Paper short abstract:

By focusing on dancing practice at a professional ballet company in Thailand, this paper argues that how a variety of bodily movements are continued and varied in a cross dancing way that they dance different kinds of dances.

Paper long abstract:

This paper opens a path toward understanding the bodily experience in dancing, which is a site of embodiment of experience as well as of emergence of a variety of different bodily images. We experience the world directly through our body. In dancing bodily experience emerges as a bodily image for those dancing as well as for those seeing them dancing. Although we can allocate dancing itself in the field of bodily experience as such, dancing has been paid scant attention in anthropology as a site of bodily experience.

Based on my ethnographic fieldwork, this paper discusses dancer's bodily experience that lies in between 'variation' and 'continuity' in embodiment, describing and analyzing the daily practice at a professional ballet company in Thailand, reflecting the influential aspect of bodily experience of learning dancing at school and the company.

The dancers have been trained as professional classical ballet dancers at the company through daily practice of dancing classical ballet there; however, most of them had experienced learning classical Thai dance at school as a part of their school education system in Thailand before they became professional ballet dancers.

This paper argues that how a variety of bodily movements are continued and varied in a cross dancing way that they dance different kinds of dances such as classical Thai dance, classical ballet, contemporary Thai dance and so on, describing the practical process of dancing.