. Louis. Collectively, the writers—dancers, choreographers, improvisers, painters, actors, playwrights, directors, and therapists—argue that creative movement education helps us to define our notions of art and self. Individually, they take very different paths toward this end. Mertz has organized the essays into two categories. "As We See It" covers theory, while in "How We Do It"the various authors discuss process and application. Rarely, however, does an essay fall easily into one or the other of these categories; most are too complex to conform to such explicit definition. In the theory division, for example, Ruth Grauert, editor of the Web-based Journal of Art and Ideas, writes about the compelling work that she does at a camp in Maine where children study music, visual art, dance, poetry, and theatre. Grauert is interested in interdisciplinary artistic processes, and hinting at how she might describe such creative intersections to her young students, suggests, "perhaps having a tantrum is all the arts put together: sound and motion and words; and you are bound to turn red, and of course with a tantrum there is contrast, so we have theater" (16). Grauert's essay is informed by both educational theory and practical experience. Her enthusiasm for working with children and her concrete examples of how she connects art to the natural world of the forests and lakes of Maine offer vivid lessons for teaching. Grauert's essay is also a valuable reminder that artistic education is necessary to a child's development. She asserts, "Our participation in life must lead us to art, and art in turn will lead us to what we truly are" (16). Two of the more clearly theoretical essays are written by pioneering dance educators, whose careers parallel Mertz's own in fostering dance education at the university level. In "Education Through Dance," reprinted from Dance: A Creative Art Experience (1957), Margaret N. H'Doubler, the first woman to institute a dance program at the university level, describes an education in dance as "a special way of reexperiencing aesthetic values discovered in reality" (13). An essay by Dorothy M. Vislocky, professor emerita at Hunter College, is a lovely, reverential, and rambling tribute to her mentor Alwin Nikolais, who in the dance [End Page 500] world is remembered as much for his generosity in teaching as for his work in performance. These essays reflect on the power that teachers have to influence their students both in and out of the classroom. Some of the collection's most interesting essays focus on teaching movement ideas to specific populations, including several essays about teaching dance to children. In "Moving into Belonging: The Dance of the Mother and Child," Becky Engler-Hicks describes her work teaching parents to support the young child's growing ideas of self through movement. In "Spring Celebration: A Movement Ritual for Children,"Jeff Rehg gives a simple and explicit set of instructions for staging a circle dance with children. The children, in practice and in performance, run and chant. They honor the four directions. They create a circle and explore the community the shape implies. In learning and performing this dance, the children solidify their connection to the earth and to each other. One of the most moving and practical essays in the book is by Branislav Tomich, a former student of Mertz. He describes his process of teaching a mix of dance and theatre to a group of incarcerated teens. Tomich uses the lessons of an acting class to teach...

Circle dancing

During the last 15 to 20 years, a strong circle dance movement has evolved. Bernard Wosien started collecting circle dances from different cultures and began to teach them to others. There are now many groups and teachers all over Britain. I first came across circle dancing when my children were very little, and was delighted to find that at many of the events, children were not only welcome, but wereencouraged to join in.

