© Uri Novo Photography
The symbolic nature of dance
A Socio-Philosophical Approach on Dance Movement
by means of
Pierre Bourdieu’s Conceptual Reconstruction of the Body
Naam: Aurélie Lever
Studentnummer: 5736218
Begeleider: Dr. J.F. Hartle
Tweede lezer: Dr. M. Coolen
Masterscriptie Wijsbegeerte van een Wetenschapsgebied
MA Wijsbegeerte van een Wetenschapsgebeid
Graduate School of Humanities
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Content
Chapter 1. Introduction 3
Chapter 2. A symbol-philosophical approach on dance 8
o The conceptual framework of the symbol 9 o Susanne Langer’s symbol-philosophical theory 10 o Susanne Langer: what is dance? 14
Chapter 3. A phenomenological approach to dance 19
o The phenomenological being 20
o Sheets-Johnstone’s corporeal turn within the human condition 25 o Sheets-Johnstone: what is dance? 26
Chapter 4. A sociological approach on dance 33
o Bourdieu’s adaptation of bodily belief 35 o The bodily dimension of social meaning 38
o Habitus and Field 43
o Symbolic structures in Bourdieu’s theory 48
Conclusion: What is dance? 51
Literature 59
CHAPTER 1.
Introduction
‘The art of the dance is, ontologically speaking, the art of the body’ (Levin, in Copeland and Marshall, 1983: 91).
What is dance? How does it present itself? What are the structures inherent to its
representation? How can we formulate a definition to cover the variety of these structures? In other words: What is the meaning of dance? These are the relevant philosophical
questions about the art of dance. Philosophical theories of the art of dance represent, although less comprehensively than philosophical theories of art in general, many different positions concerning the question how one should conceptualize dance. This results in the ambiguous relation between dance as an art form and its significance. This thesis will research this relation.
In Plato’s Laws, dance figures as an educational device –in which public dance festivals are to enhance civic order. A little later than Plato, in Aristotle’s Poetics, it is said that dance is used to ‘imitate emotion’, character and action by rhythmical movement. This notion of dance was still influential until the end of the twentieth century; depending on different interpretations on what it is that dance should imitate. During the romantic era, the theory of art as a form of self-expression rises. Consequently, dance too, is seen as an art form that expresses individual emotions. This idea of dance as self-expression is also
reflected within dance theories in the beginning of the twentieth century, where choreographers such as Rudolph von Laban and Isadora Duncan sought the connection between movement and emotion (Copeland, and Marshall, 1983). However, it was the twentieth century dancer and choreographer Mary Wigman whose idea of the
self-expression of dance was most radical: as a reconquering of the body as a tool for emotions (Utrecht, 1988).
‘The dance, like every other artistic expression, presupposes a heightened, increased life response. Moreover, the heightened response does not always have to have a happy background. Sorrow, pain, even horror and fear may also tend to release a welling-up of feeling, and therefore of the dancer’s whole being’ (Wigman, in Copeland Marshall, 1983: 305-306).
Wigman’s idea is that personal feelings of the dancer are the inner origin of dance, in which dance movement immediately expresses these personal emotions - the meaning of dance being some sort of catharsis for individuals.
The main critique that has been given to this theory of dance as self-expression
contains the argument that dance cannot be the immediate expression of the individual, for individual emotions are expressed through dance movement. In other words: the expression of dance already lies in its movement, its form, hence abstracts from emotion. This is a strong argument, as even proponents of the expression-theory in dance, such as von Laban, state that within dance, individual emotions are expressed through its form: that of dance movement (Utrecht, 1988). The line of thought, that dance is expressed through the form of dance movement, is extended within symbol-philosophical theories of dance. Many of these symbol-philosophical theories resonate the idea that the symbolic form of dance is based on the same conventional symbolic form as language, and therefore dance enhances the same formal logic as found within discursive thought. In other words: dance is considered a metaphor for discursive language. Discursive language should be understood as a convention of sentence structure (formulas of syntax, grammar), which yields meaning through well-formed sentences (Soldati, 2014).
