Dug Boat Dance: Contemporary Body and Prehistoric Experience

Historyka. Studia Metodologiczne, 2021

Since the so-called "bodily turn" in the humanities, it may pass as trivial that, as observed by Alva Noë, "experience is not a passive interior state, but a mode of active engagement with the world". Nevertheless, it seems worth repeating especially that the most direct implication of this thought-that when humans actively engage with the world they do so by moving their physical bodies around-has apparently penetrated much less. This is especially true in the case of academic disciplines involved in the study of the past-history and archaeology-which seem unprepared to investigate past embodiment in a comprehensive manner. Hence, a new methodological proposition is put forth-archaeology of motion. It is inspired by anthropologists and ethnographers' successful adaptation of participatory observation and auto-ethnography to the study of embodied practices. It makes use of embodied research advocated by Ben Spatz as well as insights from ecological psychology of James J. Gibson and its various offshoots in order to propose a positive research programme for studies in past bodily motion. The paper is capstoned with a short account of a case study on a forgotten Polish folk wrestling style where the proposed theory was put into practice.

Folklore, 2023

For a dance researcher, audiovisual recordings are the most informative part of archives. For various reasons, in Estonia, re-embodiment of traditional dances has been based more on verbal descriptions and less on film and video. Nonetheless, some analysis has been done by today, and some findings on individual, local, and temporary variability of traditional dancing in different parts of Estonia exist, and some clips have been published. Despite of availability of archival video recordings, folk dance teachers usually prefer verbal descriptions, which leads to the loss of a great deal of detailed information. In the article, I explore some of the reasons for this situation, based on my own teacher practice and a case study inquiry among teachers of high school girls' dance groups involved in the process of the 12th Youth Dance Celebration in 2017. In this project high school girls' groups were proposed to learn Ristpulkadetants (Crossed Sticks Dance) in an unusual way -as a supplement to verbal descriptions, an archival movie clip was provided to teachers as source material. This made it possible to investigate teachers' interest in the use of film, as well as the facilitating or hindering factors of actual use. About a fifth of the involved teachers expressed an opinion that archival recordings contain information not yet verbalized in descriptions and could help them in adding new qualities to the bodily dimension of their own and their students' dance. As a result of the study, it can also be said that archive videos of a traditional dance are not that available to folk dance teachers as they would like them to be.

Documenta Praehistorica, 2011

Indications for dancing activities in prehistoric Europe appeared as early as modern humans, at the start of the Upper Palaeolithic era. However, only limited data are available for this stage. In the Neolithic period, evidence for dancing appeared at many more sites, but the territory is confined to south-eastern Europe. The dancing in this case is probably part of the ‘Neolithic pack- age’, which diffused from the Near East.

Journal of the History of Ideas, 2022

Indigenous histories told in dance compose a vast and understudied realm of modern knowledge filled with thinkers creating theory through movement whose contributions have been erased by the state. The memory capsule of dance—its ideas, theories, and generative transformations of the past—encodes a history denied by textual sources. The archive of body knowledge reorients our view of world history, disclosing the influence of Indigenous knowledge on modern thought.

American Dance Therapy Association 27th Annual Conference Proceedings, 1992

This experiential workshop is based on simple folk dances, the living descendants of the primitive healing dance which is also the ancestor of dance/movement therapy. Along with creative improvisation and meditation on ancient images of woman, they provide a structure for a 'living ritual'. This helps us journey to the roots of healing dance and to the source of our empowerment as women. We are enabled to find a new context for our present-day questioning, and new hope for the future we imagine. Living Ritual Dance is a technique developed by Laura Shannon, out of many years of working with folk dance and creative ritual. It is also informed by the European Sacred/Circle Dance network, which for ten years has been a model for the experience of a more focused group consciousness in folk dance, and by dance/ movement therapy theory and methods. The simplest village folk dances are the ones which have survived the longest, and are considered by dance anthropologists to be the living descendants of the primitive therapeutic dance tradition which is also the ancestor of dance/movement therapy. Through them we can touch the source of dance as healing, communal expression, and receive new inspiration for our inner journey as well as our work in the modern world. Dance therapy is said to have its roots in primitive healing dance as it has been practised throughout history. Many authors in dance therapy literature including Leventhal, Levy, Bartenieff, Bernstein, Schmais, Hanna, Espenak and Blacking, acknowledge the historic use of dance as a therapeutic modality and an antecedent of present-day dance therapy. The early dance forms themselves have, for the most part, disappeared, but their influence is apparent in the ethnic and folk dance traditions descended from them: Lange tells us that "there is a visible connection between the art of the vanished 'primitive' cultures and those still existing" and that "these connections have lasted into contemporary times".

Documenta Praehistorica, 2010

Indications for dancing activities in prehistoric Europe appeared as early as modern humans, at the start of the Upper Palaeolithic era. However, only limited data are available for this stage. In the Neolithic period, evidence for dancing appeared at many more sites, but the territory is confined to south-eastern Europe. The dancing in this case is probably part of the ‘Neolithic pack- age’, which diffused from the Near East.

Ethnographica et Folkloristica Carpathica, 2021

My paper outlines an anthropological approach to dance focusing on the body’s interpretation within the contexts of space, sensuality, theater, fashion, aesthetic quality, and the development of gesture systems of the body. The study addresses the question whether the bareness of the body and space may be defined as a form of emptiness or rather as a case of sincere manifestation and revolves around the issues of social and personal attitudes related to dance performance, including mimetic performers, limits of social body norms, and the possibilities of survival, especially the changes in the female body’s perceptual and social roles and strategies.

Text and Performance Quarterly, 2016

Excerpts of performance writing from three dance research projects are at the heart of this article. It explores relationships between bodies, sites and ecologies and offers methods for documenting creative inquiry through a posthuman/new materialist paradigm. Projects discussed include the interdisciplinary art/science installation Fluid City; a dance research process entitled Moving, Writing, Living-Experimental Documentary Practices in Site Specific Dance Research and the site-based dance workshop Into the Fields.

Northern Scotland, 2019

The Funeralscapes team comprise three academics in contrasting but complementary disciplines. Shane McLeod, a historian of the Viking Age was based at the University of Stirling, Frances Wilkins, an ethnomusicologist based at the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, and Carlos Galán-Díaz, an environmental psychologist who was then based at dot.rural at the University of Aberdeen. The project emerged from a funding competition run by the Centre for Academic Development entitled ‘How to Collaborate Virtually’ where early career researchers were encouraged to collaborate together, online, to produce a funding application for £1000 to carry out an interdisciplinary, inter-institutional project. On winning this competition our goal in conducting this project was to explore the idea of working with participants to use historical re-enactment, using sound including song, as a means of gaining a greater understanding of the historical landscape, and exploring emotional reactions to this form of place-based, contextual learning.

Two Days After Forever: A Reader on the Choreography of Time , 2015