Introduction

          Dancing is an art. Like music, it is an expression. Here, we can express ourselves through the movement of the body and the soul. Like if the music is fast, of course, a person has to dance according to the beat and if the music played is slow, the person has to fit his or her movements in regards to the music. Dance is a means of communication that is grounded in the lived body (Fraleigh, 1987). It is an appropriate medium to explore issues of self-esteem and self-knoweledge.

          Furthermore, creating choreography using a method in which individual experience are valued as sources of choreographic material holds potential for eliciting self-discovery. When such choreography is used in the educational setting, instructors' creative and pedagogical goals are merged.

Dancing

          Critical moves. Steps we must take. Movement that informs critical consciousness. Dance lies at the point at which reflection and embodiment meet, at which doing and anticipation are intertwined. Dance is, therefore, the acute moment of its conditions, appearing as if with warning but no prior diagnosis. It has all the intensity of an emergency, yet one that is invariably survived. Dance occurs through forces applied to the body that yields to them, only to generate powers of their own (Arkin, 1994). Dance makes for quick thinking, thinking on one's feet. Dance generates a sense of being in the midst of a crisis, a break, a rupture, even a loss and a prospect at the same time; thus while dancing may appear to be a series of stops and starts, for the dancer, next steps are already in motion, already passing from one (im) balance to the next. The commonsense view of crisis is that it arrests movement. Therefore it seems that breaks are total, and ruptures irreparable, as if each moment involves a rethinking of what is to be done. When applied to political life, the idea of crisis suggests a series of unconnected moves, each of which is prompted by a thought and a decision, rather than something continuous in itself and capable of going beyond itself. Applied to dance, crisis is only a metaphor, since no one could deny that the special motion and momentum of dance is inherently progressive, hence creative (Martin, 1998). Yet we still think of what dancers do as if they are constantly in the crisis they appear to be in. What is important is to move beyond that metaphor to recover a sense of what motion, progressive movement, dance are, in fact, for the dancer. Taking dance seriously in this way helps us to see beyond the despair of an arrested present to the opening that any present forges for enhancing social life, as activity done together. The sense that the present could be made other than what it is -- namely, that movement is possible and unavoidable -- is intuitive for those who dance or attend to it fully. But the social significance of this goes beyond what is formally recognized as dance to apply to life itself and therefore to politics -- the uncertainties and motions of life in the contemporary world. If one grants that along with dance, politics cannot have a solitary form or unitary object, if neither can be one thing or about one thing, it becomes possible to notice a proliferation of political activity throughout the social fabric and not simply confined to what are formally considered to be political institutions. Once politics is no longer reserved for events that constitute a sort of big bang that suddenly changes the world (if only one could find the fuse), then it can be recognized as far as the eye can see. Political activity, conceived beyond any given site or type, is viewed here as the contest over what difference can make (in the double sense of that which diverges from what is dominant in the present, and the expansive multiplicity of human expression that demands adjudication and decision).

          In this regard, politics is activity already in motion. It does not await ignition. Dance is best understood as a kind of embodied practice that makes manifest how movement comes to be by momentarily concentrating and elaborating in one place forces drawn from beyond a given performance setting (Martin, 1998). The constituent features of any given dance work include technical proclivities and aesthetic sensibilities that elaborate and depend on aspects of physical culture and prevailing ideologies. While dance is neither language nor politics, it is clarified and qualified through these means. The question, What is dance? is not usefully answered by description (as if the categories used to inventory putative dance activities were somehow taken to be empirical rather than conceptual) (Arkin, 1994). The efforts to identify dance as purely different or clearly demarcated from any other cultural practice are complicated by the fact that venues, promoters, and practitioners have self-consciously mixed dance with other aesthetic forms, nothing novel initself but surely disruptive to any firmly established classificatory schemata. Equally unsatisfying is the elimination of the question altogether by saying that dance is whatever people call dancing, unless, when such statements are made, we ask, What is being called for?

          Definitions of dance, given the field's cultural, historical, and technical diversity, if they are to remain open to these differences, cannot presume either transcendent or immanent criteria. Instead, a concept of dance needs to be formulated some steps removed from any concrete dance practice to avoid excluding particular expressions before adequate reflection on them is possible. It is insufficient, however, merely to state what dance is not. To delineate a field called "dance" requires a positive construction as well. In what follows, dance is treated as the reflexive mobilization of the body -- that is, as a social process that foregrounds the very means through which bodies gather (Arkin, 1994). Through dance, the means and ends of mobilization are joined together and made available to performers and their publics. Dance, so conceived, does not name a fixed expression but a problem, a predicament, that bodies find themselves in the midst of, whose momentary solutions we call dancing. Unlike most political practice, dance, when it is performed and watched, makes available, reflexively, the means through which mobilization is accomplished. In this regard, the relation of dance to political theory cannot usefully be taken as merely analogical or metaphorical.

          Just as dance has no defining ideal form or aesthetic model, there can be no simple resemblance between dance and social movements. What is social in dance could never substitute or stand in for the politics of other situations. Dancing cannot, by itself, cause change in other social arenas, but clearly connections and mediations can establish a certain legacy for dance beyond the scene of its performance. Nevertheless, what is situated in the world, what people contest in myriad forms, can also be found in dance (Martin, 1998). More pointedly, dance displays, in the very ways that bodies are placed in motion, traces of the forces of contestation that can be found in society at large.

Bibliography:

Arkin, L. (1994). Dancing the Body: Women and Dance Performance. Journal Article: JOPERD- Journal           of Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, Vol. 65

Fraleigh, S.H. (1987). Dance and the lived body. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Martin, R. (1998). Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University           Press