This dissertation investigates the way dancers experience the “personality of soma” while practicing. The purpose of this dissertation was to study the interrelationship between the personality of soma and the creation of unique dances. This study included dancers learning original movements and the entire process of practicing. The author used practice-based research and other academic resources for the study. First, major terms, such as “soma,” “somatic learning,” and “personality of soma” were defined based on other academic sources. The discussion of the concepts of soma and somatic learning is primarily based on the somatics of Thomas Hanna. The personality of soma discussion is based mainly on the concepts that Karol Wojtyla suggested from a theological perspective: origin solitude, origin nakedness, and origin unity. Practice-based research informed analysis of the entire process of constructing the piece, creating choreography, practicing, and performing. Somatic data was derived from the researcher’s first-person observation, and dancers were employed as the subjects of analysis. Experiencing the personality of soma consists of four stages: recognition, awareness, unity, and openness to soma. First, the experience of silence caused the dancers to recognize their soma and discover the potential within them. Second, the experience of origin solitude allowed the dancers to discover creativity and autonomy within their soma through an exploration of autonomous movement. Third, the experience of origin unity provided a chance to realize that soma has its own way of conducting communication and personal interaction. Fourth, undergoing the origin nakedness stage, the dancers learned how to dance their unique moves without the eyes of others, a perspective that they had internalized. The researcher who participated in the study gained self-esteem and recovered the personality of soma. They also created unique dance through a development of their own dance moves. By conducting this study, the researcher experienced transitions from passive, memorization-based learning to active learning, which allowed the utilization of somatic sensations.

This article reports on changes in health-related parameters, including muscular strength, cardiac-pulmonary endurance, flexibility, equilibrant and coordination, elderly citizens who completed a seven month movement educational program based on somatic disciplines for body-mind integration. The study included 5 participants (1 male, 4 females; age range 70-86) and was conducted over seven months (November 2013 to June 2014) at a senior welfare center in Seoul, Korea. Pre-program data collection consisted of a questionnaire on somatotype, body composition analysis, and examination of physical strength. The somatic movement program included meditation, Bartenieff Fundamentals, Pilates, the Feldenkrais Method, etc., and each participant attended class for two hours twice a week. The program comprised to sections of 20 and 14 classes respectively. After each section, body composition and physical strength were analyzed (1st exam: March 27, 2014 ; 2nd exam: June 3, 2014). The results of this study were as follows: First, the participants lost weight and body fat noticeably through somatic disciplines. Second, it seems that there is a significant interrelationship between somatotype and health elements. Indeed, the participants improved on some specific aspects of health elements more than others which depends on the participants’ somatotype. For example, leg and arm muscle functions were improved more for participants with mesomorph than those with ectomorph. The observed outcomes were attributed to the participants’ attitude of immersing in classes, mindfulness, intimate relations between teacher/peers, and awareness of their own soma in daily lives.

Human beings think, study, and develop creativity and character somatically. However, at present, many people are pressured and stressed; as a result, they have lost this sense. The purpose of this study is to explore the principles and develop a program of movement education based on somatics through the analysis of literature on somatics as a practice plan for the recovery of the vitality of soma. First, the principles of movement education based on somatics are as follows: The goals of education are atony, awareness, awakeness, and abundance. The contents of education are soma and movement responding to temporal, spatial, and relational factors. The methods of education are composed of verbal methods leading to first-person experience, including description, comparison, explanation, and questions, and non-verbal methods leading to second-person experience, including touch. Second, the program of movement education based on somatics was as follows: The “Soma 4A program” was developed to reflect the principles described above. Specially, three programs were actualized with a focus on characteristics like totality, verticality and confrontation, balance and horizontality, and movement. Finally, we recommend implementing and evaluating this program, developing various programs, expanding movement education based on somatics, and connecting this to dance education. We hope that this study will represent a small steppingstone in movement research–based somatics, and that it will help dancers and ordinary person to understand the soma through the provision of valuable data.

