How does the representation of bodies change in times of war? How can dance be political activism? This paper considers the dances of Hijikata Tatsumi and Mary Wigman in relation to their experiences of war, and explores their use/representation of the body as a political statement. In both cases, these artists sought to use dance to rescue the body from its subjugated social standing.Mary Wigman's dance technique is influenced by German korperkultur, and had its birth in her work with Rudolph Laban and at the natural paradise of Hellerau. Wigman admired Nietzsche's desire to rescue the body from “despisers of the body,” who saw the physical body as an obstacle that must be denied in order for the soul to reach salvation. For Wigman, the “sensuous dancing body” that Nietzsche referred to in Zarathustra “became the vehicle to an authentic life.”Hijikata's idea of dancers as “lethal weapons that dream” offered a view of bodies that were aware of personal agency and chose to step outside of usefulness for the elusive “advancement” of society. He explains, “in this sense my dance, based on human self-activation … can naturally be a protest against the ‘alienation of labor’ in capitalist society.” Douglass Slaymaker's writing on post-war Japanese literature frames Hijikata's sentiment in the time: images of body as nikutai [flesh] were considered counterhegemonic because they defied the notion that the individual body belonged to the national body. Hijikata redirected the body's sacrifice away from productivity and toward the creation of art.
The execution strategy of technical dance movements is constrained by aesthetic and qualitative artistic requirements. As such, there are limited leap-landing strategies that may be used by dancers when executing a grand jeté or saut de chat. The purpose of this study was to determine potential differences in lower extremity angular positioning and joint loading when performing a dance-style leap landing. Fifteen female dancers (age: 20 ± 1 years; height: 1.61 ± 0.13 m; weight: 58.00 ± 11.89 kg) completed six leap-landing trials during which three-dimensional kinematics and kinetics data were collected. Paired-samples t-tests (α = 0.05) and Cohen’s d effect sizes (ES; large ≥ 0.8) were used to compare the following variables: jump height; peak vertical ground reaction force; loading time; loading rate; joint angular positioning of the ankle, knee, hip, and trunk in the frontal and sagittal planes; and joint angular impulse of the ankle, knee, and hip in the frontal and sagittal planes between the dominant and non-dominant limbs. Frontal plane hip angular impulse was significantly greater in the dominant limb (p = 0.023, ES = 1.53). While no other statistically significant differences were observed between dominant and non-dominant limbs, moderate effect sizes were observed for the hip and trunk angles in the frontal plane along with hip impulse in the sagittal plane. This study indicates that dancers might slightly alter their landing strategy at the hip joint when leap-landing onto the dominant limb. Frontal plane hip mechanics should be considered to minimize overuse injury potential in the dominant limb.
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