This book brings together women in higher education with an emphasis on academic and inspirational leadership in dance and spirituality. The chapters in this collection provide scholarly reflection and inspiration for those interested in the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary nature of dance and spirituality. Augmented through epistemologies of embodied thinking, this book may be of interest to those working in the often private, lived and sensed meeting points between academia and spirituality. Written by women whose research proficiency extends into areas such as philosophy, anthropology and ethnography, biblical studies, psychotherapy, embodied education, feminism and diasporic studies, the scope of the book travels across multi-directional spiritual geographies. The writers in this volume have either centred their life’s work on spirituality and dance, or ebbed and flowed across disciplinary and cultural boundaries, expanding the theorization and documentation of spirituality in dance studies through innovative scholarship. The book follows the edited collection, Dance, Somatics and Spiritualities: Contemporary Sacred Narratives (Williamson et al. 2014); however, it is broader in its cultural and methodological diversity. Chapters decisively dive into, or gently drift across disciplinary areas such as African-American spirituality, diasporic spiritualities, spiritual feminisms and Jungian spirituality. Readers travel the excavated and rived landscapes of the Goddess – the fresh ravines of thealogy and spiritual feminism, and spiritualities developing through what Arjun Appadurai (1996) refers to as ‘ethnoscapes of migration’. A number of authors offer spiritually orientated historiographies, challenging colonial inscription. Chapters are geographically and religiously diverse; research topics range from Hindu Mythology, Zen and Buddhism, Caribbean and Afro-Latin divinity in Cuba, Brazil and Haiti, and indigenous dances rooted in symbols of North America, Mongolia and China.  ​


​Preface: Dancing incantations, Celeste Snowber

Introduction 1: Amanda Williamson and Barbara Sellers-Young

Part 1: Spiritual Feminist Perspectives, Amanda Williamson
Chapter 1:  Woman, body, earth and spirit: Journeys of descent through myth, embodiment and movement practice,  Linda Hartley
Chapter 2:  Informed by the Goddess: Explicating a processual methodology,  Jane Bacon
Chapter 3:  Until The Lions: Amba’s story,  Jayne Stevens
Chapter 4:  Symbols of the Goddess in Balkan women’s dance, Laura Shannon
Chapter 5:  Sensing her: Matrifocal symbolism in the field of Somatic Movement Dance Education and Therapy, Amanda Williamson
Chapter 6:  Soul loss and retrieval: Restoring wholeness through dance, Eline Kieft
Chapter 7:  Reclaiming our innate vitality: Bringing embodied narratives to life through Dance Movement Psychotherapy, Caroline Frizell

Part 2: Somatic Ethnography, Diasporic  Spiritualities and Postcolonial Voices,  Barbara Sellers-Young
Chapter 8:  Dancing bodies and ritual spaces: Diaspora practices of  transcendence and conversion, Yvonne Daniel
Chapter 9:  ‘Niimikaage’ into the twenty-first century, Sandra Laronde and Elaine Keillor
Chapter 10:  Unearthing the presence of African women dancers in  Nyanza province, 1900–40 Seónagh Kummer 
Chapter 11:  Love Poems to God: The contemplative artistry of Dianne McIntyre, Veta Goler
Chapter 12:  Dancing the Four Directions: The spirit of  intuition, Rosalie M. Jones
Chapter 13:  Souls, soil and soma: Memoirs of Japan and Guåhan/Guam in (post)colonial times, Ojeya Cruz Banks and Miriam Marler
Chapter 14:  Dancing through myself: Memory, identity, spirituality,  Barbara Sellers-Young

Part 3: Spiritual Journeys in Dance Research, Amanda Williamson 
Chapter 15:  Writing Why We Dance: The predicament, pitfalls, potential and promise of writing about dance and spirituality,  Kimerer L. LaMothe
Chapter 16:  Mystery, magic and the mundane: A dancer’s journey  in the liturgy of life, Celeste Snowber
Chapter 17:  Creativity as medicine,  Janet Lynn Roseman
Chapter 18:  Dancing evolutionary spirituality, Cheryl Pallant
Chapter 19:  Attunement and evanescence,  Sondra Fraleigh
Chapter 20:  Awakening the spirit through dance, somatics and Scaravelli Yoga,  Sara Reed
Chapter 21:  Spirituality in Aurelia Baumgartner’s Tanzphilosophie, Aurelia Baumgartner and Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe
 

Notes on Contributors 524 Index