The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States

The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States. By Samuel Floyd, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. [316 p. ISBN 0-19-508235-4. $30.00.] The argument that Samuel Floyd makes in The Power of Black Music demands serious consideration, especially by specialists. For those of us who have taught African-American music surveys or specialized seminars in the area, the book offers and affirms many ideas, challenges old assumptions, and suggests new approaches to existing ideas. It is well researched and draws on many sources, both printed and recorded, to support the argument. With regard to the assumptions, Floyd takes the position that: African musical traits and cultural practices not only survived but played a major role in the development and elaboration of African-American music. The debate and interpretations surrounding the theories of survivalism, syncretism, and non-survivalism-posited by Herskovits (1947), Waterman (1948, 1952), and Jackson (1933, 1943), respectively--are not relevant to this study. (P. 5) Given that the above-mentioned studies have become classics in the discourse of the African diaspora, Floyd's statement, by downplaying (hem (if not dismissing them) right at the outset of the hook, should strongly suggest to readers that they are being taken to uncharted musk historical waters. For his theoretical framework, Floyd relies on Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) and Sterling Stuckey, Stave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Floyd identifies several paradigms that have been an intrinsic part of the African-American musical experience. Among them are the ring or ring shout (taken from Stuckey's Slave Culture) found on both the African continent and throughout the history of African-American music-making. Other paradigms include, call-and-response--the ubiquitous performance practice--a cultural memory that can manifest itself in a variety of ways consciously or unconsciously; dance, drum, and song; mythology, and the ever-popular (and complex) Yoruba trickster deity, Esu. The ring, which in the African context symbolizes continuity of life (dating back to ancient Egyptian symbolism) manifests itself in community circle dances and other religious and secular events on both the African continent and in African-American culture. Within the African-American musical context, Floyd identifies multiple manifestations and citings of the ring phenomenon from stylized vocalities such as ululations, screams, shouts, moans, and hums found in spirituals and subsequent African-American musical genres, to the jazz funerals throughout the South (best known in New Orleans), to the 1949 popular song and dance of saxophonist Paul Williams, the Hucklebuck among others. The call-and-response phenomenon is found within numerous instrumental (e. …

Inside Veins

Inside Veins(for Sidney Bechet & Michel Fabre) Sterling D. Plumpp (bio) At first I can not tell whether you are an out law or prophet. Calling from a plateau half way between St. Peter’s post and my baby’s arms in hell. Calling in blues washed but not ironed out of Mississippi birth place wrinkles. You do not force the woman in side you in to head rags and aprons. She sings in side veins of your axe. But I never listen to you because I fear your horn will have a Bigger in its tones. He wanna erect an altar of tongues where his moods can find avenues for his travel plans. [End Page 441] Bigger always longs to make another world. And you teach him Sunday school lessons in D-natural. And I do not want sounds to bleed on me. You play after the war music. But, I live near Bigger. There is no peace or treaties anywhere I imagine. Your music, days, you make and cast your nets, in. You say. 2 There are no dreams for the dispossessed. I steal mine from between hours as they sleep after a vigil of my torture. I give them wine. I give them tales. Lyricist, you auction my mother’s laughter. You pilfer tones from muscadine breaths and cherry blossoms inside a lonely voice in side your voice. Soprano or clarinet. Speaking tributaries of a history that connect the Mississippi with Seine boulevards of pain and longings. You bring Dick from Little Richard’s hop scotching reveries among ethics of Jim Crow. It is silk I hear in your melody from brittle footsteps of garbage dumps. Translator of memory and rhythm, you clear harvests of dreams so I can plant my lines in their silences. [End Page 442] You play menus for those who slight the culinary arts of oppressors. I run a school for blues. You say. Start ‘em off with the right pass worlds. And America ain’t nothing but a Poli Sci fiction cast as saviour in bad dreams. 3 Each riff I breathe is a runaway’s memoir. Your song straddles the back streets of Congo Square and weighs logos of pain. You do not play when Johnny come marching home but Johannes does go wagging his tales from Paris and its metaphors of blood. Spilled for ideas and art. Your music is a cloak for places dreams negotiate for more space. Pages of the imagination where Satchmo and Fletcher and Duke and Count and Bird. Are union stewards of improvisation. 4 I hear latches unlocked. Migratory windows opening behind Dizzy’s closed [End Page 443] eyes at Minton’s. You beat WC to the punch bowl of down home blues down home blues. And pour them from your heart according to almanacs your home land lends songs you manage for salt peanuts. And a Saturday night you can own. I hear lavender and the color hurt you get post cards from dreams under Vichy convesations of bullets. Where truces with darkness. And St. Louis Blues emigrate from cellars to lord over a glass of burgundy. You, poet of exile with in your land and with out polling distance for a consensus of individual voicings of days we rise polling for genius you proclaim. I hear your laughter and allegiance to canals of blood your fathers and mothers swam through. To get W.E.B. and Booker T in to close encounters with Satin Dolls and Three O’ Clock Jumps. In liberated zones of nodding heads and patting feet. Where James Brown engineers his Night Train of hoodoo lored haint cars. 5 I hear your moans from the Left Bank where blues pulls me [End Page 444] after troubles send me under three times and three times three times and three times three. I hear your moans from loneliness and nameless silhouettes of ropes hounding your name and my name and the shadow of your soul. I hear your moans your blues liquid cries dripping from windows of your axe and I make them mine I jine the circle dancing and make them mine make them mine Sterling D. Plumpp Sterling D. Plumpp...

