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Fire Dancers in Thailand's Tourism Industry explores the evolution of fire dancing from informal community jam sessions into the iconic, tourist-oriented performances at beach parties and bars, through a close consideration of the role of affect in the lives of fire dancers in the ever-changing scene. Rather than pursuing the common notion that tourism industries are exploitative enterprises that oppress workers, Tiffany Rae Pollock centers the perspectives of fire artists themselves, who view the industry as simultaneously generative and destructive. Dancers reveal how they employ affect to navigate their lives, art, and labor in this context, showcasing how affect is not only a force that acts on people but also is used and shaped by social actors toward their own ends. Fire Dancers in Thailand's Tourism Industry highlights men as affective laborers, investigating how they manage the eroticization of their identities and the intersections of art and labor in tourist economies. Exploring moments of performance and everyday life, Pollock examines how fire artists reimagine their labor, lives, and communities in Thailand's tourism industry.

This article discusses dissemination of dances in and out of Sweden, and the dancing communities these processes create. The examples are the African-American Lindy Hop, which originated in New York City, and the polska , a couple dance considered to be the number one Swedish folk dance. Both dances were once used in local community dancing, while today they belong to dancing communities in many places around the world.

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate qualitative value indicators of region-based community dance for cultural urban regeneration. To this end, the conceptual structure of local-based community dance was explored and evaluation indicators were developed by deriving questions related to this. The specific research procedures and results are as follows: First, a literature review and Delphi survey were conducted to obtain factors and questions regarding qualitative value indicators. Consequently, four factors of local singularity, convergent creativity, sustainability, and community culture were obtained with 43 questions. Next, a preliminary survey targeting 122 people who have participated in representative local dance festivals (the ‘Wonju Dynamic Dancing Carnival’, ‘Cheonan World Dance Festival’, and ‘Andong Maskdance Festival’) in Korea was conducted to determine the relationship between the factors and questions. Multi-dimensional value indicators with 30 questions in four factors were obtained from an exploratory factor analysis using SPSS version 25.0. Then, the main survey, targeting 341 people who have participated in three representative local dance festivals in Korea, was conducted to verify the validity of the value indicators. Finally, evaluation indicators of 26 questions (seven questions for regional uniqueness, five questions for convergent creativity, seven questions for sustainability, and seven questions for community culture) were developed from a confirmatory factor analysis using AMOS version 24.0. Additionally, the contents evaluated by each factor are as follows: Firstly, ‘Local Singularity’ is a factor in whether the evaluation target sufficiently contains the unique characteristics of the region. Secondly, ‘Convergent Creativity’ is a factor in whether the evaluation target converges the indigenous culture (traditional culture) and acceptance culture (modern culture) of the region well. Thirdly, ‘Sustainability’ is a factor in whether the evaluation target contributes to the sustainable development of the region. Fourthly, ‘Community Culture’ is a factor in whether the evaluation target contributes to the formation of community culture in the region. This study is significant in that it emphasises the potential possibility of community dance, which can contribute to cultural urban regeneration based on the perspectives of cultural democracy. Therefore, the results of this study are expected to be extended and applied to various types of community dance in the future. Moreover, it is further forecasted that this study will suggest the meaning of the qualitative valuation of art and culture for a variety of subjects, such as policy experts and administrators, as well as for directors, choreographers, and participants in community dance.

China’s extremely restrictive anti-pandemic policy has significantly affected the independent dance sector. A pioneer of interdisciplinary choreography in Guangzhou, Southern China, the Ergao Dance Production Group is transforming its creative mode, abandoning an artist-led model to construct a practice that radically reassesses the social significance of dance and its value to the public. In this way, the Ergao Dance Production Group has responded sensitively to the Cantonese social context. This article, which points out the community’s transformation from an individual to a collective-based practice model, is divided into two sections. The first section, “Nowness,” discusses China’s independent choreographers and the importance of considering their current living conditions. The second section, “Future,” focuses on the establishment of Southern Dance Hall and provides insight into the emerging form of independent choreography rooted in China’s post-pandemic socio-economic structure. This creative process is formative yet fluid as it evolves across time.

Against the backdrop of a four-year study into dance for people with Parkinson's, I examine one woman's claim that dancing makes her feel beautiful, and, as such, is fundamental to her well-being. I debate the challenge that this claim poses to those who argue that beauty in dance is at best unimportant, at worst disenfranchising. In debating this challenge, I create a link between aesthetics and health through a reformulation of the value of beauty in the context of chronic illness and well-being. This link then allows me to discuss how feeling lovely could become relevant and meaningful within the context of participating in dance.

Recreational dance offers significant psychological well-being potential. However, traditional instruction emphasizes technique while limiting attention to nervous system development and embodied meaning-making. Despite empirical support for polyvagal theory, motor learning science, somatic education, and phenomenology, their systematic integration into unified structures is not clearly established in recreational dance contexts. This protocol integrates nervous system regulation, motor learning, and creative expression within structured Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing (ISTD) modern dance syllabus for recreational adults. It presents a 12-week integrated dance-mindfulness intervention addressing this gap through a three-phase structure grounded in neuroscience and embodied pedagogy. The intervention comprises eight standardized components delivered weekly. The randomized controlled trial evaluates intervention effects using the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), Depression Anxiety Stress Scales-21 (DASS-21), the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS), the Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS), and the Leisure Involvement Scale (LIS). Qualitative assessment via semi-structured phenomenological interviews (Weeks 8 and 12) and weekly journaling captures somatic awareness, nervous system resilience, technical confidence, creative expression, relational and social belonging, and embodied meaning-making. Intervention participants are expected to show significantly greater improvements compared to controls. Results will establish evidence-based practice standards for recreational dance and demonstrate neuroscience integration’s efficacy for psychological wellbeing and embodied meaning-making.

The Foundation for Community Dance is the national lead body for community dance in the UK. It has been at the forefront of the development of community dance in Britain continuously for over twenty five years. It began, in 1986, as the National Association of Dance and Mime Animateurs (NADMA). This professional association of dance practitioners (referred to at the time as animateurs) sought to raise awareness of a newly identified profession and provide a forum for the dissemination of the forms, working processes and techniques needed to work successfully in community settings. This paper seeks to instigate a critical assessment of NADMA's work by considering it in relation to theoretical debates concerning cultural provision and pedagogic practice of the time and, subsequently, to the theory of communities of practice. The paper considers the cultural and educational policy contexts within which the dance animateurs, who formed and ran the association, worked. This helps explain the multiple demands and tensions, inherent in the cultural and pedagogic politics of the time, to which the profession was subject. The paper suggests that these were ultimately managed through the cooperative and collective working of NADMA members. In the five years following NADMA's formation some key parameters for dance development in Britain were established. The paper suggests that NADMA made a significant contribution to such development by helping to create a more integrated, adaptable dance profession and an infrastructure for participatory dance that pre-figured the national dance agency network of the 1990s.

This chapter contains sections titled: English Country Dance Modern ECD The Politics of Space Spatialized Urban Culture References

This essay asks how notions of intellectual property played out among African American vernacular-dance communities during the first half of the twentieth century, when copyright law did not extend to choreography and when racial segregation governed the dance world. On the one hand, tap and jazz dancers' liberal borrowing of steps from one another defied the logic of US copyright law, with its prohibition against the unauthorized reproduction of another's original work; but on the other, the extra-legal measures that performers developed to protect their moves bore notable affinities to Western constructions of intellectual property. The examples provided by these dancers also prompt a reconsideration of the fit between copyright law and dance more generally.