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.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of empathy ability on dance emotion and dance expression of college students. The subjects of this study were 169 college students who majored in modern dance at each four universities in Seoul, Busan, Gyeonggi, and Jeolla provinces. The survey tool used a empathy ability, dance emotion and dance expression questionnaire, and collected data were analyzed by frequency analysis, correlation analysis, t-test, ANOVA, and multiple regression analysis using SPSS 21.0 program. As a result, first, students of modern dance majors had high physical expression ability in boys and 9~11 years in dance participation period, and high cognitive ability in 4th graders. Second, the empathy ability of college students of modern dance major had a significant influence on fun, vitality, pride and achievement. Third, empathy ability of college students of modern dance major had a significant influence on dance expression ability. Fourth, the fun and vitality of dance emotions of college students had a significant influence on the performance of dance expression. The results of this study are expected to provide basic data for teaching dance expression in the curriculum of modern dance majors.