Geography, First Peoples, and Social Justice

The geography of native or indigenous groups in the United and other former British colonies is evolving as result of both internal and external forces. Native groups in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Africa are experiencing opportunities for self-expression and for establishing native-voiced priorities that are very much part of the postcolonial present. In the United two related situations, gaming and probable cuts in the budget of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), twist the administrative tasks of tribal governments into pretzel-like contortions. On one hand, the decline of BIA funds means less revenue from federal sources; on the other, in isolated cases activities like gaming are producing revenue that greatly increases tribal autonomy. In other regions of the postcolonial world, native groups face diminishing governmental funds and lack the ability to create capital, even as they express the confident rhetoric and hope of self-governance - especially in looking toward control of land and natural resources. These conditions are part of historical process, one that not only affects the present condition of native groups but also sets the agenda for native issues in the next century. The ability and desire of native groups to define their own landscapes by modifying natural environments, establishing settlement patterns, and formally acknowledging the symbolic importance of specific sites is part of wider global system which unites hundreds of culture groups that have experienced British imperialism since the sixteenth century. Though culturally unique, the groups were systematically faced with centrally organized state power that attempted to create homogeneous relationship with all of them, as if they were one. The primary objectives of the British were to dominate other European powers in global trade and to acquire land and resources. But British colonial imperialism, in which American federal Indian policy had its roots, is ending; and native, aboriginal, or Indian groups are more able than ever to participate in determining cultural landscapes and economic survival. The pace of native survival is much like an Apache women's circle dance: small steps to slow and constant rhythm, swaying shawls leaving trail in the dust of the powwow ground. The progress is slow, sometimes the drumming is faint, sometimes the drumming is louder, but the circle is not broken. The same pattern is evident in the history of native adjustments to British colonial systems: A constant circle of native life has withstood considerable disruption. Adjustments to imperialism required natives to reestablish individual and group identity that had to satisfy two contradictory worldviews. These contradictions have created sense of ambiguity and sometimes hopelessness that can be found in almost all native communities today. The task now for those communities is to escape the reproduction of contradictions and hopelessness by returning to production of native-defined worlds in the present. David I. Wishart, geographer at the University of Nebraska, reminds us of major source of Indian hopelessness in An Unspeakable Sadness: The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians. The title of his book comes from phrase that an Omaha Indian used in 1912 to describe his sense of loss. Quoted by Wishart, White Horse says, Now the face of all the land is changed and sad. The living creatures are gone. I see the land desolate, and I suffer unspeakable sadness. Sometimes I wake in the night and feel as though I should suffocate from the pressure of this awful feeling of loneliness (Wishart 1994, v). This despair follows the Nebraska into the modern era, according to Wishart. Having defined the pervasive turmoil of the Nebraska, Wishart goes on to construct an impressive and convincing argument about the process of land losses of the Nebraska as a means of determining the justness, or lack of justness, of the United States in its treatment of the Nebraska (p. …

The Sardana: Catalan Dance and Catalan National Identity

The sardana, a circle dance from northeast Spain, emerged in the mid-19th century as a key symbol of Catalonia. A prototypical invented tradition, the sardana represents qualities that Catalans hold dear, such as harmony, democracy, brotherhood, and national identity as an achieved rather than ascribed status. Threats against the sardana are perceived as threats against Catalonia. Hence, Catalan folklorists rewrite history in an attempt to defend the dance's purity and persistence.