| Popis: |
This master thesis is a study of bodily experience with dancing salsa, seen from a perspective of health promotion. The aim is to understand the experiences and room for manoeuvre of people having practiced salsa in Denmark. The intention is to contribute and inspire to expand the understandings of health promotion that lies behind many initiatives in Denmark and which mostly has an instrumental and goal-rational approach to body, movement and health. The investigation is based on a survey of 447 completed responses and five interviews with practitioners of salsa in Denmark, and a mapping of current tendencies in the treatment of the body and the use of body movement in health promotion within Danish society. Different experiences and opportunities for self-expression and action that salsa can give in a Danish context is analyzed and discussed. This study utilizes the analytical and methodological framework of Maurice Merleau -Ponty's bodily - existential phenomenology and Mogens Pahuus ' life- philosophical - existential theory of the good life. By focusing on the body as a co-creator of experiences and health, it provides an understanding of how the participants experience their own bodies, the music and dance partners, and how these things, as well as the social relationships, affects them. Salsa provides an opportunity to exercise and move the body, but also to use skills and experience an improvement of one's physical, mental and social well-being, happiness, self-expression and self-realization. It can also contribute with pleasure, a feeling of presence and an opportunity to use oneself, as many people may lack in everyday life. The possibility of meeting new people under positive, confident and creative terms creates potentials and unpredictability, which may incidentally enrich the practitioners' lives. In addition, practicing salsa helps to create awareness that people is body, and not only have a body that has to meet current health ideals. The body gets a different meaning in salsa, and a healthy body is one that is experiencing and sensing, and through movement and engagement is involved with the world and the dance. In this way dancing salsa, as a volunteer leisure activity, exceed a professional intervention practice and becomes part of the good life for some people. |
