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Advantages of dynamically-typed languages:The absence of a separate compilation step (which is much more common) means that you don't have to wait for the compiler to finish before you can test changes that you've made to your code. This makes the debug cycle much shorter and less cumbersome.
Dynamically typed languages must make all of their checks at runtime because the type might change during the course of the execution. Static typed languages resolve all types during compile time so the cost is consumed up front, one time. This is the main reason why dynamic typed languages are typically slower.
No. Dynamic languages are not slower than static languages. In fact, it is impossible for any language, dynamic or not, to be slower than another language (or faster, for that matter), simply because a language is just a bunch of abstract mathematical rules.
Dynamic programming language is a term used broadly in computer science to describe a class of high level programming languages that execute at runtime many common behaviors that other languages might perform during compilation, if at all.
Dan Bornstein gave a presentation on Dalvik at Google I/O. It's worth watching to learn about the system in general, including the constraints you care about. The specific issue of non-Java languages compiled into Java bytecode comes up during the Q&A.
Remco van 't Veer has a github project where he's patched Clojure to work on Android. Tim Riddell has written a tutorial on how to use it.
As mentioned here by @sean, there is sometimes a bigger problem than just performance. Dan Bornstein discusses it when asked about Jython, at ~54:00 in video. There is currently no support for dynamic languages which generate bytecode on-the-fly, (because the bytecode translation is not available at runtime).
Android just got scripting
There are some patches to make clojure work.
http://riddell.us/tutorial/clojure_android/clojure_android.html
I think the real issue is the use of byte code generators by some dynamic languages; they won't generate byte code for the Davlik VM. Therefore eval will not work.
Given the relatively speaking cramped hardware of the phone running you probably should just target java and not worry about a dynamic jvm language. They dynamic languages on the jvm aren't going to be as efficient as the java to my understanding.
Besides the Android SDK is pretty sane and easy to write for I don't think you'll experience very many benefits using something else.
dynamic languages for the JVM would be hard pressed to obtain good performance on Dalvik
Dynamic languages are hard pressed to obtain good performance, period. If you want performance, use a statically typed language like Java (or C#, F# etc.).
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