Dance Mind and Body - Sandra Cerny Minton

Dance Mind and Body

by Sandra Cerny Minton

NEW, 200 pages

Get other Dance books here

About Dance Mind and Body

There’s a point where it all comes together—the steps, the breathing, and the style—to transform simple body movements into kinetic works of art. Through illustrations, examples, and reference materials, Dance Mind & Body explores the fine line separating movement and dance while providing practical advice for dancers who want to improve their technique.

Dance Mind & Body features 128 exploration exercises designed to help you improve your focus, observe and explore movement systematically, refine your technique, and create movement phrases. In addition, improvisation challenges at the end of each chapter bring together all the exploration exercises to provide inspiration for you to create longer, more complete movement sequences. At the end of the book, you are challenged to create your own dances from inspiration to presentation. With more than 70 photographs, this handbook for the serious dancer also will help you achieve better posture, a greater sense of movement, and heightened artistic expression.

As the former director of dance at the University of Northern Colorado, author Sandra Minton brings more than 30 years of teaching experience to her latest book. In addition to chapters packed with practical instruction, Minton’s definitive guide features a glossary and biographical highlight boxes describing famous dancers and choreographers.

Dance Mind & Body is designed to help dancers, teachers, and students understand how to create body shapes and lines, explore dynamics and qualities of movement, identify both internal and external sources of inspiration, link movements together to make statements, and expand movement phrases into dances. From the basics of breathing to the complexities of modern choreography and form, Dance Mind & Body offers the practical instruction you need to make the transformation from dance as movement to dance as art.

About Sandra Cerny Minton

Sandra Cerny Minton, PhD, was the coordinator of the dance program at the University of Northern Colorado at Greeley. She has taught and choreographed dance for more than 30 years and directed numerous concerts.

As an active member of the Colorado Dance Alliance; the National Dance Association of the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance; and the National Dance Education Organization, Minton is well respected as a dance educator. She was a 2001 Fulbright Scholar and honored as the National Dance Association Scholar/Artist in 1999.

Sandra Minton earned her master's degree in dance education from the University of California at Los Angeles and earned her PhD in dance and related arts from the Texas Woman's University. The author of numerous articles and books on dance, she resides in Thornton, Colorado.

Reviews

"Dr. Minton guides us to the understanding that the body and mind have a distinct connection. This book is for anyone who has ever wanted to strengthen the link between the two. Step by step, you will gain a greater understanding of how the body can access the creative process of the mind."

Lee Cooper
Department of Music, Theater, and Dance
Colorado State University

From Journal of Dance Medicine & Science
"...this book is a most welcome addition to any dancer or dance educator's shelf."

About Dance

Dance is an art form that generally refers to movement of the body, usually rhythmic and to music, used as a form of expression, social interaction or presented in a spiritual or performance setting.

Dance may also be regarded as a form of nonverbal communication between humans, and is also performed by other animals (bee dance, patterns of behaviour such as a mating dance). Gymnastics, figure skating and synchronized swimming are sports that incorporate dance, while martial arts kata are often compared to dances. Motion in ordinarily inanimate objects may also be described as dances (the leaves danced in the wind).

Definitions of what constitutes dance are dependent on social, cultural, aesthetic, artistic and moral constraints and range from functional movement (such as folk dance) to virtuoso techniques such as ballet. Dance can be participatory, social or performed for an audience. It can also be ceremonial, competitive or erotic. Dance movements may be without significance in themselves, such as in ballet or European folk dance, or have a gestural vocabulary/symbolic system as in many Asian dances. Dance can embody or express ideas, emotions or tell a story.

Dancing has evolved many styles. Breakdancing and Krumping are related to the hip hop culture. African dance is interpretative. Ballet, Ballroom, Waltz, and Tango are classical styles of dance while Square and the Electric Slide are forms of step dances.

Every dance, no matter what style, has something in common. It not only involves flexibility and body movement, but also physics. If the proper physics is not taken into consideration, injuries may occur.

Choreography is the art of creating dances. The person who creates (i.e., choreographs) a dance is known as the choreographer.

Dance does not leave behind clearly identifiable physical artifacts such as stone tools, hunting implements or cave paintings. It is not possible to say when dance became part of human culture. Dance has certainly been an important part of ceremony, rituals, celebrations and entertainment since before the birth of the earliest human civilizations. Archeology delivers traces of dance from prehistoric times such as the 9,000 year old Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka paintings in India and Egyptian tomb paintings depicting dancing figures from c. 3300 BC.

One of the earliest structured uses of dances may have been in the performance and in the telling of myths. It was also sometimes used to show feelings for one of the opposite gender. It is also linked to the origin of "love making." Before the production of written languages, dance was one of the methods of passing these stories down from generation to generation.

Another early use of dance may have been as a precursor to ecstatic trance states in healing rituals. Dance is still used for this purpose by many cultures from the Brazilian rainforest to the Kalahari Desert.

Sri Lankan dances goes back to the mythological times of aboriginal yingyang twins and "yakkas" (devils). According to a Sinhalese legend, Kandyan dances originate, 250 years ago, from a magic ritual that broke the spell on a bewitched king. Many contemporary dance forms can be traced back to historical, traditional, ceremonial, and ethnic dance.

Dance Mind and Body