The above-mentioned philosophical theories on the art of dance are a few of the many theories that have occurred during the past centuries. Considering the scope of this research it will not be useful or necessary to elaborate extensively on all these different theories. The starting point of this research for the meaning of dance as an art form is based on a fundamental assumption that is distilled from different philosophical theories on dance. This assumption is that the expression of dance lies in its movement, which is constituted by the dancer’s (moving) body. The question for the meaning of dance thus comes down to the explanation of a satisfactory understanding of the nature of dance movement in relation to the moving body.
Two philosophers who take dance movement as a starting point for their philosophical theories on the meaning of dance are Susanne Langer and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone. Both theories present an implicit or explicit critique on the two prominent traditions in dance theory that have been mentioned: dance as the expression of emotion and dance analogous to the expression of a discursive formal language. Nonetheless, their theories of dance represent two different theoretical traditions of the interpretation of dance, embedded within two opposed philosophical paradigms: symbol-philosophical theory and phenomenology. In some way one could say that the debate between these two
philosophical paradigms was played out at a centre stage in Davos in Switzerland between two major protagonists: Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, two of the greatest
philosophers of the twentieth century (Gordon, 2010).
The first position that will be discussed in this thesis is Langer’s position. In Langer’s
theory, dance as an art form presents a symbol, an ‘articulated form’ (Langer, 1953). Her theory of dance movement can be placed within Cassirer’s tradition of symbol-philosophical theory. Langer’s theory is a direct critique on the theory of immediate emotional expression in dance. She tries to overcome the limitation of feeling to the realm of spontaneous expression, which reduces feeling to a non-cognitive aspect of human life. Instead, dance movement expresses patterns of feelings, which according to her is a cognitive process. It is because dance movement is the symbolic form of real movement and real emotions, and the ‘process of symbolizing’ is still a cognitive process, that the meaning of dance is a form of knowledge. Langer also criticizes theories on dance where dance movement is considered analogous to the formal structures of language. Nevertheless, dance-critic Kristina Soldati notices that the foundational structure of dance in Langer’s theory is (still) comparable to that of discursive practice, in the sense that dance can be logically reduced to a semantic as well as a syntactic level. These are the foundational structures on which language is build as well.
The second position to be discussed in this thesis, a position quite explicitly opposed to the one of Langer, is Sheets-Johnstone’s philosophical theory of dance. Sheets-Johnstone represents the philosophical debates around the corporeal turn, in which the significance of dance is regarded from within the immediate practical experience of the dancer’s body. Sheets-Johnstone and others have claimed that by concentrating on the embodiment of the dancer, on its bodily movement, one can depart from the emphasis on dance as a discursive practice within which the dancer becomes strangely disembodied. In various ways Sheets-Johnstone’s theory of dance movement belongs to the phenomenological tradition,
primarily in its Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological form, as it focuses on the notion of bodily consciousness.
This concept of bodily consciousness should not be interpreted according to the Cartesian interpretation of the body as an object that is understood through a cognitive process of the subject. In the phenomenological theory on dance the Cartesian subject-object distinction is abandoned: the meaning of dance does not reach back to an internal emotion or logical structure that is eventually represented by dance movement; neither shall it be understood as a form analogous to the logical form of language, nor based on the structures of semantics and syntax of language as in Langer’s theory. According to Sheets-Johnstone dance movement is not a form of knowledge, and therefore the meaning of dance is not logically reducible to an ‘act’ of reason - such as Langer claims.
Dance-movement as a kinetic bodily motion should be understood as the direct experience of the
dancer. Although Sheets-Johnstone gives a phenomenological analysis in which dance movement is the immediate expression of being, she also claims that dance is symbolic in its nature. To substantiate this argument, she incorporates Langer’s theory within her
phenomenological approach of dance. This argument can be seen as an inconsistency or anomaly within her theory.
