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Dance: Performance and Professional Practices

Table of contents

Dance: Performance and Professional Practices at University of Salford

Language: English Studies in English
Subject area: arts
University website: www.salford.ac.uk
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Definitions and quotes

Dance
Dance is a performing art form consisting of purposefully selected sequences of human movement. This movement has aesthetic and symbolic value, and is acknowledged as dance by performers and observers within a particular culture. Dance can be categorized and described by its choreography, by its repertoire of movements, or by its historical period or place of origin.
Performance
Performance is completion of a task with application of knowledge, skills and abilities. In work place, performance or job performance means good ranking with the hypothesized conception of requirements of a task role, whereas citizenship performance means a set of individual activity/contribution (prosocial organizational behavior) that supports the organizational culture. In the performing arts, a performance generally comprises an event in which a performer or group of performers present one or more works of art to an audience. Usually the performers participate in rehearsals beforehand. An effective performance is determined by competency of the performer - level of skill and knowledge. Spencer and McClelland in 1994 defined competency as "a combination of motives, traits, self-concepts, attitudes, cognitive behavior skills (content knowledge)" that helps a performer to differentiate themselves superior from average performers. A performance may also describe the way in which an actor performs. In a solo capacity, it may also refer to a mime artist, comedian, conjurer, or other entertainer.
Professional
A professional is a member of a profession or any person who earns their living from a specified professional activity. The term also describes the standards of education and training that prepare members of the profession with the particular knowledge and skills necessary to perform their specific role within that profession. In addition, most professionals are subject to strict codes of conduct, enshrining rigorous ethical and moral obligations. Professional standards of practice and ethics for a particular field are typically agreed upon and maintained through widely recognized professional associations, such as the IEEE. Some definitions of "professional" limit this term to those professions that serve some important aspect of public interest and the general good of society.
Performance
"I hope my recordings of my own works won't inhibit other people's performances. The brutal fact is that one doesn't always get the exact tempo one wants, although one improves with experience."
Aaron Copland, quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music. ISBN 0028645812.
Professional
When I speak of the purpose of self-culture, I mean that it should be sincere. In other words, we must make self-culture really and truly our end, or choose it for its own sake, and not merely as a means or instrument of something else. And here I touch a common and very pernicious error. Not a few persons desire to improve themselves only to get property and to rise in the world; but such do not properly choose improvement, but something outward and foreign to themselves; and so low an impulse can produce only a stinted, partial, uncertain growth. A man, as I have said, is to cultivate himself because he is a man. He is to start with the conviction that there is something greater within him than in the whole material creation, than in all the worlds which press on the eye and ear; and that inward improvements have a worth and dignity in themselves quite distinct from the power they give over outward things. Undoubtedly a man is to labor to better his condition, but first to better himself. If he knows no higher use of his mind than to invent and drudge for his body, his case is desperate as far as culture is concerned.
William Ellery Channing, “Self-Culture”
Dance
Of what is the body made!
It is made of emptiness and rhythm.
At the ultimate heart of the body , at the heart of.
the world there is no solidity…there is only the dance.
George B.Leonard, p. 189.
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