Whoopi Goldberg, Meredith Monk, Ping Chong, Spalding Gray, Barbara Dilley, and other contemporary performance artists talk about their work.

This book aims to define new theoretical, practical, and methodological directions in educational research centered on the role of the body in teaching and learning. Based on our phenomenological experience of the world, it draws on perspectives from arts-education and aesthetics, as well as curriculum theory, cultural anthropology and ethnomusicology. These are arenas with a rich untapped cache of experience and inquiry that can be applied to the notions of schooling, teaching and learning. The book provides examples of state-of-the-art, empirical research on the body in a variety of educational settings. Diverse art forms, curricular settings, educational levels, and cultural traditions are selected to demonstrate the complexity and richness of embodied knowledge as they are manifested through institutional structures, disciplines, and specific practices.

Steinman's book really stands alone among performance art books. While there are many that document what particular artists are doing, this one offers a way in for a person who wants to perform (or know more about how performance artists work). Must reading for anyone interested in performance art, it will also be fascinating to those in theatre, playwriting, visual arts and performance of any sort.

This amazing, revealing handbook contains all anyone will ever need to know about reading body language. With it, you can become a veritable human lie detector, spotting exactly when people are telling the truth, when they are lying, and even how they are feeling. What can you tell by folded arms, by the distance away someone stands when talking to you, from facial expressions, or from blinking eyes? The answer? Almost everything! With hundreds of examples illustrated in full color, Body Language 101 can help anyone from any culture know more about his or her friends, spouse, colleagues, lovers, competitors, and enemies.

The essays in this interdisciplinary collection share the conviction that modern western paradigms of knowledge and reality are gender-biased. Some contributors challenge and revise western conceptions of the body as the domain of the biological and 'natural, ' the enemy of reason, typically associated with women.

The body talks and communicates with us, and provides information to others. Body language is a reflection of the emotional conditions of the person. Unexpressed emotions, lived in solitude, affect our health and are expressed in the body through pain and/or disease. Paying attention to the voices of the body and contacting our emotions and internal conflicts are necessary steps to enjoy health and wellness. Do you want to know the message your body wants to tell you when you are sick? This book can be of great value for those who want to take the path of responsibility in their lives, who want to take the first step toward freedom and self knowledge, using the topic of disease in humans as a guide. Its purpose is to help the sick person to find health status, based primarily on what happens within us. Because even if we can find help abroad (psychologists, doctors, gurus, etc) the only ones who are able to heal us are ourselves. It is a book full of simplicity so that everyone can understand and use it in your daily lives using it as the best travel companion you may have.

Knowing Body, Moving Mind investigates ritualizing and learning in introductory meditation classes at two Buddhist centers in Toronto, Canada. The centers, Friends of the Heart and Chandrakirti, are led and attended by Western (sometimes called "convert') Buddhists: that is, people from non-Buddhist familial and cultural backgrounds. Inspired by theories that suggest that rituals impart new knowledge or understanding, Patricia Campbell examines how introductory meditation students learn through formal Buddhist practice. Along the way, she also explores practitioners' reasons for enrolling in meditation classes, their interests in Buddhism, and their responses to formal Buddhist practices and to ritual in general. Based on ethnographic interviews and participant-observation fieldwork, the text follows interview participants' reflections on what they learned in meditation classes and through personal practice, and what roles meditation and other ritual practices played in that learning. Participants' learning experiences are illuminated by an influential learning theory called Bloom's Taxonomy, while the rites and practices taught and performed at the centers are explored using performance theory, a method which focuses on the performative elements of ritual's postures and gestures. But the study expands the performance framework as well, by demonstrating that performative ritualizing includes the concentration techniques that take place in a meditator's mind. Such techniques are received as traditional mental acts or behaviors that are standardized, repetitively performed, and variously regarded as special, elevated, spiritual or religious. Having established a link between mental and physical forms of ritualizing, the study then demonstrates that the repetitive mental techniques of meditation practice train the mind to develop new skills in the same way that physical postures and gestures train the body. The mind is thus experienced as both embodied and gestural, and the whole of the body as socially and ritually informed.