The notion of a symbolic nature of dance movement in both Langer’s and Sheets-Johnstone’s theories of dance should not be ignored. In both theories however an important and immanent aspect of dance movement is neglected. This is one of the reasons why, as I will claim, both Langer and Sheets-Johnstone are not able to explain the symbolic nature of dance movement properly. To be able to acquire the skill of dance movement, the dancer’s body has to be trained intensively. Most professional dancers are therefore trained in elite schools. Through technique the dancers can create a state of ‘perfect’ dance-movement and are able to perform dance (dance-movement) as an art form (Levin, in Copeland and Marshall, 1983; Leigh-Foster, 1997).1 The philosopher and dancer Erica Knödler explains
the notion of dance-technique in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. She claims that dance technique can easily be confused with a mentally navigation of the body in space, or through mechanical understanding of body movement. With her phenomenological understanding of the dancer’s body and of body movement, she goes beyond the mechanical or mental understanding of learning steps. Although Knödler explains dance movement through dance-technique, she, too, fails to explain this properly and is therefore not able to explain the nature of dance movement either.
In this thesis I argue that the symbolic nature of dance movement should not be understood by means of a phenomenological approach or a symbol-philosophical approach to dance but through a mediation of both of these perspectives: To my mind the symbolic nature of dance movement can be understood most adequately through a
socio-philosophical approach. To substantiate this argument I will introduce Bourdieu’s conceptual reconstruction of the body. In Bourdieu’s understanding the body is fundamentally
constituted by social practice. Interestingly, Bourdieu builds on Cassirer’s as well as Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy.
Bourdieu, however, has himself never explicitly written about dance or dance movement in relation to his socio-philosophical theories. In this thesis, I will try to inquire in what way his conceptual construction of the body conceptually adds to the question on the meaning of
1 From the professional dancer, in contrast to the amateur dancer, it is expected to learn dance movement most
perfectly by means of dance-technique.
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dance in the philosophical debate.
The main question of this research will therefore be:
In what way does Bourdieu’s conceptual reconstruction of the body add value to the philosophical debate on the meaning of dance?
The focus here will be on the main concept within Bourdieu’s work: the habitus. Habitus indicates a certain body technique: the cultural and social moulding that everybody, as an object of society, undergoes, even before he or she becomes a subject. Bourdieu hereby places the body at the centre of a powerful and complex theory that binds the agent to the world (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 20). It is trough habitus that I think dance movement can be seen as symbolic in its nature.
The concept of the symbolic nature of the body in Bourdieu’s theory however is a complex one. This symbolic nature can, so I will argue, best be understood with the help of the German philosopher Helmuth Plessner. Plessner claims that three laws constitute the human condition, two of them being the law of natural artificiality and the law of mediated immediacy. I claim that these two laws in Plessner’s philosophy could contribute to a proper understanding of Bourdieu’s symbolic nature of the body, and therefore of dance
movement. Since Bourdieu builds on Cassirer’s symbol-philosophical theory as well as Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenoloyg, I argue that Bourdieu’s notion of the body can help complementing both theories on dance by Langer and Sheets-Johnstone.
CHAPTER 2.
A symbol-philosophical approach on dance
The starting point of this thesis is the assumption that the question of the meaning of dance, comes down to the explanation of a satisfactory understanding of the nature of dance
movement. The philosopher Susanne Langer uses a symbol-philosophical approach to
explain this nature of dance movement. Before discussing Langer’s theory on the art of dance, it is first necessary to elaborate on the symbol-philosophical tradition she is considered to be part of.
Many theorists have written on the relation between dance movement and
symbolic forms, placing dance within a symbol-philosophical theory. Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry for example posited a symbiotic relationship between dance and poetry, where dance movement is described as ‘writing with the body’ (Townsend, 2005: 127). Hereby the symbolist use of dance becomes a metaphor for the symbol of language: the idea that the symbol of dance as an art form is based on the same conventional structure as that of language. This idea, assuming an analogy between the structural formal base of that of language and art, has been approached more often in symbol-philosophical theories on art. It refers to the idea that art (and therefore dance as an art form) enhances the same formal logic as found within discursive thought.
