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beauty and the power of dance as an art form. The wisdom of Harris's metaphor for teaching and spirituality has been embodied before us. That is the context out of which this paper has been written. I do not intend to offer a study of Harris's earlier "steps" of the dance of teaching and spirituality, which began with a theology of teaching, then employed dance as a metaphor for understanding this enterprise. I wish to begin with an investigation of the nature of dance as both an art form and a personal spiritual experience, then use the categories developed in this study as working metaphors for the teaching of theology. In other words, while inspired by Harris's work, I propose to offer my own observations about the connections between dance and what we do when we teach theology -more accurately, when we teach theologically. The title of the paper is taken from a particularly poetic passage in Dance of the Spirit:The Awakening of spirituality resembles the awakening of poets and artists. Painters speak of the awakened eye, where seeing is complete, alert, and intense. Painters talk of facing paintings, and not only looking at them, but feeling them with their eyes. Artists acknowledge the awakening of the sense of touch in the hands and the fingertips, especially if they are potters or sculptors. Musicians, both performers and composers, know the awakening of the ear, the outer and the inner ear, to a special world of hearing. Dancers exult at the awakening of the entire body in movement, gesture, and rhythm. And those who are poets know the secret of awakening to words -to their sound and rhythm, their precision and splendor. (Harris 1989, 3-4; italics added) It is, indeed, this awakening to the "Dancing Spirit" that is the goal of the religious life, and it is the opening up of persons to the possibility of such an awakening that is at the heart of what we do when we teach theology and do so theologically. An investigation of the nature of dance may help us experience our roles in this act of Abstract. This article explores the art form of dance as a metaphor for the teaching of theology. Employing the work of Maria Harris, the author contends that there are seven elements of dance than can serve as metaphors for teachers of theology: preparation, rhythm, movement, expectancy, response, embodiment, and performance. Each dance element is described in detail, and the correlations between specific elements of dance and how one might teach theology are presented as possible methodological steps for teaching.Dance is a striking metaphor for the teaching of theology, one that brings attention to theology as an intentional movement toward wholeness, with the point being the movement itself, rather than the method used or the particular steps taken to arrive there. Because I was trained as a musician and have always had an inclination toward the aesthetic dimensions of experience, I was drawn toward Maria Harris' powerful work on the aesthetic dimensions of education. Over the course of a remarkable series of book...
beauty and the power of dance as an art form. The wisdom of Harris's metaphor for teaching and spirituality has been embodied before us. That is the context out of which this paper has been written. I do not intend to offer a study of Harris's earlier "steps" of the dance of teaching and spirituality, which began with a theology of teaching, then employed dance as a metaphor for understanding this enterprise. I wish to begin with an investigation of the nature of dance as both an art form and a personal spiritual experience, then use the categories developed in this study as working metaphors for the teaching of theology. In other words, while inspired by Harris's work, I propose to offer my own observations about the connections between dance and what we do when we teach theology -more accurately, when we teach theologically. The title of the paper is taken from a particularly poetic passage in Dance of the Spirit:The Awakening of spirituality resembles the awakening of poets and artists. Painters speak of the awakened eye, where seeing is complete, alert, and intense. Painters talk of facing paintings, and not only looking at them, but feeling them with their eyes. Artists acknowledge the awakening of the sense of touch in the hands and the fingertips, especially if they are potters or sculptors. Musicians, both performers and composers, know the awakening of the ear, the outer and the inner ear, to a special world of hearing. Dancers exult at the awakening of the entire body in movement, gesture, and rhythm. And those who are poets know the secret of awakening to words -to their sound and rhythm, their precision and splendor. (Harris 1989, 3-4; italics added) It is, indeed, this awakening to the "Dancing Spirit" that is the goal of the religious life, and it is the opening up of persons to the possibility of such an awakening that is at the heart of what we do when we teach theology and do so theologically. An investigation of the nature of dance may help us experience our roles in this act of Abstract. This article explores the art form of dance as a metaphor for the teaching of theology. Employing the work of Maria Harris, the author contends that there are seven elements of dance than can serve as metaphors for teachers of theology: preparation, rhythm, movement, expectancy, response, embodiment, and performance. Each dance element is described in detail, and the correlations between specific elements of dance and how one might teach theology are presented as possible methodological steps for teaching.Dance is a striking metaphor for the teaching of theology, one that brings attention to theology as an intentional movement toward wholeness, with the point being the movement itself, rather than the method used or the particular steps taken to arrive there. Because I was trained as a musician and have always had an inclination toward the aesthetic dimensions of experience, I was drawn toward Maria Harris' powerful work on the aesthetic dimensions of education. Over the course of a remarkable series of book...
I begin these rather tentative and exploratory reflections by calling upon some provocative remarks by George Beiswanger, from an essay written some years ago and later reprinted:Muscular capacity is the physical means by which dances are made. But the means becomes available to the choreographic imagination only through the operation of a metaphor, a metaphor by which a moving in the muscular sense takes on the character of a doing or goings-on. … Strictly speaking, then, dances are not made out of but upon movement, movement being the poetic bearer, the persistent metaphor, by which muscular material is made available for the enhanced, meaningful, and designed goings-on that are dance.Though this passage summarizes a view that I shall try to defend and articulate, the attempt to apply the concept of metaphor troubles me: it seems a strained extension of an otherwise reasonably clear and useful term. So instead of Beiswanger's rather mysterious “operation of a metaphor” I shall suggest we employ some concepts and principles borrowed from the philosophical theory of action. But I still like his favored expression for what we are all trying to understand better—those special “goings-on” that constitute dance.
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