A Practice of Understanding

Dance and Resistance: An Embodiment of the Body as a Medium to Fight Violence against Women

“…LaMothe uses Gerard Van der Leeuw's perspective to see the correlation between the body and dance. LaMothe wrote "dance is the most universal of the arts because doing it requires nothing other than one's own body" [24]. In LaMothe's perspective, dance starts from the main source, namely the body.…”

“…In more depth, LaMothe emphasized "every human being is a body moving, its movement is its life" [24]. The body as a universal medium for dance forms movement.…”

DANCING TO TRANSFORM: HOW CONCERT DANCE BECOMES RELIGIOUS IN AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY by Emily Wright. 2021. Bristol, UK: Intellect. 240 pp. $106.50 hardcover. ISBN: 9781789382839.

“…As noted in the introduction, she is deeply indebted to philosophy of religion scholar Kimerer LaMothe. LaMothe was one of the first scholars to animate dance studies with insights from philosophy and religious studies (2004, 2006). Wright relies strongly on LaMothe's concept of “bodily becoming,” a philosophical principle that posits that physical movement, and specifically dance, is central to the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual development of a human being (LaMothe 2015).…”

PRAGMATIST PHILOSOPHY AND DANCE: INTERDISCIPLINARY DANCE RESEARCH IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH by Eric Mullis. 2019. Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan. 247 pp. $89.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9783030293130. $59.99 paper. ISBN: 9783030293154. $44.99 e-book. ISBN: 9783030293147. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-29314-7

“…Mullis's monograph brings a renewed focus on pragmatism, which has been overwhelmed in the American context by phenomenological, analytic, and continental philosophical approaches. However, Pragmatist Philosophy shares a focus on philosophical approaches to dance and religion with Kimerer LaMothe's Between Dancing and Writing: The Practice of Religious Studies (2004) and an emphasis on relationships between dance and religion with Sam Gill's Dancing Culture Religion (2012). Simultaneously, Mullis draws attention to autoethnographic methodologies in the dance field, aligning with work such as the edited collection Fields in Motion: Ethnography in the Worlds of Dance (Davida 2011), Karen Schupp's (2017) autoethnographic studies of dance competition culture, and Lliane Loots's (2016) “The Autoethnographic Act of Choreography,” to name but a few.…”