The philosopher Nelson Goodman takes the symbol-philosophical approach into a completely different direction. In contrast to what the title of his main work ‘Languages of
Art’ suggests, he does not use the art-symbol analogous to that of the formal and
conventional structures of language. Goodman argues that it is not the symbol that can be replaced by language systems, but that symbol systems cover every representation such as objects, events, art and language. As the dance theorist Kristina Soldati shows, Goodman even goes a step further, and emphasizes that ontologically speaking, a person is depicted with attributed properties. This means that every representation (of an object, a landscape, a person, an artwork) is ‘not possible without accompanying properties’. Goodman calls these properties attributes of representation. There is ‘no innocent eye of the artist nor an object or model bare of attributes’ (Goodman, in Soldati, 2014: 68). Art is thus not the representation (of for example language), art as a symbol-system is a way of world-making. Just like Goodman, Susanne Langer too thinks that the symbol covers every
representation. Langer’s symbol-philosophical theory is known for contributing to a comprehensive philosophy of art that attempts to account for each art form individually, while simultaneously unifying the arts. She establishes a distinction between discursive
symbols as forms of knowledge – such as language, and presentational symbols as forms of knowledge – such as art.
The conceptual framework of the symbol
Discussing Langer’s theoretical position on dance cannot be done without discussing the main concepts of philosopher Ernst Cassirer first, for Langer (as well as Goodman) devised her theory of language and theory of the arts with Ernst Cassirer’s neo- Kantian and anthropological definition of the human condition as the ‘animal symbolicum’ (Cassirer, 1957). Cassirer, who is one of the main epistemological currents in contemporary social theory, writes an epistemological analysis on the conditions of possibility of (scientific) knowledge that leads to a general philosophy of symbolic forms (Vandenberghe, 2001). The Neo-Kantianist movement, which Cassirer is considered as being part of, refers to an academic movement that prevailed in Germany somewhere between 1850 and 1930. Neo-Kantianism can, to some extent, be characterized by its reference to the idea of a
transcendental subject; where the human mind is said to be an essentially creative faculty that is capable of laying down necessary and a priori conditions for its own surroundings and, therefore, of shaping the experienced world according to its own forms of intelligibility (Gordon, 2010: 13).
Within his early work Substance and Function [Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff] (1910), Cassirer gives a critique on modern scientific thinking in general. He states that any explanation of things as substance should not be explained in terms of pure function, but should be explained according to their relation instead. Hereby he criticizes the idea of the functional over-determination of objects as facts; facts being generated by thought and determined by its position in a logically necessary scheme. Cassirer develops a mode of thinking that he describes as ‘a relational mode of thinking’. He charts a transformation in scientific explanation from this dogmatic metaphysics of functional substance to symbolic theory of relations; meaning that the essence does not lie in in a given unity, a substance, but in a crossover of relations; a transcendental principle of a non-essential unity (Magerski, 2005: 115-118). Within in his most erudite work Philosophy of Symbolic Forms [Philosophie
der Symbolischen Formen], (1957 [1923-9]) this concept of relational substance comes back
within his theory of the symbolic form. Cassirer claims that one is never able to have immediate access to the material contents of the world as such; humans are never confronted with immediate reality, but only with a reality that is mediated by symbolic forms. A symbolic form should be understood as ‘every energy of mind through which a
mental content of meaning is related to a concrete, sensory sign and made to adhere internally to it’ (Cassirer, 1957: 175). Cassirer thinks of the human being as an animal
symbolicum whereby consciousness and therefore knowledge is always generated and
formed through a symbolic form. The subject thus needs the symbol for the possibility of receiving objects.
