The Phenomenology of Dance
... Through a phenomenologically inspired lens [18], we understand dancing as an aesthetic first-person experience [19,20] and a symbolic non-verbal way to build resilience, emphasising the whole person's belonging in context [21]. Drawing on interviews [22] with four people who differ in age, gender and dance genre, we investigate their experiences while dancing. ...
... Dancing has been forced on humans and non-humans, used as punishment, and humans have been punished for dancing. We build on Sheets-Johnstone's [18] and Farleigh's [36] descriptions of dancing as a phenomenon. The structures inherent in dancing as a phenomenon therefore become relevant to how the dancers experience themselves, others and moments of belonging when dancing. ...
... Sheets-Johnstone's and Farleigh's phenomenological descriptions of and perspectives on dancing turn the attention to how dance can be described differently in relation to different people's experiences with dancing. Dancing is therefore perceived as a lived experience, from which additional perspectives and understandings are gained than from a cognitive perspective, as dancing is understood as a non-verbal/animate way of knowing [18]. This way of knowing is of specific relevance to young children's education since they have limited verbal competence to express their knowing [37]. ...
Individuals’ capacities to contribute to more sustainable living are deeply influenced by their early life experiences. Hence, there is a need to discover which experiences are relevant to young children’s contemporary and future contributions to more sustainable living. Perceiving children as aesthetically oriented to the world and their sense of belonging as a core experience for social and cultural sustainability, and using the example of dancing, we investigate how such a sense of belonging can be supported through aesthetic first-person experiences. This article is therefore structured around the following research question: How can adults’ experiences of themselves, others and their sense of belonging—when dancing—inform explorations of ways to foster embodied and aesthetic belonging for social and cultural sustainability in early childhood education (ECE)? Drawing on a phenomenological study, we analyse interviews with four dancers, who differ in age, gender and dance genre. Our analysis reveals their experiences when dancing as being in a meditative state, having a sense of freedom and feeling body and mind as one, described as an overall “different”, resilient way of being and belonging in a social context. Our findings indicate that facilitating moments of sensible and bodily awareness can support a non-verbal understanding of oneself and others, as well as arguments for promoting aesthetic experiences while dancing as relevant to sustainable practices in ECE.
... Many dance scholars have followed Merleau-Ponty's and other phenomenologists' theories of the body (Sheets-Johnstone 1980;Fraleigh 1987;Parviainen 1998;Rouhiainen 2003;Foster 2012). For example, Fraleigh (1987Fraleigh ( , 1991Fraleigh ( , 2015 has adopted the phenomenologist approach in her task of defining the phenomenon of dance: "When I make any movement truly mine, I embody it. ...
... And in this, I experience what I would like to call 'pure presence,' a radiant power of feeling completely present to myself and connected to the world" (Fraleigh 1991, 13). Similarly, Sheets-Johnstone (1980) says that to define dance, we must go back to the immediate encounter with it, to the heart of the experience before any reflection takes place. In other words, the meaning of dance comes alive if we have lived experience of it; it is not the result of knowledge of it (Sheets-Johnstone 1980). ...
... Similarly, Sheets-Johnstone (1980) says that to define dance, we must go back to the immediate encounter with it, to the heart of the experience before any reflection takes place. In other words, the meaning of dance comes alive if we have lived experience of it; it is not the result of knowledge of it (Sheets-Johnstone 1980). Dance has the potential to challenge both rationalism, mind-body dualism, and individualism, self-other dualism. ...
Heatwaves, extinct species, and broadly polluted areas worldwide are apparent signs of the human-caused ecological crises. Scholars agree that a collective ecological change is needed to save the Earth. Thus, we must critically reflect how we, as dance educators, are dependent on how dance is defined, and how its educational aims and practices are justified in the era of ecocrisis. In this article, we suggest an EcoJustice approach to dance education. This theoretical study is based on the EcoJustice education framework but draws from our practices as dance educators and the directors of community dance projects. In this article, we open up a discussion on the ways that the processes of dance education can lead to an ecosocially informed paradigm shift. We will suggest three aspects considering the three aspects of an EcoJustice approach to dance education: 1) celebrating diversity, 2) recognizing the lived body, and 3) practicing co-creation.
... 131), and on the "psychological sensitivity the researcher brings to the task" (p. 130). Carrying out the steps may be understood as the rhythmic structure of the method, but intuition seems to be what Sheets-Johnstone (2015) would label the "perpetual projection of force" that makes a rhythmic structure truly rhythmic. ...
... Considering Lefebvre (1992Lefebvre ( /2004 and Sheets-Johnstone (2015) led to a common understanding of rhythm as dependent on a flowing force of energy connecting a series of moments or elements. Applying this understanding of rhythm to phenomenological methods in psychology suggested that intuition is the uniting force of such inquiries. ...
