Haiti, Cuba and Bahia in Brazil each mantain African-derived religious systems, albeit in the new world, that rely heavily on dance behaviour. Combining her background in dance and anthropology to parallel the participant/scholar dichotomy inherent to dancing's 'embodied knowledge', Yvonne Daniel examines the misunderstood and oppressed performative dances of vodou, yoruba and candomble in terms of physiology, psychology, philosophy, mathematics, ethics and aesthetics.