Dancing Identity: Metaphysics In Motion by Sondra Horton Fraleigh

by Sondra Fraleigh

Combining critical analysis with personal history and poetry, Dancing Identity presents a series of interconnected essays composed over a period of fifteen years. Taken as a whole, these meditative reflections on memory and on the ways we perceive and construct our lives represent Sondra Fraleigh's journey toward self-definition as informed by art, ritual, feminism, phenomenology, poetry, autobiography, and-always-dance. Fraleigh's brilliantly inventive fusions of philosophy and movement clarify often complex philosophical issues and apply them to dance history and aesthetics. She illustrates her discussions with photographs, dance descriptions, and stories from her own past in order to bridge dance with everyday movement. Seeking to recombine the fractured and bifurcated conceptions of the body and of the senses that dominate much Western discourse, she reveals how metaphysical concepts are embodied and presented in dance, both on stage and in therapeutic settings. Examining the role of movement in personal and political experiences, Fraleigh reflects on her major influences, including Moshe Feldenkrais, Kazuo Ohno, and Twyla Tharp. She draws on such varied sources as philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Martin Heidegger, the German expressionist dancer Mary Wigman, Japanese Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata, Hitler, the Bomb, Miss America, Balanchine, and the goddess figure of ancient cultures. Dancing Identity offers new insights into modern life and its reconfigurations in postmodern dance.

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Sondra Fraleigh is founding director of the Eastwest Somatic Institute for Dance and Movement Studies and the author of six books on dance and movement philosophy published by university presses. She is professor of dance emeritus, and chaired the Department of Dance at the State University of New York at Brockport for nine years, later directing the graduate dance program there. Fraleigh is certified in the Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education. She has also been an elected Faculty Exchange Scholar for the State University of New York. Fraleigh is ERYT with Yoga Alliance, Experienced Registered Yoga Teacher at the advanced 500-hour level. She teaches yoga, depth-movement dance, and somatic workshops at several locations in the United States, Europe, Japan, and New Zealand. Fraleigh’s home and that of Eastwest Somatics is in the beautiful Red Rock country of Southwest Utah.