This paper discusses how different concepts of rhythm apply to phenomenological psychological research. We suggest that viewing phenomenological research in psychology as rhythmic not just enables us to notice how the research procedure implies certain shifts within in a series of temporally structured movements of repetition and change; it also enables us to deepen our understanding of the manner in which the researcher engages with the studied phenomenon through intuition. In other words, we argue that rhythm is fundamental to the method of how we understand “the things themselves.”
... In dance philosophy, the experience of reflecting, thinking and understanding through dancing is recognized and well described. There is Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's classical notion of "thinking in movement" (Sheets-Johnstone, 1980, 2011, Dorothée Legrand and Susanne Ravn's legendary article that describes "a form of reflective consciousness at the bodily level" in dancers (Legrand & Ravn, 2009), Anna Petronella Foultier's work on dance and "the reflections of the living body", explained through the "form of reflection, that Merleau-Ponty sometimes calls "radical", which is said to capture things in the state of their appearance" (Foultier, 2013). And there is Einav Katan-Schmid's book on embodied philosophy in dance, where she, inspired by Varela, Thompson and Rosch's notion of "embodied reflection" in "The Embodied Mind" (2016), presents a chapter on "embodied reflections", that describes "the effortlessness of thinking in movement" (Katan-Schmid, 2016). ...
... In dance philosophy, the experience of reflecting, thinking and understanding through dancing is recognized and well described. There is Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's classical notion of "thinking in movement" (Sheets-Johnstone, 1980, 2011, Dorothée Legrand and Susanne Ravn's legendary article that describes "a form of reflective consciousness at the bodily level" in dancers (Legrand & Ravn, 2009), Anna Petronella Foultier's work on dance and "the reflections of the living body", explained through the "form of reflection, that Merleau-Ponty sometimes calls "radical", which is said to capture things in the state of their appearance" (Foultier, 2013). And there is Einav Katan-Schmid's book on embodied philosophy in dance, where she, inspired by Varela, Thompson and Rosch's notion of "embodied reflection" in "The Embodied Mind" (2016), presents a chapter on "embodied reflections", that describes "the effortlessness of thinking in movement" (Katan-Schmid, 2016). ...
Dancers and dance philosophers report on experiences of a certain form of sense making and bodily thinking through the dancing body. Yet, discussions on expertise and consciousness are often framed within canonical philosophical world-views that make it difficult to fully recognize, verbalize, and value the full variety of embodied and affective facets of subjectivity. Using qualitative interviews with five professional dancers and choreographers, I make an attempt to disclose the characteristics of what I consider to be a largely overseen state of consciousness: embodied reflection. Dancers are familiar with this attentive bodily presence, which constitutes their work mode and heightens their abilities as experts. Detailed descriptions of their daily work at the theatre help us grasp the qualities and understand the enigmas of the absorbed state of bodily thinking. Husserl’s theories on reflection and Merleau-Ponty’s work on motoricity support our understanding of the structures behind embodied reflection. I believe it is a common human resource, and that whether we are experts or not, we all have the ability to reflect non-conceptually through bodily and/or affective activity.
... The question is, "How could dance help Helene Caecilie to heal the disintegration of her Self and world and give a form to herself?". Maxine Sheets-Johnston -a dancer who in her life studied the phenomenology of movement 37 -suggests that the dancer experiences the dance as a constantly moving form that is unified in its progression through time 38 . The dance is not a series of disconnected moments but rather a continuous flow that is constantly in the process of becoming. ...
This co-written paper discusses strategies for dealing with schizophrenia. For Helene Cæcilie, an expert by experience, dance has served as an artistic outlet for schizophrenia, allowing her to work and exist in the world. Through the act of automatic writing while in psychosis, Helene Cæcilie has transformed the bewildering world of her mind into choreography. Choreographies have been a memory map tracing her mental state through the years. Her experience shows the dialectic of disintegration and reintegration that characterizes the existence of a schizophrenic person. In her existence, this dialectic transforms her experience of disintegration (a "very bleak place") into something "life-affirming" through cho-reography. Delusional explanations, creation of art products, and dance are traced back in this paper to a process of Gestaltung-a German term that in English can be rendered as "form in formation"-the act of giving form to the experience of the formless. We find Gestaltung at work in the chiasm linking the moment of disintegration and that of reintegration in the course of schizophrenic existence. It has been argued that most of the schizophrenic person's efforts are directed at compensating for this disintegration- putting together and reassembling what is scattered. To Helene Cæcilies otherwise disintegrated self and world-experience, dance operates an embodied Gestaltung which restores continuity and temporal coherence to the Self, individuality, and boundaries in space, unity, and structure in the body, attunement with other bodies in movement and at the same time delimitation with respect to them.
