Experiencias de danzaterapia de mujeres que han sufrido cáncer de mama. Un estudio fenomenológico

Objective: This essay aims at identifying, describing and analyzing possible changes both in the experience of the body and in interpersonal relations of women with breast cancer, which result from their participation in Dance Therapy group meetings.Method: This is a phenomenologically oriented qualitative research using Maria Fux´s dance therapy method for group experiences. Eight meetings are described here, and an analysis of descriptions based primarily on Merleau-Ponty and María Fux is provided.Results: The participants have been able to express pain and sorrow over the circumstances that breast cancer and its relational environments have brought to their lives. They have been able to go through moments of creation and surrender to the rhythmic body sensations and experiential environment with different emotions lived separately and jointly. They have revived memories and sensations of their childhood and adolescence, and finally, they have rediscovered their sensitive body through body resignifications marked by the absence of the breast, and by means of feelings of greater acceptance and integration of lived experiences in new gestalts.Conclusions: This project is still under way, but it is already possible to conclude that the life experiences provided in dance therapy have allowed these women to improve their integration and welfare. Likewise, they have felt positive changes in the perception of their corporality and in their way of being in the world and with other subjects, thus experiencing the body in a new and different way.

The Narrative Value of Dance Communication: "habitus", musicality and emotion

The richness of dance comes from the need to work with an individual body. Still, the body of the dancer belongs to plural context, crossed by artistic and social traditions, which locate the artists in a given field. We claim that role conflict is an essential component of the structure of collective artistic creativity. We address the production of discourse in a British dance company, with data that spawns from the ethnography ‘Dance and Cognition’, directed by David Kirsh at the University of California, together with WayneMcGregor-Random Dance. Our Critical Discourse Analysis is based on multiple interviews to the dancers and choreographer. Our findings show how creativity in dance seems to be empirically observable, and thus embodied and distributed shaped by the dance habitus of the particular social context.

Typical reggaeton in Morocco: forms of female political affirmation throught dance

Through an ethnographic account, this text analyses how social dance may become a discourse involving the cultural affirmation of a subordinate group. It describes how a group of girls faced with a complex of outlooks that construed them as Moroccan, Muslim or unattractive —or as objects of education and intervention— responded by affirming their own culture with an unanticipated corporal discourse. The way in which looking construes bodies is explored through metaphors: a hand that touches, a chisel that sculpts, a whip that lashes and a cobweb that controls and traps bodies. Owing to this political dimension of dance, workshops can also be an oppressive and silencing tool; to prevent this, the article concludes with a series of recommendations to implement dance in social intervention processes.