Shusterman developed somaesthetics, which emphasizes somatic consciousness and practice based on pragmatic aesthetics. Somaesthetics is closely related to the somatic approach to dance, which focuses on the dancer’s inner experience as the cognitive subject. This study purposes to analyze the relationship between performative somaesthetics and dance in order to determine how somaesthetics contributes to dance as an art form as well as provides the theoretical framework for the dancer’s movement exploration. For aesthetic communication between dancer and audience to occur through dance expression, it is necessary to develop the dancer’s expressive power. The dancer can enhance his/her expressive power through the development of abilities to form motor programs in dance, process proprioceptive information, and perceive dance space. These are closely connected with the development of the dance body, that is, the body schema in dance. The development of the body schema in dance is the outcome of conscious efforts to transform the everyday body into a dance body. From the perspective of somaesthetics, this implies the transformation of the dancer’s body into the aesthetic medium through practicing performative somaesthetics. The development of the dance body makes a dancer able to perform dance movements in a refined and natural way, in which the dance schemata functions preconsciously. As a result, aesthetic communication with the audience is enhanced. Therefore, through somaesthetics, particularly performative practices, the dancer develops a dance body to contribute to the expressive power of dance. As the audience reaches deeper understanding and experience of the movement possibilities of the dance responding to the dance environment, its appreciation may be heightened. This implies that it is important for students to have performing experience in the dance curriculum through experiential and performative practices in order to enhance the abilities of evaluation and appreciation in the dance performance.

The intent of this study is to explore what soma in dance is, how dancers can communization in dance, and what communication in dance is. This research will explore the contents of “Somatics”, which have been studied for soma in culture and dance research through a literature review. By doing so, I want to study what the soma is and how to communicate specifically in the dance. In addition, the research method is based on the experience of the direct soma of the dancer, which was also used as an auxiliary research method. This study is only one study exploring the way communication is done in soma dance. This study can be a small reference in terms of widening the horizon of communication rather than defining the problem of communication in all dance performances as one standard.

Since the rise of ‘dance studies’ as an academic discipline in Anglo-American dance scholarship in the late 1980s and 1990s, interdisciplinary methodologies borrowed from cultural studies have been dominating the field, generating valuable research that places central focus on the role and value of dance and/or dancing/moving bodies in ways that transcend and traverse the disciplinary boundaries between sociology, politics, and aesthetics. In more recent years, however, such theoretical interdisciplinarity itself has, to some extent, become a burden for dance scholarship, at times distracting researchers from focusing on the core concepts, viz. dance and the body, and at the cost of a balanced adoption of interdisciplinary and medium-specific methods. Accordingly, this paper focuses explicitly on these concepts, selecting three key studies on the themes of dance and the body–in particular, the works of Janet Lansdale, Susan Leigh Foster and Body-Mind Centering®(BMC)–to reveal how each exhibits different yet somehow interlinked interpretations of dance and dancing/moving bodies. To this end, the paper examines three key concepts: (1) Lansdale’s understanding of ‘dance’ as a performance piece; (2) Foster’s concept of ‘dancing’ and ‘dancing bodies’ as a performing act involving active agency; and (3) BMC’s idea of ‘mindfully moving bodies’, which highlights the interconnectedness of and interactions between body and mind. Through comparative evaluation, the paper demonstrates the distinct ways in which each discourse perceives dance and the body in relation to processes of thought and mind, revealing how dance and/or the body play an active role in shaping discursive thought, socially contingent knowledge, and human wisdom. In doing so, the paper reveals the diverse forms of knowledge that dance and the body bring out, in the process highlighting the enduring effort (intentional or unintentional) to construct renewed discourses and disciplines that challenge the long-standing western dichotomy between body and mind.