... Dance is a complex human activity that provides a rich, ecologically valid test case from which to understand the role of the body in cognition, and to investigate skilled performance and the development of expertise. In recent decades a growing number of researchers in phenomenology (Albright, 2011;Buttingsrud, 2021;Legrand & Ravn, 2009;Ravn, 2009Ravn, , 2020Sheets-Johnstone, 1966, 1981, cognitive science (Kimmel et al., 2018;Kronsted & Gallagher, 2021;Merritt, 2015;Mingon & Sutton, 2021;Pini, 2022;Pini & Deans, 2021;Pini & Sutton, 2021) and neuroscience (Bläsing et al., 2011(Bläsing et al., , 2010 have focused their attention on the analysis of dance practices. The present study consists in an interdisciplinary enactive ethnography (Wacquant, 2015) that addresses questions of embodied cognition and skilled movement in a specific dance form: Contact Improvisation (CI). ...
In exploring skilled performance in Contact Improvisation (CI), we utilize an enactive ethnographic methodology combined with an interdisciplinary approach to examine the question of how skill develops in CI. We suggest this involves the development of subtleties of awareness of intra- and interkinaesthetic attunement, and a capacity for interkinaesthetic negative capability—an embodied interpersonal ‘not knowing yet’—including an ease with being off balance and waiting for the next shift or movement to arise, literally a ‘playing with’ balance, falling, nearly falling, momentum and gravity. We draw on insights from an interdisciplinary approach, including from a developmental perspective concerning the experience of dyadic interpersonal embodied skill development in both infancy and CI. Building on Ravn and Høffding’s (2021) definition of expertise in improvisation as an “oscillatory process of assuming and relinquishing agency” we propose that a key aspect of expertise in CI involves oscillation between levels and processes of interkinaesthetic sense of agency. These interdisciplinary insights also elucidate limitations within current conceptualisations of sense of agency, including the relationship between sense of agency and sense of control.
... Na obra The Phenomenology of Dance,Sheets-Johnstone (1963) traz esclarecimentos sobre o processamento cinestésico da experiência dançada. A partir dessas informações, pode-se dizer que tarefas dançadas permitem ao aluno se conscientizar sobre as determinantes do espaço e do tempo: condições essenciais para que os fenômenos aconteçam. ...
Dance is the official content of regular teaching in the discipline of Physical Education. With it, teachers can develop motor, intellectual, expressive and social skills of the student, and expand their understanding of cultural facts. This essay proposes to discuss the
formation and the gain of knowledge through the teaching and learning of dance. The basis was Maxin Sheets-Johnstone’s The Phenomenology of Dance, and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. In this context, knowledge comes from the set of experiences lived bodily by the student during the resolution of activities, in this, the body-movementkinesthesia-cognition relationship focuses on the main mechanism for the firmament of “embodied” knowledge.
Dance has a long history within game studies and occupies a very literal niche within game design. When applied to more conventional videogame play, dance has provided a way of re-interpreting player performance, with the feminine cultural coding of dance used to challenge the masculinity of contemporary videogame culture. Exploring conceptions of choreography, dancing, and gender as understood through dance studies, this paper questions the applicability and efficacy of dance as a force of change. By examining alternative ways of running dance studios and making games, we see that it is not dance or play that produces new ways of exploring gender but rather the structures that surround them. In this light, dance emerges as a latent potentiality within game performances, but one that is still subject to pervasive and rigid ideas of gender.
The question of how dances bear meanings is one of the key issues in the anthropology of dance. The author here describes how sensory participation in a dance party with traditional music allows the dancers to understand and negotiate the complex ideas behind the dances. She proposes the dance floor as an analytical category – an emergent modality of space that encompasses dancers and their materialising interactions. The research is based on the theoretical framework of embodiment. The material was gathered through participant observation during dance parties with traditional music. The data presented in this article was collected through observation, with a focus on the chosen senses. The study suggests that the personal engagement of a researcher in the field makes it possible to extrapolate the subjective information of bodily experience within a net of relations that come into being on dance floors. By focusing on the senses and materiality to explore the animated reality of dance, the author is able to provide a phenomenological description of how dance floors communicate information.
This article develops the concept of ‘haptic grammar’ to encourage greater scholarly focus on the sensory aspects of bodily motion used to generate movement, knowledge of one’s body in an environment, and thus being-in-the-world. It ethnographically examines how swimmers learn specific motions – ‘the catch’, sculling, hand entry – to illustrate broader questions of how we learn to move our bodies. Focusing on these specific motions emphasises the importance of shared sensory knowledge and perception for learning enskilled bodily movement. More than simply knowing what to move when and how, learning how to sense how one moves one’s body parts is a crucial social process that swimmers become more skilful at via interlocutions among themselves and with their coaches regarding specific motions of specific body parts. This article illustrates how such socialised knowledge requires a shared haptic grammar to become more skilful at moving through the water and thus become ‘swimmers’.
