Although physical inactivity contributes substantially to the so-called obesity epidemic, public health programs have had limited success in increasing activity. Dancing is a form of physical activity widely practised by all cultures and age groups which may offer many health benefits. Community-based dance classes in urban settings may have a role in health promotion programs. However, little is known about the motivations or experiences of people participating in dance classes or the outcomes of such participation.We undertook a qualitative study of 10 people aged 14-25 years attending communitybased dance classes. One-to-one, semi-structured interviews addressed motivations, the nature of the class experience, impact on body image and other implications for health and wellbeing. The interviews were transcribed and analysed according to standard techniques of thematic analysis.The data have shown that dance class participants' experiences of 'the physical' are embedded in social, community/cultural or other values; participants respect their older teachers and they value physical expertise or knowledge that is gained over the long term; participation develops a sense of confidence and provides opportunities for transcendent experiences. These data support the conclusion that encouragement of dance class participation may offer an important strategy for health promotion as long as dance classes are not promoted in narrowly-conceived 'exercise' terms. By helping to foster a concept of physical activity that is life-long and non-individualistic, and where expertise increases rather than decreases with age, it may provide a resource for initiatives designed to address the problem of overweight.Evidence suggests that lack of physical activity in young people may be a major indicator of poor health outcomes, including obesity (Salmon et al, 2006, Power et al, 1997, diabetes and depression (Allgower et al, 2001). These poor health outcomes of youthful inactivity may also develop later in life (Baumann and Owen 1999, Power et al, 1997). It is widely agreed that there is an urgent need for young people to engage in physical activity and various public health and clinical strategies have been tried or proposed (Baur, Lobstein & Uauy 2004).Advertising and health education campaigns promoting physical activity have tended to focus on sport and other physical fitness regimes (Headley 2004) but almost no attention has been given to the preventive and therapeutic possibilities of participation in recreational dance activities in Australia. Our study sought to identify the reasons why young people attend dance classes and focused on their motivations and experiences. MethodsWe undertook semi-structured, in-depth interviews of an 'open sample' of young people attending a variety of community-based recreational dance classes. Studios offering different 3 kinds of dance classes were identified using the Yellow Pages and information from the organisation Ausdance Victoria. Teachers were approached as to the possibility ...

With the spread of digital and other modes of electronic recordings into the auditoria and lecture theatres where performance is studied, the debate about the video documentation of performance – already well rehearsed and in the pages of NTQ – is about to intensify. Rachel Fensham and Denise Varney have based the article which follows on their own work in videoing live theatre pieces for research into feminist performance. This article deliberates on their experience with the medium and examines the anxieties that surface at the point of implosion between live and mediatized performance. The first part locates these anxieties in the question of presence and absence in performance – especially that of the performer, whose body and self are both at stake in the recorded image. In the second part, the authors offer a description of viewing practices, which they present as a model of ‘videocy’. Rachel Fensham is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies, Monash University, and Denise Varney is Lecturer in the School of Studies in Creative Arts, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.

The radical innovations of African-American artists with artistic form during the 1960s and 1970s, according to black performance theorist Fred Moten, led to a new theorization of the avant-garde. His book, In the Break: The Radical Aesthetics of the Black Tradition, discusses the poetry and jazz music of artists, from Amiri Baraka and Billie Holiday to Charles Mingus, and extols their radical experimentation with the structures and conventions of aurality, visuality, literature, and performance dominant in European art and aesthetics. In this essay, I consider the implications of these processes of resignification in relation to the choreographic legacy of the artist, Eleo Pomare, whose work and career during this period was both experimental and radical and, I will suggest, critical to the formation of a transnational, multiracial conception of modern dance.

This paper aims to ask questions about how interculturalism might be informed by thinking through choreography. It examines the techniques and strategies of two Malaysian-Australian artists, Chandrabhanu and Yap, whose transmigration has constructed new forms of subjectivity from the memories and histories of dancing bodies. It asks how embodied experience, that includes dance knowledges, adapts before and after other social and political adjustments? It will examine how their choreography develops as a means to imagine the self beyond hegemonic political and social models of identity. In this regard, we have utilised the work of Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis to theorise the concept of the situated imagination and Sara Ahmed to complicate an understanding of diasporic experience in relation to home and belonging. We 'trace the cross-pollination between various states' in migratory bodies as forms of intercultural embodiment. Through discussion of two productions we consider in what ways Chandrabhanu and Yap establish modes of performative, and thus affective belonging, to place and nation.

On the cover of both of these two books are photographs of women in loose white pants-arms extended, wrists twisted, each wearing concentrated facial expressions; both seen from front and back as if doubling in a mirror. Perhaps suggested by the reaching gesture, the bodies seem to implore the viewer. It is as if movement is held out and yet in abeyance, incomplete within the image, thus awaiting further fulfillment and explanation. As with the images, both books grapple with the conundrum of how movement communicates to a viewer, and how feelings might be evoked, whether kinesthetically or choreographically. Similar but different-one more historical, the other more fragmented-they also address the timely question of empathy in creative practice.Susan Leigh Foster's monograph is organized into four large chapters: the first three are essays on the key terms of choreography, kinesthesia, and empathy, followed by a final culminating reflection on "choreographing empathy." This latter has its own argument and offers readings of contemporary choreographies by artists from Thailand, Japan, native America, France, Britain, Germany. The edited collection by Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason, on the other hand, arises from an interdisciplinary research project called "Watching Dance," and is organized into six sections each with an introduction, and includes case studies about kinesthetic empathy from fields as diverse as sports science, film, therapy, theater, dance, and photography. One might argue that these two books therefore represent some of the differences circulating in the field of dance studies, particularly as it is constituted in North America and Britain. Britain's well-developed conception of "practice as research" gives precedence to the phenomenological and interdisciplinary terrain of ideas about performance, whereas the prevalence of the concert dance tradition in the United States is aligned with the artistic and technical virtuosity of a choreographic canon elaborated within national and conceptual borders.Via the concept of empathy, both books address the burgeoning interest in embodiment and the phenomenology of experience, which is active in scholarly discourse across a range of diverse disciplines. In order to consider how empathy plays such an important role within contemporary cultural theory and creative practice, my discussion will be in three parts, provoked as much by the complementarity of these books as their differences in and through the use of key terms, images, and references. First, I will discuss their methodological contribution to choreography, and an expanded terrain of artistic research, from the perspectives of the U.S. and the UK academy. From there, I will consider the value of these books to interdisciplinary research in relation to "kinesthesia." I will conclude with discussion of the common term "empathy" as a means of addressing the place of the "affective turn" in performance and creative practice, with brief reference to wider debates in cultural studies.