‘But knowledge always implies a break with this immediacy of life […] All knowledge of the world and all spiritual working on the world requires that the I acquires a certain distance from the world […] This acquisition of the ‘world as representation’ is the goals and the product of the symbolic forms – it is the result of language, myth, religion, art, and theoretical knowledge.’
(Cassirer, 1923-9, in VandenBerghe, 2001: 486)
This quote explains Cassirer’s view that Man is not able to perceive the world and to accumulate knowledge in an immediate way but only in relation with the condition of symbols. To be able to experience the world, one has to create the world through symbols, which means that man delay their meaning of things by inserting a complex process of mind and tools which present the world to them. Only through distancing himself from the world, by means of a multiplicity of symbolic forms such as language or art, man can get access to the world. Yet symbols do not imitate reality. Rather, symbols are ways in which we produce the world. Symbols give form to reality. Symbols are the transcendental condition to be able to perceive the world. This concept of the symbol, as ways of world-making, is what has influenced Langer and Goodman. It is the ever expanding and pluralistic field of symbolic expression that Cassirer calls culture. Consequently, culture is constitutive of experiencing the world.
Susanne Langer’s philosophical theory of symbolism
The fundamental thought in Cassirer’s philosophy, that symbolism is the central concern of philosophy, for it is constitutive of any relation to the world, can also be found in Susanne Langer’s main work Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and
Myth (1942 [1951]). Langer is the most faithful follower of Cassirer’s tradition. She also
claims that ‘the process’ of symbolizing underlies knowledge and understanding and thus is a condition for the possibility of receiving (or rather perceiving) objects. In other words: symbols are the transcendental condition to be able to experience the world. Her philosophy is also first of all an exploration of the human mind's continuous process of knowledge through the power of need to symbolize, to be able to invent meanings. Following Cassirer’s theory, she claims that the symbol is not a representation but a
presentation of the world; it does not imitate reality but gives form to reality. Yet in contrast with Cassirer, Langer claims the symbol is not the same as a sign. As she emphasises, the genesis of our thinking has to be clarified by the division of the ‘sign’ and ‘symbol’. The sign has a function of reference: for a dog, the ringing of a bell is a sign; for the ringing
immediately means that the dog will get his food. A sign makes us notice the object or situation it bespeaks (Langer, 1953). Humans do not use a signal as a function of reference, but they use it as a function of imagination and of presentation; and therefore they ‘use’ a symbol.2 An empirical observation is in her opinion completely indirect and cannot be
perceived without the mediation of the symbol. What seems to be directly perceivable has to be translated or interpreted to be able to serve as a fact. In principle, every symbol is then the logical structure of something else. ‘A symbol is understood when we conceive the idea it presents’ (Langer, 1953: 26). This describes the essential features of symbols: they play a mediating role.
Langer builds her philosophy of art on a distinction between discursive and
presentational thought, and herewith criticizes philosophical theories of language that rely on logical positivism. Logical positivists according to Langer state that everything outside the logic fields of language, which are not empirical statements or analytic truths, such as the fields of ethics and aesthetics, are considered a category of statements that are not meaningful (Dunagan, 2005). Within these logical-positivist theories, semantics and analytical philosophy is only regarded as meaningful and for Langer this reduces semantics to language only. The distinction between her and logical positivists seems to be significant, for Langer refutes this disavowal of non-linguistic forms of communication, and seeks an unexplored possibility of genuine semantic beyond the limits of discursive language that finds an inclusive definition of knowledge and understanding. Langer suggests that if one symbolism is inadequate, human intelligence seeks another. She establishes a foundation for a symbol theory that takes into account a different sort of semantic that is more ubiquitous and comes up with a symbol-theory to articulate knowledge that are not ‘formally’
amenable to the discursive projection. She finds a symbolism that holds emotional content over discursive content, or better put, that presents a dynamic pattern of feeling.