This paper focuses on North Korean restaurants as a medium of culture and tourism. Prior to the analytical discussion, the researcher first summarizes the concept of 'Munyae', which North Korea uses instead of culture, in order to understand the basic historical background of North Korean art policy. The researcher understands dance and art in North Korea as a tool to express the representative ideology of the revolution, as well as the performances, which operate inside the North Korean restaurants, serve as an important means to secure government funds for North Korean authorities. Based on the understanding of the North Korean art background, this paper examines the dual suppression mechanisms presented by the North Korean authorities, and discusses the effects of body politics on restaurant performers. According to the results of this study, the North Korea interprets their restaurant in Thailand as a transformative device to hide the function of the restaurant, which is used as a medium of political support for the communist country while placing it in the tourism industry category. In addition, the North Korea suppresses the activities of female employees, who are the actual operators and performers, in the overseas North Korean restaurants, while allowing performances coming from other countries. This dual power mechanism manipulates the female performers' bodies that can flexibly cope with other cultures that have been excluded from them, and at the same time expects their bodies tamed with socialist ideology.

In the contemporary era, the dance arts no longer adhere to a representational mode. A work is not a carrier of a story, and the dancers act out the existence, rather than represent characters and situations. If contemporary dance no longer depends on the narrative, what is the reality of the thing that communicates through the contemporary dance arts, flows between the performer and the audience erasing the boundary, thereby mutually changes the subjectivity of the two parties? What is displayed in the contemporary dance is the corporeality of mind-body unity contained by the existing individuals. This study aims to add the thickness of thought through the literary study based on art history and philosophy regarding the above questions and answers. Gilles Deleuze, who focuses on the artistic works with the contemporary sensibilities, says that contemporary art as ‘the block of sensation’ outside of the representational system directly provides the tangible attribute of intensity, thereby revealing the real. In dance that does not represent something else, the dancing body itself is the part of the material universe. As a part of the reality is the reality, the dancing body is the reality, and dance is the movement itself of reality. As Deleuze says, if contemporary art is the transcript of the real that emerges from the gap created by the dislocation from the representational system of the phenomenal world, contemporary dance is the most direct mode of the contemporary art. Diluting narrative, a dance with the corporeality is something the real itself, that cannot be captured by the linguistic dimension.

This study aims to understand Somatic Experiencing® which is a trauma healing technique through the senses of the body, and how humans are neurophysiologically connected to the autonomic nervous system in the process of recognizing the senses and react to survival. I examine whether it has an emotional release and how the trauma can be healed through the senses of the body. To this end, I investigate the survival and defensive behavior of wild animals, which is the core concept of Peter Levin's trauma healing, and discuss in terms of neurophysiology. As a result, I identify the physical implications of somatic experience based on neurophysiology. First, trauma is something that can be experienced willingly and is a natural and normal part of life. Second, for trauma healing, the intervention of the brain's neocortex is important. Through neocortical intervention, it is possible to focus on the body sensations and integrate the three-layered brain structure. Third, activation of the vagus nerve, which is closely related to our emotional response and social relationship, plays an important role in bringing about stabilization.

This study aims to explore the critical approach toward media in contemporary dance, which avoids conventional understanding of dance and artistic media. After reviewing important contexts and debates concerning contemporary dance, this study discuss the matter of its ambiguous boundaries and expansion through the concept of intermediality.

The idea of performance and dance with its ephemeral nature and media being used to preserve it, has constituted a conventional understanding of its temporality. However in contemporary dance, the archive expresses the request for extended temporality that enables the simultaneous existence of what is remaining, what is captured, and what is progressing in the performance. In addition, these archives expand into living spaces so that performances can lead to theoretical, educational, or political discourses, and function as a mediating space where heterogeneous entities such as art, virtual reality, and real life meet.

Moreover through this study, I wish to illuminate the expanded understanding of media in contemporary choreography as a criticism on previous media conventions, by introducing certain examples of autobiographical performance pieces in which the performer tells his or her own story. These works show the blurred boundaries among verbal languages, documents, and corporeal performance. They also bring participants in communication with performers, who can be understood as a physical archive of memories and experiences, roaming the ambiguous space inbetween reality and arts. Accordingly, an autobiographical performance creates an intermediality that allows the body-archive to experience and construct the virtual identity of the body in a fragmented manner.