Penelitian ini mengkaji permasalahan tentang penguasaan kualitas gerak Tari Topeng Tunggal karena tarian ini memiliki tingkat kerumitan yang cukup tinggi. Tujuan penelitian ini adalah untuk mengetahui bentuk penyajian, teknik gerak, serta kualitas gerak Tari Topeng Tunggal melalui teori teknik dan ekspresi menurut perspektif Margaret N H’Doubler. Penelitian ini dapat digunakan sebagai peluang kajian lanjutan mengenai penguasaan kualitas gerak pada jenis tari lainnya menggunakan teori Technique and Expression. Metode penelitian yang digunakan adalah analisis deskriptif kualitatif dan teknik pengumpulan data melalui wawancara, pengamatan, studi pustaka, dan studi dokumen. Data yang diperoleh meliputi: 1) bentuk penyajian Tari Topeng Tunggal yang dapat dilihat melalui analisis struktur gerak, 2) teknik gerak yang mencakup tiga aspek yaitu pengaturan nafas, tenaga, dan ritme, 3) ekspresi yang disajikan melalui gerak topeng dan gerak tubuh. Hasil analisis dan interpretasi data menjelaskan bahwa Tari Topeng Tunggal memenuhi seluruh sub bab dalam Technique and Expression. Sehingga, diperoleh kesimpulan bahwa Technique and Expression dapat digunakan sebagai upaya penguasaan Tari Topeng Tunggal.
Although the process of education and learning is traditionally related to reason and its abilities, aesthetics has long played with the idea of emancipation of sensitivity and its enhancement through the aesthetic experience of the arts. In this paper, I will address one particular example of art experience being able to indicate an emancipatory process of learning—the case of dance. According to S. H. Fraleigh, the process of learning how to dance, with its disciplining of the body, is a testimony to the neglect and violence towards our bodily lived experience. On the other hand, the experience gained through dancing is exactly the opposite—the experience which reveals not only aesthetic phenomena per se, but also our very bodily nature. Fraleigh’s phenomenological aesthetics of dance also implies that such an emancipatory effect of the aesthetic experience of dance will be transmitted to the audience as well, that it is not restricted to the artists—dancers—only. The focus of my analysis will be exactly this receptive aesthetic experience of dance and its formative, educational, and emancipatory potentials. I will show that the kinaesthetic nature of the phenomenon of dance, according to the positions of phenomenological aestheticians, can in fact open up a particular possibility of questioning the idea of education in traditional terms. More precisely, I will argue that the phenomenological analysis of the dance phenomenon demands not only the questioning of traditional approaches to body, mind-body relationship, and finally the character of our very basic experience, which determines all our ideas and concepts, but that it also implies a change in the pre-reflective dimension of consciousness, which can be actualized exactly through the aesthetic experience of art. The fact that we are pre-reflectively aware of the relation between ourselves and the Other exactly through our bodily nature can bring forth different perspectives on education and, perhaps, help us to understand it better. In order to develop my argument, I will focus on the critique of the primacy of vision, in favour of the primacy of movement, as presented in the works of S. H. Fraleigh and M. Sheets-Johnstone.
This paper explores how phenomenological notions of rhythm might accommodate a richer description of preverbal infant-caregiver dialogue. Developmental psychologists have theorized a crucial link between rhythm and intercorporeality in the emergence of intersubjectivity and self. Drawing on the descriptions of rhythm in the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Erwin Straus, Henri Maldiney and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, the paper emphasizes the role of art and aesthetic processes proposing that they not only be considered as metaphorical or representational aspects of rhythm but as primary resources that can enrich and deepen our understanding of self-emergence and intercorporeality in preverbal infant-caregiver dialogue.
Artykuł jest poświęcony wizji tańca w estetyce środowiskowej Arnolda Berleanta. Autorka przywołuje historyczne koncepcje estetyczne podkreślające znaczenie medium dla tożsamości poszczególnych sztuk (Gottholda E. Lessinga i Clementa Greenberga). Charakteryzuje problemy, które wynikają z uznania ludzkiego ciała za specyficzne medium tańca. Na tym tle przedstawia sposób ujmowania tańca jako performance’u w pismach Berleanta i stawia tezę, że pojęcie medium, którym Berleant się niekiedy posługuje, nie ma u niego ontologicznego zaplecza. Berleant bowiem nie opisuje świata w kategoriach substancji czy materii, lecz w kategoriach procesów i interakcji, a zamiast separowania sztuk czy odrywania sztuki od życia akcentuje ciągłość i holistyczny charakter doświadczenia. Taniec jest w jego koncepcji integralnym doświadczeniem, podczas którego ruch kreuje obszar przedstawienia, zespala tancerza i widza, ciało i świadomość, percepcję i myśl. Ważnym kontekstem tej teorii, w której doświadczenia estetycznego nie oddziela się od doświadczenia środowiskowego, jest ekologia.
The selection of perceptual properties proposed in this study is presented in the chapter, as well as the methodology of analysis. These case studies were chosen because they produced an emotional response in me, but were also perceived and described as emotional by both informed spectators and general audiences. In order to develop the model with a controlled number of variables, solos were chosen for these analyses. Since emotional import is understood as a substructure constituted by, but not reducible to, the perceptual properties of the work, these perceptual properties are studied and analysed in depth. The particular properties, movement qualities, sound-movement relationships, and spatial-rhythm, are selected because they emerged as relevant in the analysis of the three case studies and in the reviews studied; however, the book does not defend them as the only possible properties relevant towards emotional import.