‘It bespeaks his imagination of feelings rather than his own emotional state, and expresses what he knows about the so called ‘inner life’ […] Such experiences are the rhythms of life, organic,
2 The word use might not give the right connotation to what is meant by Langer; for the symbol is transcendental,
and therefore people are not able to rationally choose for the working of symbols. Yet the word has been chosen deliberately, for symbols actively constitute the world instead of imitating the world, hence it contains a form of agency. This idea will be discussed later on in Bourdieu’s relational ontology of the habitus [and field] as well.
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emotional and mental (the rhythm of attention is an interesting link among them all), which are not simply periodic, but endlessly complex, and sensitive to every sort of influence. All together they compose the dynamic pattern of feeling. It is this pattern that only non-discursive symbolic forms can present, and that is the point and purpose of artistic construction’ (Langer, 1953: 28; 240-241).
Analysing this quote we can see that Langer claims that art (among other symbolic forms such as myth and ritual) is suited to the expression of inner life experience, of (patterns of) feeling. Provided that art has an emotional content, the ‘expression’3 of this emotional
content, of inner life is presented in the same way that language ‘expresses’ her semantic content, in an articulated form. Langer claims that within the articulated form of art it is possible to make something ‘experienceable’ that is in a strict sense not communicable through such a conventionalized formulae, for art is not a language of feeling. One should thus seek further than this formal approach and see that art symbolizes emotion, in an articulated or presented form.
Although Langer is critical towards explaining the rules of art based on the basis of the rules of formal discursive language, she cannot avoid but basing her symbol-philosophical theory of art on that of the foundational rules of formal language as well. The first analogy with that of the rules of formal language is an overlap at a semantic and syntactic level. Langer states that:
‘ Music, like language, is an articulate form. Its parts not only fuse together to yield a greater entity, but in so doing they maintain some degree of separate existence, and the sensuous character of each element is affected by its function in the complex whole. This means that the greater entity we call a composition is not merely produced by mixture, like a new colour made by mixing paints, but is articulated, i.e. its internal structure is given to our perception.’ (Langer, 1953: 31)
In Soldati’s words it becomes clear that Langer claims: it is ‘within the interrelatedness of the elements, where all of these elements contribute to the meaning of the artwork’ (Soldati, 2014:67). According to Soldati this happens in the same way as with the
interrelated structure of elements within discursive language. The ‘structure’ in Langer’s theory of the symbol in art might not be fixed such as the structure in discursive language, for this is fixed by convention (formulas of grammar that is within discursive language). Yet it
3 Hopefully it is clear that the concept of expression has a different meaning than the concept of expression
within theories of dance as immediate expression.
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is Langer’s ambition to show this relation of interrelated elements, or in other words the structure of the artwork (Soldati, 2014: 66-67). Hence what we can see is that there is still an underlying structure within art, only without conventionalized formulae. Art instead, has an ambiguous internal structure. Consequently, Langer cannot avoid explaining the rules of art based on the basis of the rules of discursive language.
