Spiritual Herstories

Amanda Williamson is visiting honorary professor of somatic movement dance education at Coventry University in the UK. She is founding editor of The Journal of Dance, Movement & Spiritualities, a peer-reviewed journal, coeditor of Dance, Somatics and Spiritualities: Contemporary Sacred Narratives, both also published by Intellect. Barbara Sellers-Young is a senior scholar and professor emerita at York University in Toronto, where she was dean of the School of Arts, Media, Performance and Design. She is the author of many books, including The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity and Belly Dance, Pilgrimage and Identity. She is currently editor-in-residence at Dance Chronicle.

Preface: Dancing Incantations – Celeste Snowber



Introduction – Amanda Williamson and Barbara Sellers-Young



Part One: Patriarchal Critique and Spiritual Feminist Perspectives – Amanda Williamson  



1: Woman, body, earth and spirit – Linda Hartley 



2: Informed by the Goddess – Jane Bacon



3: Until The Lions – Jayne Stevens



4: Symbols of the Goddess in Balkan Women’s Dance – Laura Shannon



5: Spirals and circles – Amanda Williamson



6: Soul loss and retrieval – Eline Kieft 



7: Reclaiming our innate vitality – Caroline Frizell



Part Two: Somatic Ethnography, Diasporic Spiritualities and Postcolonial Voices – Barbara Sellers-Young 



8: Dancing bodies and ritual spaces – Yvonne Daniel



9: ‘Niimikaage’ into the twenty-first century – Sandra Laronde and Elaine Keillor



10: Unearthing the presence of African women dancers in Nyanza province, 1900–40 – Seonagh Kummer 



11: Love Poems to God – Veta Goler



12: Dancing the Four Directions – Rosalie Jones



13: Souls, soil and soma – Ojeya Cruz Banks and Miriam Marler



14: Dancing through myself – Barbara Sellers-Young



Part Three: Spiritual Journeys in Dance Research – Amanda Williamson and Barbara Sellers-Young



15: Writing Why We Dance – Kimerer L. LaMothe 



16: Mystery, magic and the mundane – Celeste Snowber



17: Creativity as medicine – Janet Lynn Roseman



18: Dancing evolutionary spirituality – Cheryl Pallant



19: Attunement and evanescence – Sondra Fraleigh



20: Awakening the spirit through dance, somatics and Scaravelli Yoga – Sara Reed



21: Spirituality in Aurelia Baumgartner’s Tanzphilosophie – Aurelia Baumgartner and Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe