Meditative Creative Movement: Developing God-oriented spirituality through contemplative movement improvisation practice / Maryane Ribeiro (2020)

This thesis articulates the multi-stranded processes of developing my creative dance practice, the Meditative Creative Movement (MCM). This practice uniquely explores the holistic body-mind-spirit approach, which involves embodying the Christian faith through movement improvisation. The MCM consists of contemplating the presence of God in dance through synergising somatically-informed movement practices such as Authentic Movement within the RSVP Cycles framework. Working within the artsbased research context, this project questions: how might somatically-informed dance improvisation re-inform, expand, and develop one’s understanding and embodiment of Christian God-oriented spirituality? How do these two passions inform each other?

This work is situated among overlapping territories, the Somatic Movement Dance Education, theology, and Dance Movement Psychotherapy. This research aims to contribute to the ever-expanding, diverse, and complicated discourse of spirituality and its predominant secular views within the somatic dance field. In the search for academic support about spirituality within somatic practices from a Christian perspective, I have argued why ‘Spiritual Herstories: Call of the Soul in Dance Research’ (2020) does not address ‘God-oriented’ spirituality?

Illustrating the potential of building a relationship with God through process/homebased dance practice, the MCM not only addresses the importance of but facilitates the connection with God, as well as explores creative ways in discerning God’s voice through witnessing and metaphorical language. I reflect on the challenges of experiencing ‘self-awareness’ and ‘God-awareness’ inspired by Anna Halprin’s selfinquiries of “why are you dancing? Who are you dancing for? Does it make a difference to anybody?” (Continuum Movement, 2011, 12 min 18 s to 12 min 31). Although this work focuses on the individual’s personal choices of belief, I hope to bring a fresh Christian perspective of God-oriented spirituality to somatic dance studies, ultimately, aiming to offer this practice to a wider context outside of academia, to support and inform not only the somatic dance professionals but also amateurs, who may or may not be Christians.