Dancing the Thinking Body, the Feeling MindTMSM: An arts-based research exploration

Three dance videos and the contextual essays are the result of three years of immersion using arts-based research methodology, celebrating primary experience as valid and useful within academia. The basis of this project has been to explore the relationship or non-relationship between primacy experience and worded experience in the arts, and in movement therapy. The work begins with a literature review that explores the idea that dance itself is the "living" literature of our field.; The Portals Project is a literal investigation of the differences between primary experience, translated experience, and pure dance art. This is achieved by portraying movement, first in silence, next with a narrative score accompanying the same movement, and finally by presenting an excerpt from a masked dance performance piece. Viewers/participants are asked for their reactions. This dance performance video has functioned as an elicitation tool.; The Acts-Based/Body-Based Interview, poses questions about the meaning and impact of The Thinking Body, The Feeling MindIMSM, the technique that the author created and practices with a community of movers. Some of them were also participants in this research. The responses were non-verbal, and were the basis of and the inspiration for the dance video-art project Wilderness Rituals. Wilderness Rituals aesthetically expresses the findings of the arts-based body-based interviews. It is a piece of magic realism where the real (research responses) are fused with the fantastic.; Ascent-I will not be Sad in this World is a dance performance created by the author and integrates three years of this research. This performance combines and stages the worlds of art and movement therapy, functioning together. It acknowledges primary fundamental human experience (Art, Dance and Movement) as a means to preserve and understand our own humanity. It is the aesthetic analysis of the findings of this study.