Nine Songs is one of Lin Hwai-min’s most important works. As one of the features of Nine Songs, it combines traditional Chinese culture with western modern dance techniques and accepts the way of thinking of modern dance to create a fusion of traditional Chinese culture. In this study, the work Nine Songs serves as the research object, and various perspectives are used to analyze the cultural background and the fusion of East and West in this work. In addition to serving as a valuable reference for the study of the fusion of traditional dance with modern one in East Asia, this research is of great significance in expressing the aesthetic fusion of Chinese and Western dance in order to promote modern dance development.

The purpose of this research is to confirm the value of the New Folk Song Dance in the history of modern Korean dance. Based on literature review and video analysis, this research investigates the characteristics of the New Folk Song Dance by analyzing the dance movements of ‘Cheonan Samgeoli’, ‘Nillilia’, and ‘Cheonyo Chonggak’ in cultural films reproduced under the direction of the Society for Dance Documentation and History. Based on the dance analysis theory of Janet Adshead, the characteristics and values of New Folk Song Dance were explored by analyzing the components of dance (movement, dancer, visual and auditory environment) and the nature of dance (genre and style). The result of this research shows that the New Folk Song Dance has the characteristics of cultural expressions of modern dance through which we can enjoy occidental music as well as traditional one. The dance is composed of simple and repetitive movements as well as a variety of formation, which makes it very easy for the public to learn. This allows us to confirm the value of the New Folk Song Dance as another type of modern dance heritage, ultimately leading us to redefine the perspective of modern dance culture.

This postmodern era that we live in has its characteristics of eradicating the boundaries between forms of art. In this movement, where pure art and popular art are actively fusing and the importance of popular dance is becoming apparent, this paper has been developed to study a representative case on popular dance. For research methods, case studies and Dance Analysis has been combined. Case studies on idol related publications and thesis papers were used to demonstrate concepts and characteristics of popular art and idols. With Dance Analysis, details of has been examined. To accomplish this task, details from news articles, pictures, music videos, and stage clips has been reviewed and the four stages of Dance Analysis, describing the Components of the Dance, Discerning the Form of the Dance, Interpreting the Dance, and Evaluating the Dance has been applied. The three following conclusions can be drawn from this study: First, the dance emphasizes cuteness and sexiness to attract male fans. Second, the dance moves are highly repetitive, which makes it easy to pick up, appealing to the mass, exciting and enjoyable with popularity. Third, the easy-to-follow moves are friendly and makes the spectators join to develop an extraordinary feeling of group cohesiveness. In this culture, popular art has significant influence on people. I earnestly hope that this work could offer a complimentary vision for popular dance to rediscover its true meaning and value and elevate its status to a inspiring dance.

Since the rise of ‘dance studies’ as an academic discipline in Anglo-American dance scholarship in the late 1980s and 1990s, interdisciplinary methodologies borrowed from cultural studies have been dominating the field, generating valuable research that places central focus on the role and value of dance and/or dancing/moving bodies in ways that transcend and traverse the disciplinary boundaries between sociology, politics, and aesthetics. In more recent years, however, such theoretical interdisciplinarity itself has, to some extent, become a burden for dance scholarship, at times distracting researchers from focusing on the core concepts, viz. dance and the body, and at the cost of a balanced adoption of interdisciplinary and medium-specific methods. Accordingly, this paper focuses explicitly on these concepts, selecting three key studies on the themes of dance and the body–in particular, the works of Janet Lansdale, Susan Leigh Foster and Body-Mind Centering®(BMC)–to reveal how each exhibits different yet somehow interlinked interpretations of dance and dancing/moving bodies. To this end, the paper examines three key concepts: (1) Lansdale’s understanding of ‘dance’ as a performance piece; (2) Foster’s concept of ‘dancing’ and ‘dancing bodies’ as a performing act involving active agency; and (3) BMC’s idea of ‘mindfully moving bodies’, which highlights the interconnectedness of and interactions between body and mind. Through comparative evaluation, the paper demonstrates the distinct ways in which each discourse perceives dance and the body in relation to processes of thought and mind, revealing how dance and/or the body play an active role in shaping discursive thought, socially contingent knowledge, and human wisdom. In doing so, the paper reveals the diverse forms of knowledge that dance and the body bring out, in the process highlighting the enduring effort (intentional or unintentional) to construct renewed discourses and disciplines that challenge the long-standing western dichotomy between body and mind.