Langer claims that what is symbolically expressed in the artwork, the presentation of the patterns of feeling -the inner experience, enriches our knowledge of reality on a level of reason. She states that:
‘Rationality is the essence of mind, and symbolic transformation its elementary process. It is a
fundamental error, therefore, to recognize rationality only in the phenomenon of systematic, explicit reasoning.’ (Langer, 1948: 99)
According to Langer, normally when one speaks of reason, one assumes reason can only exist of systematic patterns. She argues, instead, that also feelings can be conceived as ingredients for the rational. This sounds like a paradox. Langer herself describes this as counterintuitive as well, but only because within the scientific paradigm we can see forms only as scientific and mathematical logical forms that do not involve anything else but the scientific or mathematical structures or relations. This is the reason why qualitative factors such as feelings are always made ‘content’ instead of form. An artistic symbol is a much more intricate thing that what we usually think of as form. After all, it involves all the relationships of its elements to one another, all similarities and differences of quality, not only geometric or other familiar relations (Langer, 1953: 51). This explains why Langer thinks that the presentational symbol brings much that earlier tradition assigned to the emotional and irrational, and that the symbolic form of art presents ubiquitous knowledge. The question that remains is how feelings can be conceived as ingredients for the rational, as knowledge. Her response is that feelings gradually become disciplined and transformed and so progressively articulated as they develop in and through human experiences, that such feelings have definite forms. It is thus because patterns of feelings can be logically
expressive, in its form, feeling somehow must participate in our rational knowledge and understanding, in our reasoning, yet not in a systematic and explicit way. In a broader sense Langer thinks that ‘any appreciation of form, any awareness of patterns in experience, is reason; and discourse with all its refinements (e.g. mathematical symbolism, which is an extension of language) on only one possible pattern’ (Langer, 1953: 129) The symbol of art is an articulated form of the patterns of feeling, and therefore logical and systematic. It is
because art as a symbol has this articulated form that Langer claims feelings are also cognitive, a thinking, and therefore rational knowledge.
Langer thus criticizes logical positivists by claiming that aesthetic symbolic forms are meaningful. She still defines the art-symbol as rational and logic knowledge and thereby reduces art to the same set of abstract rules that define and govern what the logical
positivist think of as language. This argument undermines the distinction she primarily made between discursive and presentational thought. A second analogy can thus be made with the rules of formal language: art becomes a metaphor for the symbol of language. In the next paragraph it will be explained what consequence this has for her theory on dance.
Susanne Langer: what is dance?
Langer’s symbol-philosophical theory on art entails a critique on expression theory that lies on the immediacy of the personal expression in art. Her idea is that art is not the self-expression, nor the fear or love of one individual and not a sign of the subjective emotions it conveys either, in which art is used as a catharsis or incitement. She tries to overcome the limitation of feeling to the realm of spontaneous expression, which reduces feeling to a non-cognitive aspect of human life. Alternatively, she claims art can only be expressive in a certain articulated form, a symbol, and is therefore symbolically expressive. Her critique is that within the notion of spontaneous expression in expression theory, the artwork is not considered a symbol, but a sign that points to some matter of fact of how someone feels (Langer, 1953). This is exactly not what the artwork presents. Although Langer’s symbol philosophical theory on art is primarily about music that receives extended treatment in her primary work, that receives extended treatment in her primary work, this is later on
extended to other forms of art such as the art of dance, which includes an elaborate explanation of how the artistic meaning of dance lay in its symbolization. Langer herself claims that the proper way to construct a general theory is by generalization of a special one. She believes the analysis of musical significance in Philosophy in a New Key is capable of such generalization, of furnishing a valid theory of significance to the whole sphere of the arts (Langer, 1953: 24). In her work Feeling and Form (1953), she puts her focus - amongst other art forms - on dance and again explicitly criticizes theory on art as a form of self-expression; this time within the art of dance:
‘The widely popular doctrine that every work of art takes rise from an emotion which agitates the artist, and which is directly “expressed” in the work, may be found in the literature of every art […] Only in literature of dance, the claim to direct self-expression is very nearly unanimous. Not only
the sentimental Isadora, but also such eminent theorists as Merle Armitage and Rudolf von Laban, and scholars like Curt Sachs, accept the natural doctrine that dance is a free discharge either of surplus energy or of emotional excitement’ (Langer, 1953: 176-177).
