The Flicking Dancing Mind

According to the subject orientation, the anthropology of dance and the anthropology of music are the subfields of anthropology. Because of the special character of dance, the scholars can’t record dance movement as easy as they record musical note onto music score. It took a relatively long time before anthropologists did some research on it, and not until 1960s did the subject being established. What’s more, anthropology of dance became known to Chinese scholars around the year 2000. There has been a book published named with the anthropology of dance, while in China, as far as I am concerned that there has existed a systematic written version but unpublished yet. For I’ve attempted to interpret the whole book during my 3-year-study as an undergraduate student, the first part of my thesis combines part of the interpretation with my understandings to the masterworks of the field along with bibliographical research. The first part consists of seven chapters, starting with the analysis of the core and the definition of dance, named"what is dance?", followed next is to see dance from the anthropological perspective and to define the subject. The fourth chapter is about techniques and methods and the last two chapters describe the symbolic meaning and structural analysis which are special characters of dance. The second part of the thesis is to sort out researches in mainland China on anthropology of dance, bibliographically and theoretically. The last part is based on techniques and methods of anthropology of dance to do the case study of mainland China’s "independent dancer", including giving definition to "independent dancer" and illustrating the historical development as well as the status quo of "independent dancer". The main methods using to get a whole picture of the dancers are through interviewing and participant observation, then classifying their information into "disciplinary background ","education background", "growth circumstance", "choreographing method"and "performance style". After comparing and analyzing, conclusions are made about the liberalism spirit behind these dancers’career choice as an independent dancer and their spiritual pursuit of harmony in body and mind.