Dancing the Data

Dancing the Data and its interrelated CD-ROM, Dancing the Data Too, show the ways in which educational research and the visual and performing arts can embrace each other to engender a culture of feeling and meaning and in so doing evoke new ways of knowing, learning, and teaching. It draws on the artistic mediums of dance, collage, poetry, music, and drama and invites the reader to engage with the educational research endeavors of the contributors as they seek to move beyond the traditions of established approaches to represent and reflect on their work in artistic forms. Dancing the Data seeks to open up conversational beginnings with teachers, researchers, and students, and to tempt them to discuss and reflect on the ways in which established methodological and pedagogical boundaries might be crossed and new ways of seeing and doing valued and explored. Contents: Carl Bagley/Mary Beth Cancienne: Educational Research and Intertextual Forms of (Re)Presentation: The Case for Dancing the Data--Celeste Snowber: Bodydance: Enfleshing Soulful Inquiry through Improvisations--Jim Mienczakowski/Lynn Smith/Steve Morgan: Seeing Words--Hearing Feelings: Ethnodrama and the Performance of Data--Dwight Rogers/Paul Frellick/Leslie Babinski: Staging a Study--Performing the Personal and Professional Struggles of Beginning Teachers--Terry Jenoure: Sweeping the Temple: A Perform-for the legal content in his works, which found fit audiences among jurists at the Inns of Court law schools and in King James' Court. Shakespeare pleased the king on these matters enough to have him command his plays to be repeated on an occasion. For himself, Shakespeare learned from his own writing how to deal with the languageof law theoretically and conceptually with such concepts as equity and mercy in Chancery. He used his own family life, personal documents, and legal problems to give impetus to his version of borrowed characters, plots, plays, and history. These personal events, from the placement of the references, give his plays, which sometimes end with a fictionalized, wish-fulfillment, or literary compensation, an autobiographical initial compulsion. « From November 1604 until Shrove Tuesday 1605 the Master of the Revels chose to stage seven of Shakespeare's plays, all dealing with justice and law, equity and mercy, courts and jurisdiction: 'Othello', 'Merry Wives of Windsor', 'Measure for Measure', 'Comedy of Errors', 'Loves Labours Lost', 'Henry V', and 'Merchant of Venice'. W. Nicholas Knight argues this was no coincidence: Tilney used the plays to teach the proper use of law to the new King James. In this pioneering study of Shakespeare's life and work, Knight discovers new sources for the plays--the lawsuits and family concerns of Shakespeare himself, matters which may well have inspired Shakespeare then and heighten certain fresh thematics now. This is a unique work of legal history and theater criticism showing how each may illuminate the other. (Arthur F. Kinney, Director, Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amberst) « W. Nicholas Knight has made exciting discoveries where law and literature intersect in Shakespeare's plays. This book persuades me that the 'allegory' Shakespeare made of his life carries important and dynamic traces of the troubles, legal and familial, that beset the playwright's daily thoughts in the 1590s and beyond. Thisis a pioneering work of scholarship and detection in the field! (Tony Connor, Department of English, Wesleyan University, Connecticut)