Greetings!
My name is Moira Frazier, and I will be an intern at the Center for Interfaith Cooperation this year. I am a junior at Butler University, where I am a Religious Studies major and Dance minor. This blog will follow my path as I attempt to find the connections and parallels between religious customs and dance traditions. I plan on using the intersection of these two entities to promote an educational and ultimately ecumenical message about the many different religious traditions that are present in the Indianapolis area.
As part of this internship, I am attempting to organize a series of events that incorporate both dance and religious traditions. I would like for these events to include learning and discussion about how dance and movement are incorporated in different religious and ethnic cultures. This series of events will ideally include not only textual information, but also actually learning phrases of movement from specific tradi-tions. By getting people to learn the movement themselves, I am hoping to promote a greater personal understanding of how movement fits into religion.
Ideally, each event would focus on a different movement tradition. For example, one event may focus on Jewish/Israeli folk dance, while another would be dedicated to educating oneself about Hindu dance. Each event would include a hands-on approach to learning about each dance tradition. Ultimately, I would like to gather a following of people throughout the series, and culminate in one special event that incorporates all that we will have learned thus far about the role of movement in religious traditions.
Dance and religion, and the intersection and connection of the two, is a topic that is not discussed in great detail very often. There is little scholarly work on the subject, nor is there much common knowledge even within either dance communities or religious communities. However, my own experiences have led me to see that movement is an integral part of religious practice for many traditions. I want to use this blog, and this series of events, to promote knowledge about the interplay between two interesting subsets of human culture, and ultimately encourage a strong ecumenical and educational message.