| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 教育學系 === 106 === This dissertation traces the shifts of my life’s trajectory from a former dancer to a dance teacher. These changes also marked the beginning of my search for the meaning of life.
The story begins with the end of my personal dance performance. I reached my life’s zenith in my thirties, as others cast envious eyes on my work and my life. Despite my athletic flesh, however, a sense of void fed my growing anxiety. In 2015, I came to Taiwan to study. Suddenly, I was no longer a teacher but a student. Why was it so difficult, I could not help but wonder, for a teacher who had worked for more than a decade to become a ‘student’ again? Fortunately, in Professor Lee Tsung-Chin’s class, I was deeply moved by discovering the body through touch. Feeling that the body seemed to have been trying to say something to me, I started to learn to listen to the voice of my own body.
This dissertation adopts Writing as its research methodology. I started to face myself and learn from the rich wisdom of life. Writing inquiry is to understand the body’s narrative; it is an act of expression; it is a key which takes me home. Writing can be compared to the art of poetry. With the help of self-narrative, life stories, and dialogues with the body, one exposes, organizes, and gazes at himself, so as to commit to papers his true self. These highlighted fragments of life are extremely precious. At the same time, during the course of writing, I saw my life’s transformation. This allowed me to arrive at a new understanding of myself, and to like myself again.
The first chapter of this dissertation outlines my research motivation, its purposes, and research questions. Chapter Two discusses self-narrative as the research methodology and the reason behind this choice. In Chapter Three, I will recall my life story and my trajectory from a dancer to a dance teacher. Chapter Four focuses on my transformation after my re-encounter with dance in Taiwan. Chapter Five focuses on the significance of the dance to me. Finally, in Chapter Six, I argue that dance education is an art which helps people to achieve self-realization. Such understanding of dance education allows me to continue the quest for the origin of art and education. This provides more possibilities for the practice of dance education.
Dance is the fulcrum to lift one’s own life. Thanks to the dissertation writing process, I have slowly managed to make sense of my own understanding of the relationships between body, dance, education, and human beings. Body is the source and recipient of human senses and consciousness. Dance expresses the human mind and emotions. In the course of education, the teacher helps others to attain self-realization, which in turn helps himself to fulfil his life. As long as we believe in love and life, whenever and wherever, we will dance in the wind and freely find the dance moves of our lives.
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