Dancing with Mystery

Dancing with Mystery
Author: Raymond H. Dressler
Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
Total Pages: 614
Release: 2022-08-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

This book is about mysteries—the mysteries which confront and confound every one of us. They come into focus when we ponder how to respond successfully to the proverbial “speed bumps in the road” of our lives. There are no quick or certain answers. The challenge is in the process of dealing with them. The author asserts that we have essentially three choices. When encountering these mysteries, we can choose to (1) wrestle with them, (2) dance with them, or (3) wrestle with them while we dance. This is Ray Dressler’s first and only book. New to this endeavor, and enthusiastically encouraged by his children to write it because they want their children and grandchildren to learn about his interesting career, he accepted the challenge. After seventeen years, his work is complete. He begins, where else, with his earliest childhood recollections. Having no idea whatsoever where his journey will take him, he invites his reader to walk along with him through his life’s adventures to the day when he retires from his naval career aboard the historic USS Constitution (“Old Ironsides”) in Boston Harbor His career is unique because he begins his professional studies in electrical engineering and architectural design. In his second year of college, however, called by God, he switches to philosophy and theology and begins his studies for the pastoral ministry. His theme is, as the title declares, Dancing With Mystery. His conviction is, “Mysteries remain mysteries, until God is brought into the mix.” As he pursues his dream, he becomes aware of an additional truth, that “coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”

Dancing Revelations

Dancing Revelations
Author: Thomas DeFrantz
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2006
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780195301717

He also addresses concerns about how dance performance is documented, including issues around spectatorship and the display of sexuality, the relationship of Ailey's dances to civil rights activism, and the establishment and maintenance of a successful, large-scale Black Arts institution."--Jacket.

Dance and the Lived Body

Dance and the Lived Body
Author: Sondra Horton Fraleigh
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
Total Pages: 330
Release: 1996-05-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780822971702

In her remarkable book, Sondra Horton Fraleigh examines and describes dance through her consciousness of dance as an art, through the experience of dancing, and through the existential and phenomenological literature on the lived body. She describes, with performance photographs, specific imagery in dance masterworks by Doris Humphrey, Anna Sokolow, Viola Farber, Nina Weiner, and Garth Fagan.

Bequeath

Bequeath
Author: Melora Wolff
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2024-09-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0807183075

What should we do with the things we inherit? In ten intimate essays as vivid as fiction and as varied as music, Melora Wolff’s Bequeath presents a flawed, funny, impressionable narrator who tries to solve the mysteries of bequeathed artifacts, family myths, and haunting mistakes—while also figuring out how to grow up in dangerous, glamorous 1970s New York City. With a wide range of voices—comic, lyric, collective, personal, joyful, and deeply elegiac—Wolff pays homage to her musician father and family as she roams a past rich with cultural touchstones and indelible characters, from West Side Story and Lost in Space to Leonard Bernstein and Gloria Steinem. Bequeath explores the legacies we impose and bestow on one another.

The Mysteries

The Mysteries
Author: Joseph Campbell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 512
Release: 1978
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9780691018232

Essays by Julius Baum, C. G. Jung, C. Kerényi, Hans Leisegang, Paul Masson-Oursel, Fritz Meier, Jean de Menasce, Georges Nagel, Walter F. Otto, Max Pulver, Hugo Rahner, Paul Schmitt, and Walter Wili.

The Anatomy of Dance Discourse

The Anatomy of Dance Discourse
Author: Karin Schlapbach
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198807724

Within the newly thriving field of ancient Greek and Roman performance and dance studies, The Anatomy of Dance Discourse offers a fresh and original perspective on ancient perceptions of dance. Focusing on the second century CE, it provides an overview of the dance discourse of this period and explores the conceptualization of dance across an array of different texts, from Plutarch and Lucian of Samosata, to the apocryphal Acts of John, Longus, and Apuleius. The volume is divided into two Parts: while the second Part discusses ekphraseis of dance performance in prose and poetry of the Roman imperial period, the first delves more deeply into an examination of how both philosophical and literary treatments of dance interacted with other areas of cultural expression, whether language and poetry, rhetoric and art, or philosophy and religion. Its distinctive contribution lies in this juxtaposition of ancient theorizations of dance and philosophical analyses of the medium with literary depictions of dance scenes and performances, and it attends not only to the highly encoded genre of pantomime, which dominated the stage in the Roman empire, but also to acrobatic, non-representational dances. This twofold nature of dance sparked highly sophisticated reflections on the relationship between dance and meaning in the ancient world, and the volume defends the novel claim that in the imperial period it became more and more palpable that dance, unlike painting or sculpture, could be representational or not a performance of nothing but itself. It argues that dance was understood as a practice in which human beings, whether as dancers or spectators, are confronted with the irreducible reality of their own physical existence, which is constantly changing, and that its way to cognition and action is physical experience.

The Dictionary of Magic and Mystery

The Dictionary of Magic and Mystery
Author: Melusine Draco
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2012
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1846944627

Every good reference book is both a product and a reflection of its time. The Dictionary of Magic & Mystery is not just another compendium or dictionary of occultism: it is a jumping-off point for further research. Here, the reader will find the ancient and modern interpretation for magical and mystical terms, together with explanations for the differences between the varied (and often conflicting) approaches to magic.

Dancing an Embodied Sinthome

Dancing an Embodied Sinthome
Author: Megan Sherritt
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2024-01-04
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 3031423275

This book provides the first in-depth analysis of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and the art of dance and explores what each practice can offer the other. It takes as its starting point Jacques Lacan’s assertion that James Joyce’s literary works helped him create what Lacan terms a sinthome, thereby preventing psychosis. That is, Joyce’s use of written language helped him maintain a “normal” existence despite showing tendencies towards psychosis. Here it is proposed that writing was only the method through which Joyce worked but that the key element in his sinthome was play, specifically the play of the Lacanian real. The book moves on to consider how dance operates similarly to Joyce’s writing and details the components of Joyce’s sinthome, not as a product that keeps him sane, but as an interminable process for coping with the (Lacanian) real. The author contends that Joyce goes beyond words and meaning, using language’s metre, tone, rhythm, and cadence to play with the real, mirroring his experience of it and confining it to his works, creating order in the chaos of his mind. The art of dance is shown to be a process that likewise allows one to play with the real. However, it is emphasized that dance goes further: it also teaches someone how to play if one doesn't already know how. This book offers a compelling analysis that sheds new light on the fields of psychoanalysis and dance and looks to what this can tell us about—and the possibilities for—both practices, concluding that psychoanalysis and dance both offer processes that open possibilities that might otherwise seem impossible. This original analysis will be of particular interest to those working in the fields of psychoanalysis, aesthetics, psychoanalytic theory, critical theory, art therapy, and dance studies.