This article takes its point of departure from the second (embodied) linguistic turn represented by the enactivist notion of humans as linguistic bodies, using resources from Hans Georg Gadamer in order to propose a view of the relation between art and everyday experience as one of symbolic transformation. Conceiving art as a form of linguistic phenomenon wherein one can engage in original situations of communication, this view rejects both autonomist and direct continuity views of the art-everyday relation. We start by situating the idea of linguistic bodies within the enactive approach, spelling out relevant aspects concerning the significance of language for human life and perception (Sect. 2). Then we embark on a discussion of aspects of Shaun Gallagher's and Alva Noë's enactivist perspectives on art experience, highlighting places where their views align with and depart from ours (Sect. 3). The last two sections aim to lay out the transformative view in more detail, proposing a pluralistic understanding of art media and a view of art and art experience as modes of ideational, embodied thought (Sects. 4 and 5).
While the use of phenomenological approaches in qualitative research increases in the field of performing arts, their legitimate application as research methods can prove to be challenging. The article introduces the dominant dichotomies and challenges in phenomenological research, such as concerns emerging from the researcher’s position, interdisciplinarity and mixed methods. The paper is addressed to novice researchers, researchers-practitioners and scholars with an interest in the theory of phenomenology. Drawing from a phenomenological research project that examined embodiment in Greek tragedy in the context of performer training and theatre directing, the article illustrates the methodological approach employed both in theory and practice. To this end, it proposes a model of data collection, organisation and analysis in interview design and practice-based research in performance. The proposed model sets subjectivity at its core and invests in the participants’ lived experience in an inclusive manner, concurrently calling on the investigator’s transparency as defined by the Husserlian epochè. It, therefore, comes into an inclusive step-by-step guide based on scientifically evident and ethically approved methods that accumulate Husserl and Giorgi’s phenomenological methods, Schön’s action research combined with Kolb’s reflective practice and tools for findings validation by Colaizzi (1978), Van Manen (1997) and Van Kaam (1966). Finally, in order to make phenomenological interviews more accessible, the article includes an interview schedule, which can be further developed and applied to practice-based research in both physical and digital environments.
The intelligibility of a performance of improvised dance does not reside in the rehearsed execution of a pre-existing script, nor does it result from a sustained verbal interaction between the dancers. Many aspects of the speechless performance obviously play an important role in the achieved intelligibility of the dance: a dancer is seen moving on and from a ground, on a stage, in a space delimited by walls, illuminated by spotlights, sounded by music, in front of an audience. And of course with other dancers, whose joint gestures and moves give shape to a choreography by providing pace, rhythm and sequences, thereby constituting a narrative or fragments thereof. This paper addresses the manufacture of this witnessable order, by presenting some results of an ethnographic inquiry. The investigation will be focused on how, in an improvised duet, each dancer interacts with the other, and more specifically how she or he positions her- or himself in relation to the other, from distance to proximity and touch. This work of distance management is the dance, whose choreographic accountability is produced and structured by dancers staying at a distance, getting closer and touching each other. The analysis shows that distance management is oriented to as relevant by the dancers and that it has consequences on their improvised duet. It is also what makes their performance analyzable by distant observers.
This essay takes the reader into a synesthetic landscape to explore the possibility of relating with trees as intimate companions of movement and becoming. David Abram's ecophenomenology of perception is brought into dialogue with Kimerer LaMothe's philosophy of dance and with other voices in the growing interdisciplinary field of ecosomatics. Based on the author's inquiries as dancer-researcher, encounters with trees are staged as slow improvisational rituals of listening and attunement. In opening the senses and the imagination to the presence of trees, ecosomatic practice exposes the porosity and permeability of bodily boundaries and reveals the possibility of a perceptual shift into a heightened experience of embodiment. We are not only touching, witnessing, and dancing with trees, we are also being touched, witnessed, and danced by them. In these in-between spaces the soma is reached sensorially by ecological wounds and dance is reclaimed as a healing force.
(Published in the European Journal of Ecopsychology, Vol. 8, pp. 88-113)
In “Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship,” Alfred Schutz offers a phenomenological description of a structure he contends is at the root not only of shared musical meaning, but of human communication and social relations as such: the “tuning-in relationship.” The aim of what follows is to establish that this same structure is at the root of ethical relationships, which may shed some light on the conditions under which it is possible to respond appropriately to ethically fraught situations. Schutz’ analysis of the play of internal and external time establishes what the tuning-in relationship must be, but not yet how it is possible. His account also points to two important preconditions of tuning in: embodiment as the middle term between internal and external time, and practices as more widely shared meaning contexts which may persist across generations. For several reasons, Schutz does not give embodiment its due in his account, though his earlier work on course-of-action types sheds some light on the nature of practices. In all, though, these amount to promising leads for further investigation.
