{"id":132,"date":"2009-05-08T10:00:08","date_gmt":"2009-05-08T10:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/?p=132"},"modified":"2015-03-12T11:19:42","modified_gmt":"2015-03-12T18:19:42","slug":"portrait-of-a-dance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/2009\/05\/08\/portrait-of-a-dance\/","title":{"rendered":"Portrait of a Dance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Professor Gail Abrams has taught in the Scripps College Dance Department for 23 years. She is cur\u00adrently team-teaching a CORE II class called \u201cThe Embodied Self: Feminist Theories of Body, Yoga, and Dance\u201d with Professor Leigh Gilmore. The class explores expression through body movement in yoga and dance, as well as the role of gender in embodi\u00adment. She also teaches Modern Dance, CORE III, Laban Movement Analysis, and a course called Dynamics of Hu\u00adman Movement, which explores effi\u00adciency (or lack thereof) in the ways we use our bodies and movement. Abrams is a Certified Laban Movement Analyst who studies the qualitative and quanti\u00adtative characteristics which contribute to expressive communication and ef\u00adficacy of all forms of human movement (including sports, dance, management, teamwork, and other motion-related tasks). <\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody has body im\u00adage issues,\u201d says Abrams when asked about her self-image. While this might be a generalization, she explains that it would be hard to find a woman who has never had an issue with her ap\u00adpearance.<\/p>\n

Like most people, Abrams has had insecurities. While growing up, people teased her for her small stature and \u201cbig Jewish nose,\u201d and she was self-conscious about being flat-chested as a teenager.<\/p>\n

Such insecurities affected her throughout high school, but her experience in college was differ\u00adent. In her sophomore year, a friend dragged her to a modern dance class and she was instantly hooked. She was attracted to the \u201cless codified move\u00adment\u201d of modern dance, and the fact that it celebrates individuality, not just prescribing a specific body type for all dancers. Modern dance, she says, is \u201cconcerned with expressive content and movement as communication.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Abrams, connecting with modern dance was the first step towards sensing her own self-worth. Exploring the connection between mind and body relieved her of many insecurities, including body image struggles.<\/p>\n

A sense of self-worth, in Abrams\u2019 opinion, is vital for accepting love from others. Each woman needs to feel good about herself before she can really believe it when someone tells her she is beautiful, or intelligent, or worthy.<\/p>\n

As a mother of two, Abrams appreciates the relationship between good parenting and a child\u2019s posi\u00adtive self-image. Her parents loved their children unconditionally and emphasized the importance of loving oneself. By the same token, Abrams was careful not to be self-critical in front of her own children. In today\u2019s culture, dieting and plastic surgery have become increasingly common. While she does not believe that caring about appearances is bad, Abrams does question the negative messages mothers send their children when fol\u00adlowing such cultural trends.<\/p>\n

Abrams believes that men have body image issues too, but feels that \u201cwomen struggle with them more than men do.\u201d This is partly a result of mixed messages coming from the media. When magazines and televi\u00adsion criticize female celebrities for both gaining a few pounds and be\u00ading too thin, women are caught in a double bind where they \u201ccan\u2019t win either way.\u201d By contrast, weight gain and loss in male celebrities is usually attributed to movie or television roles, and is not \u201ca reflection of an inadequa\u00adcy in the person himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Through her experience, Abrams has learned the value of individuality in contemporary society. \u201cWhere we make a mistake is in al\u00adlowing ourselves to be dictated to by some external arbiter of how we are supposed to look.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Professor Gail Abrams has taught in the Scripps College Dance Department for 23 years. She is cur\u00adrently team-teaching a CORE II class called \u201cThe Embodied Self: Feminist Theories of Body, Yoga, and Dance\u201d with Professor Leigh Gilmore. The class explores expression through body movement in yoga and dance, as well as the role of gender […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,234],"tags":[8,143,142],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feature","category-vol-1-issue-1","tag-becca-marion","tag-dance","tag-gail-abrams"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}