Joy, Flow, and Personal Transformation
Joy, Flow, and Personal Transformation
This chapter locates ballroom dance's transformative potential in the affective experience of synchronized performance, with particular emphasis on how it brings pleasure and feeling of well-being to the dancer. It examines the radical shift in awareness that occurs during the dance event itself, where feelings of joy and euphoria displace feelings of self-consciousness and worry over everyday life. It considers Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of optimal experience and flow in order to understand the events that can lead to such states of awareness as well as appreciate the appeal of ballroom dance as play. It also discusses the notion, advanced by Csikszentmihalyi and Stith Bennett, that play is grounded in the “concept of possibility” and is action that generates action, creating a unified experience flowing from one moment to the next. The chapter argues that flow and flow states generate feelings of positive personal transformation, of becoming beautiful.
Keywords: ballroom dance, synchronized performance, self-consciousness, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, optimal experience, personal transformation, personal transformation, becoming beautiful
Illinois Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