Section I details Husserl’s insight into style and how a person’s individual style is played out in affect and action and in the two‑fold articulation of perception and “the kinestheses,” both of which are integral to gestural communication. Section II details how the evolutionary perspectives of Darwin and linguistic scholars complement Husserl’s insights into the animate realities of gesture and bring to light further dimensions of human and nonhuman gestural practices and possibilities through extensive experiential accounts that document the essential role of movement and thinking in movement in animate lives. Section III focuses on critical oversights by prominent phenomenologists who, rather than basing their studies in the rigors of phenomenological methodology, write of “what it is like” with respect to experience or give preferred opinions as in “consciousness of my gesture [...] can tell us nothing about movement.”
Created by Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, Thinking at the Edge (TAE) enables the articulation of meaning implicit in embodied experience, which in turn discloses the affective meaning of words (or topics), thus, empowering one to speak and think creatively from one’s felt knowledge. In this article, I present and analyse three TAE processes undertaken by Portuguese native speaker performers – Sónia Baptista, Maria Duarte, and Andrea Maciel – who have chosen to explore and expand the terms ‘performing’, ‘presence’, and ‘play’, respectively. Considering these terms from the felt sense of each performer’s culturally and aesthetically situated experience opens new ground to build a collaborative and affectively embodied vocabulary that can illuminate different approaches or lines of enquiry into some of the core concepts of theatre practice and performance studies. Based on these three cases, I argue that TAE is a stimulating tool to access the felt sense of live performance, thus contributing to the development of research on affect from a meaningful personal standpoint.
En la danza clásica, la música es parte esencial de su realidad (sea como arte vivo o como arte transmitido de manera digital), sin embargo, cuando se estudia, muchas veces se obvia o se deja de lado. Por eso, este trabajo tiene como propósito reflexionar sobre la instalación sonora de la realidad de la danza clásica. Para abordar esto, la autora se fundamenta –principalmente– en la metáfora de atmósfera desarrollada en la teoría esferológica de Peter Sloterdijk y en la estética del aparecer de Martin Seel. Con ello se profundiza en los modos en los que los artistas del movimiento despliegan un eco acústico como parte de su climatización atmosférica social, estética y existencial, en donde el tempo-musical se convierte en un lazo inseparable. Aquí es importante señalar que, parte de estas reflexiones surgen de la propia experiencia de la autora como investigadora y profesional de la danza y del trabajo de investigación realizado en su tesis doctoral. Así, para abordar esta relación entre tempo-musical y danza clásica, la reflexión se divide en tres partes, a saber: 1) La atmósfera humana, 2) El gemelo sonoro de la danza clásica, y 3) El tempo musical y la práctica del ballet en tiempos de pandemia. Esta última parte reflexiona sobre algunos de los retos que la práctica dancística (cotidiana y escénica) tuvo que sortear durante la pandemia del SARS-CoV-2, lo que la hizo migrar a espacios digitales en los que la relación que mantenía con el tempo musical como arte vivo, inevitablemente, se modificó. Finalmente, se concluye que, la música para la danza como arte vivo es más que un acompañamiento, es una atmósfera social-estética-y-existencial de cualidades especiales que aparece en el presente escénico como un campo energético de asociaciones acústicas y rítmicas al que está completamente liado el movimiento y sus participantes (bailarines, música y audiencia). Atmósfera que –por más que se haya intentado– hasta el momento no ha podido digitalizarse de manera que se pueda decir que, la experiencia en vivo de un espectáculo de danza ya no es necesaria.
George Balanchine conceived ballets from music and, arguably, as music. This article uses a music-based notation system for dance to examine one complete piece, Variation 2 from Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux (1960). The transcription facilitates the application of music-analytic tools to choreomusical works. The analysis shows that Balanchine responded to musical features and applied musical techniques to dance, not only at the surface but at higher levels of form, creating choreomusical coherence. Performances by different dancers are compared in light of the analysis. This study offers a way to describe music-dance relationships using the tools and language of music analysis.
In the sense of phenomenology, actions are special cases of acts of consciousness. Within semiotics, first Jan Mukařovský and then A. J. Greimas have established, in different terms, a distinction between instrumental actions and actions which carry their meaning in themselves. But this is insufficient to account for the variety of actions which comprises everything from the creation of artefacts, dance, sporting events, theatre, rituals, and much else. Already those actions mentioned relate in different ways to instrumentality and intrinsic meaning, as well as to (depictive) iconicity and plasticity. In this paper, I will be particularly concerned with dancing, especially classical ballet, trying to delimit it from sporting events and theatre. Apart from the sign function and the spectacular function, I will notably have recourse to what I have elsewhere term secondary (depictive) iconicity as well as to plasticity. In the process, I hope to be able to throw some light also on the nature of sport, by comparing and contrasting it to dance, as well as to the theatre as well as, more incidentally, to some other types of action. In a wider perspective, my ambition is to contribute to a general inquiry into the semiosis of actions.
