Amanda Williamson - Spiritual Herstories: Call of the Soul in Dance Research

First published in the UK in 2020 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2020 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright 2020 Intellect Ltd

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Cover image: Thank you to Red Sky and Sandra Laronde, a member of the Teme-Augama-Anishnaabe (People of the Deep Water), and photographer Don Lee for offering this stunning photo of Jinny Jacinto with horse skull Tono.

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Print ISBN: 978-1-78938-082-8

ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78938-084-2

ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78938-083-5

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This is a peer-reviewed publication.

Dr. Amanda Williamson and Professor Barbara Seller-Youngs new collection of writings, co-authored by pioneering female academics from across continents, on dance and embodied spirituality, is shimmying in my heart.

Spiritual Herstories emphatically shakes the grounds of the academy. It challenges the assumptions of positivist methodologies with embodied insights, research of the imagination and creative moving investigations. It queries Europeanist thinking with post- colonial discourse, new historiographies, and offers re-evaluations of pre-patriarchal spiritual traditions in contemporary contexts. Feminist epistemologies are honoured and also critically examined. Written by female academics from Native American, African-American, European, and Pacific traditions, and from diverse fields of dance studies, (somatics, philosophy, ethnography, theology and thealogy, psychotherapy and more), this publication shares interdisciplinary approaches and listens to transnational and transcultural voices, particularly female voices, to create a wide dancing circle, where academic writing can be moving and bodied with soulful knowledge; and where academic questioning is inspirited.

We need inspired and fresh approaches to academic knowing and to spirituality and embodiment in Higher Education, which makes this text an essential resource for scholars, students, thinkers, feelers, movers and makers artists, dancers and seekers. Spiritual Herstories is a key text for those who want to explore how spiritual values and experiences underpin creativity, or drive ethical and humanistic standpoints in research (secular and sacred). This is essential reading for those who need to refresh and re-vitalise our current cultural ecologies.

June Gersten Roberts has contributed to the Higher Education Landscape in the UK through extensive lecturing, through making films and her publications on Dance, Health and Spirituality. She is a freelance dance maker and video artist, researcher and author, and recently retired Senior Lecturer in Dance at Edge Hill University. Her most recent research is focused on the ageing body, captured through text and film.

Celeste Snowber

Imagine sitting down to a grand gourmet feast, filled with the richest colours, textures and sumptuous flavours from all over the world, and allowing every combination of taste to infuse one another. This is the experience of reading Spiritual Herstories: Call of the Soul in Dance Research so ripe with the gestures and textures of soul and body that one needs time to marinate and be marinated in the feast. This book is steeped in diverse, cultural, somatic understandings of spirit and soul. Post reading, I continue to be catapulted into gratitude for these writers, and their lives, immersed in so many kinds of somatic and dance practices, research methodologies and insights. These are not only insights, but also bodysights, inviting us to dwell in the terrain of fecundity.

The original meaning of the word preface stems back to the Old French meaning, opening part of sung devotions and the Latin to say beforehand. This anthology is an act of devotion to what has often been absent in the canon the exquisite interconnection between dance, soul and mind within scholarship. It proclaims that one does not speak, but dance, and it is living through and in the body that informs words. Here is a rewriting of history, a herstory, and a cross-fertilization that goes beyond gender and is both diverse and inclusive. We are offered a new lens and interpretation of history. This is an invitation that enchants us back to soul, celebrating herstories through spiralizing knowledges. The word incantation comes from the Latin incantare, which means to enchant, and reminds us that ritual has always been associated with chanting and music, and I would extend that to dance. So, this preface is a dancing incantation, singing the praises of SpiritualHerstories.

Be prepared to let this anthology sit with you for a long time. Each chapter stands alone in its beauty, depth and breadth of knowledge; it is truly a transdisciplinary conversation, which draws you back over and over again to nourish your whole being. Amanda Williamson and Barbara Sellers-Young have brought together a multi-disciplinary transformative work. Their comprehensive introductions weave inter-relationality between chapters. The gift is to witness the interconnections among authors. These authors represent not only themselves, but are steeped in the incommensurable traditions of dance, and even those who have gone before us are woven seamlessly into the text. We are found in each others stories, and I invite you to sit at this table and be nourished. Not only sit but also move, shift, breathe, sigh and dance through the pages.

Astounding in its diversity in both form and content in the way spirituality is articulated, the reader is invited into what has been present for so long, and yet absent. I am reminded of Kimerer LaMothes stating, its absence haunts at the centre when referring to a philosophy of bodily becoming. For too long there has been an absence of serious expressions of spirit, soul and body in the vast amount of dance literature, and particularly an absence of womens spiritualties. Here, in this anthology, women draw on a variety of fields and dare to inhabit the realms of mystery and the unknown. Seldom has there been such a mosaic of writers in a collection, where spirituality is grounded in the embodiment of what it means to be a whole person, including not just the light, but the shadow and pain of the sacred.

SpiritualHerstories does not only have ramifications for dance studies, but for all who want to explore what it means to be fully human and attentive to working holistically, ecologically and ethically in the world. More than ever, we need a somatic and embodied scholarship, rooted in the pulse and rhythm of the body, the wisdom that seeps from earth and sky, and the bones and skin of our own bodies. Cosmology and ecology meet in this anthology, where visceral practice invigorates disciplines.