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 ...

This paper undertakes a critical re-examination of the ways in which dance-making relationships between the dancer and the choreographer in American modern dance have been conceptualised in dance discourses. The essay proposes that a defining aspect of modern dance practices (from the moment that, after Duncan and Fuller, it became a group as well as a solo form) was the dancing together of the choreographer and the dancer(s) as the central mode of dance creation and transmission. In dance discourses, however, this dancing relationship is frequently not acknowledged. Texts by dance scholars Susan Leigh Foster, Amy Koritz and Randy Martin which draw on theoretical frameworks from outside dance are analysed in terms of the ways the theoretical frameworks that underpin them both make it possible to raise the question of the nature of the dance-making relationship while at the same time can also make the dancer's and the choreographer's dancing together invisible or unrepresentable. The analysis shows how scholarly discourses and the theoretical frameworks upon which they are built are already invested in regimes of intelligibility and visibility which have consequences for the representation of modern dance. This analysis forms the basis for proposing the need for a non-individualised, inter-subjective and intercorporeal understanding of the dancer and the choreographer and their relationship in modern dance.

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In the first part of the twentieth century early modern dancers created both a new art form and the forms of group social organisation that were its condition of possibility. This paper critically examines the balletic and disciplinary 'training' model of dancer formation and proposes that the assumption of training in dance can obscure other ways of understanding dance-making relationships and other values in early modern dance. An 'artisanal' mode of production and knowledge transmission based on a non-binary relationship between 'master' and apprentice and occurring in a quasi-domestic and personalised space of some intimacy is proposed as a more pertinent way to think the enabling conditions of modern dance creation.

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