In this article, two dance educators offer a definition of rhythm from both educational and performance perspectives and discuss pedagogical practices that waken students’ awareness to rhythm as a lived-experience over which they have creative control. For the dancer, in the midst of the dance, rhythms are, in the words of Margaret H’Doubler, recurring patterns of measured energy. These patterns are nested in scales from the moment-to-moment shifts in muscular contraction and release to the rise and fall of dramatic tension in a performed dance. This approach to rhythm runs counter to many dance students’ studio-based training in which rhythm is equated to synchronizing accents to a specific meter. The authors describe pedagogical practices in the studio that foster engagement with rhythm as lived-experience. Drawing attention to their kinesthetic experience while moving, students are encouraged to modulate levels of exertion embedded in the qualities of movement they are experiencing. As varying levels of exertion are attended to across temporal durations, students notice patterns as they emerge and recur. This attention to recurring patterns of measured exertion is, the authors claim, the lived-experience of rhythm in dance.
"The article presents a phenomenological investigation of body and music, with particular emphasis on electronic music. The investigation builds on theoretical framework developed in phenomenological investigations in art by Edmund Husserl, Mikel Dufrenne and Roman Ingarden. It is guided beyond these analyses by investigations of particular musical examples in avant-garde acoustic and electronic music. In the former case it tackles music from which body is being consciously erased. In the latter case, the erasure occurs instantly. This negative approach elucidates the function of body in music. In case of electronic music, the article focuses on writings and music of pioneer of musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer. Central argument is that electronic music always has been and still is defined by absence of body, here phenomenologically considered as Leib. As a consequence of the phenomenological elucidation, it is ultimately shown that erasure of body has been one of the avant-garde music’s crucial techniques, and that this avant-garde residue remains in electronic music as such, both experimental and mainstream. Keywords: Schaeffer, Husserl, phenomenology, music, body, aesthetics "
In Chap. 6, I focus strictly on how the phenomenology of dance and an embodied critical inquiry fit within an enactivist framework. In “Dancing as Naturalized Phenomenology” section, I demonstrate how the phenomenology of dance counts as a naturalized phenomenology. In “Movement-Knowings and Linguistic Bodies” section, I provide a thorough summation of Di Paolo et al.’s theory of linguistic bodies, since it is best suited to helping understand how bodied can communicate. A rendering of bodies as fully communicative is indispensable for understanding how somatic exercises can operate as conduits to embodied knowledge, which can then be expressed onto the body through movement. In the “Dancing Metaphors and Enactivism” section, I switch to the Katan-Schmidt’s version of embodied metaphors that she terms dancing metaphors to corroborate my contention that embodied metaphors are categorically compatible with enactivism.
In Chap. 5, I flesh out the underlying theory behind an embodied critical inquiry method. In “The Epistemology of Thinking-in-Movement” section, I provide a more detailed exposition of Sheets-Johnstone to explicate how and why the thinking-in-movement model is a discrete epistemology. This task is important because it is possible for an unarticulated, assumed epistemological framework to work against the explicit model of embodied cognition. Additionally, the specific kind of epistemological frame that grounds thinking-in-movement is important for explaining how, from a cognition perspective, dance can actually inquire into, and solve, conceptual problems. In “Epistemology and Dancing Metaphors” section, I address embodied metaphors thoroughly. In “Inquiring-in-Movement” section, I take on the question of how movement and dance are an unmediated means through which to query.
One can see different types of connections between the Sri Lankan martial art form angampora and dance. This essay examines the historical and kinesthetic connection between angampora and dance, primarily focusing on the Kandyan dance form of Sri Lanka. Historical sources, interviews, and my experience as a dancer and a martial arts practitioner aided me in this study. What we call angampora and Kandyan dance today has a historical connection to the precolonial Kandyan kingdom of Sri Lanka. This essay mainly focuses on the kinesthetic connections between the two forms. I elaborate on kinesthetic learning in both angampora and Kandyan dance and assert that both forms try to develop mastery through a pedagogical method I articulate as kinesthetic habituation that encompasses habits and practice. This process includes a vital component called haramba, which is a set of physical exercises done repetitively.
En el siguiente artículo nos proponemos profundizar y reflexionar sobre la artista Olga Pericet a través de su obra Cuerpo Infinito, donde se tiende puentes entre el pasado, el presente y el futuro del baile flamenco teatralizado por medio de la figura de Carmen Amaya, de su memoria y su legado, lo que lleva a una profunda investigación, transformación, aprendizaje, hibridación y búsqueda.
This article analyzes my six-year autoethnographic work in response to From Silence to Power in Austin, TX from 2013 to 2019. Performed by survivors of sexual abuse, the performance externalized trauma, recognized time via repetition, re-contextualized their minded-bodies and transformed from silenced victims to survivors. Kinesthetic empathy moved me to work through my trauma as a co-performer. I have written performance reviews, given three conference presentations and performed an autoethnography Dancethnography in TX, NY, MD, PA, and CA. This project evolved from ethnography on others, to autoethnography and to reverse ethnography through which I witness (im)possibilities of dance in speaking trauma due to decorative virtuosity.
This article approaches dance through the lens of new materialist theories (speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, thing theory, posthumanism, etc.), considering the possibility that objecthood need not align with inertness and movement need not be excluded from the realm of the substantive. Deploying a practice-based methodology informed by participation in works by Simone Forti and Maria Hassabi, as well her own movement investigation, the author considers theoretical positions that counter the persistent association of dance with ephemerality while also broadly questioning the relationship between dance and theory.
The paper discusses a walking and multi-media arts project seeking to renew agency in Holocaust testimony and generate contemporary resonances. Forced Walks is a programme of speculative, socially engaged experiments, initiated by artists Richard White and Lorna Brunstein. Honouring Esther (2015–2017), the first Forced Walks project, walked the route of a Nazi Death March digitally transposed to Somerset (UK), subsequently retracing it in Lower Saxony, Germany. The project engaged walkers in co-creating an immanent reflective space materialized in mark-making, social media and installation. An emergent hybrid somatic/digital process, ‘making the return’ in a specific Holocaust context, is presented.
This chapter primarily provides a chronological account of the evolving discourse regarding dancers’ embodied experience(s) and places the work within a spectrum of existing dance studies scholarship informing the research. It first addresses the polarisation of the kinaesthetic and the visual in contemporary dance, which has shaped assumptions about dancers’ experiences in the practice. The chapter then explores how this polarisation can be found in early phenomenological accounts about dancers’ experiences, many of which conceive of dancer experiences according to ideologies of wholeness and in-the-moment, or ‘non-reflective,’ consciousness. The way in which poststructuralist and sociological approaches were adopted in dance studies is explored to expand the historicising further, including how it can be understood as a response to the problems of universalism with previous accounts. Finally, recent sources are brought in that represent the rich growing discourse about the multiplicity and complexity of dancers’ experience in contemporary dance practice(s).
This chapter sets the stage and situates the research in a series of historical, theoretical, and methodological perspectives within dance and dance studies, including related to the author’s own experiences in the field. The chapter provides an overview of the main subject area of the book—kinaesthesia and visual self-reflection—principally related to dance studies. The ontoepistemological positionings of the research in this chapter aim to ground the philosophical and methodological positionings of the book. Key to this positioning is that material offered throughout the book is informed by a ‘conversation’ between theory and practice, more specifically: original fieldwork with 14 professional-level dancers based in the UK, the author’s twenty-plus years’ experience in contemporary dance, and a wide range of available sources and literature related to kinaesthesia and visual self-reflection.
This chapter describes and illustrates how children experience Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics learning holistically, and in an integrated fashion. It introduces children’s sensory-based, action-reaction learning, providing insight into how the individual disciplines of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) work together to support creative thinking, problem solving, decision-making and the integration of ideas and interests. Framed within the socio-constructivist paradigm, learning is discussed in terms of multi-modal engagement that stimulates in-depth inquiry. The chapter begins by describing how children’s perceptual and sensory thinking can be enriched through play and progresses to unpack semiosis and transmediation, which are defined and described for the role they play in supporting children to make meaning of their world and everyday experience. Drawing on exemplars of lived experience of three young children’s learning, Alfie (12 months), Ryle (3 years) and Amelee (4 years), STEAM is presented as an integrated experience with the arts centrally situated.
This paper aims to contribute to the theoretical discussion and empirical application of phenomenology in the sociology of sport by drawing on Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s theories. I propose that Sheets-Johnstone’s movement-focused phenomenology can be complementary to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body in the analyses of sporting moves and the learning of new moves. I mainly applied two concepts from Sheets-Johnstone, tactile-kinesthetic/kinetic dynamics and emotion-motion dynamics, to explore the moving body in waka ama (outrigger canoe) paddling, based on my beginner’s and other competent paddlers’ experiences. Findings demonstrate that a moving/paddling body is spontaneously a tactile-kinesthetic/kinetic, emotion-motion and intercorporeal body. These bodily dimensions enrich our understandings of the ways of learning new movements, doing sport and doing sport together.
Bodily rhetoric is a burgeoning field, with scholars investing attention to the ways in which non-verbal communication mediates change between individuals and groups in complex scenarios, including political settings. Scenarios in which individuals move together--whether in completely extemporaneous situations or in existing forms such as Contact Improvisation, Argentinian Tango, or Classical Pas de Deux--pose a similarly complex communicative problem. Drawing on the work of Lloyd Bitzer, I demonstrate how rhetorical theory provides methodological insight by which we can better understand the dynamic practice that is always already happening in situations where individuals move together.
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