It is thus the field of dance, as Langer argues in which art is most explicitly discussed as a form of immediate self-expression. However it was Mary Wigman (and not Isadora Duncan as Langer claims), who was the initiator of Ausdruckstanz: an expressive dance that sought to achieve emotional ecstasy. Isadora Duncan was indeed identified as the creator of Free dance as opposed to Classical dance4, as a search for the expression of the individual. Yet
Isadora Duncan as well as Rudolph von Laban sought the connection between movement and emotion, where the feeling was the inner origin of the form of movement. The form may then indeed result from feelings of joy or anger; in other words the form represented the emotional expression (Utrecht, 1988). Although many dancers and choreographers group with this tradition, Langer opposes the expression of immediate personal feelings in dance-movement. It is and has always been the expression of feelings that are performed through a form of dance movement. In Langer’s opinion movement abstracts from emotion. Meanwhile Langer is critical towards radical formalistic views on dance as well, such as the view of dance critic André Levinson. Levinson assigns dance a function outside itself, where only the contours of the movement itself are appreciated. Langer describes this formalist approach on dance as pantomime, referring to the sterility of plastic images, which is certainly not the same as the art of dance (Langer, 1953).
In explaining Langer’s theory of art in general, it has already become clear how patterns of feelings, as aspects of life, can be articulated through the art form in a general way. Art is the creation of form that is symbolic for an emotional content. In order to explain how Langer sees this within the art of dance it is necessary to get into more of the details of the art form of dance, and particular that of dance movement. Dance movement for Langer is based on two conditions: that of primary illusion and that of basic abstraction, the latter creating this primary illusion (Langer, 1953). This is in contrast to natural gesture or
-movement in natural life. The reason people believe of the genuinely self-expressive nature of dance is, as Langer claims, because gestures in dance can be seen in two different ways that connect to her general theory of art. These two ways are systematically confused. According to Langer, gesture as expressive movement has two alternative meanings: it means either ‘self-expressive’, i.e. symptomatic of existing subjective conditions, or
“logically expressive” (Langer, 1953: 180). In natural life, natural or actual gestures function
4 Free dance opposed to that of classical ballet, is what we nowadays would define as contemporary dance.
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as signs of our desires, intentions, expectations, demands and feelings. Gesticulation in this sense is part of our actual behaviour, according to the psychological condition of the person who makes it: spontaneous, emotional, and capable of repetition upon request as part of our actual behaviour, a signal of one’s will. This form of expression is self-expression, but this is not what the art of dancing is; it is simply vital movement (Langer, 1953). Dance according to Langer is not an actual self –expression, as a sign of the will, but is, such as other art forms logically expressive: a symbol.
Actual realities in dance, such as place, gravity, muscular strength, are active powers in everything a dancer actually does. Yet at the same time all these actual powers disappear immediately in the articulated form of dance. One could compare it with a rainbow: the gestures are not unreal; one really perceives it, one does not dream; however it is not completely tangible, it is illusory. What we see is what Langer’s calls a virtual entity; the abstraction of every day gestures is apparent in the symbolic form of dance. Actual gestures become virtual gestures and active powers become virtual powers. Virtual gesture in dance is thus the basic abstraction whereby the dance illusion is made. The energy that comes from virtual gestures, which is dance-specific, is what Langer calls ‘virtual powers’. These powers are as different from any system of physical forces ‘as psychological time is from clock-time, and psychological space from the space of geometry’ (Langer, 1953: 29-30). As soon as the dance is seen as an actual gesture, instead of the abstraction of this gesture, the dance work breaks and the creation fails. ‘The virtual form must be organic and autonomous and divorced from actuality. Whatever enters into it does in radical artistic transformation; its space is plastic, its time is musical, its themes are fantasy, its actions symbolic’ (Langer, 1953: 204). Dance is thus a symbol in a way that it abstracts from the actual gesture, it is logically expressive in its movement and an abstract presentation of aspects of subjective life, created is the image of a world of vital forces. Langer calls this an illusion of force. The primary illusion of dance is thus a virtual realm of power.
‘ In watching a collective dance -say, an artistically successful ballet – one does not see people running around; one sees the dance driving this way, drawn that way gathering here, spreading there - fleeing, resting, rising and so forth; and all the motion seems to spring from powers beyond the performers.’ (Langer, 1953: 175)
This can even be better explained by a pirouette. A pirouette is a turning movement in dance. Performing a pirouette, it is very important for the dancer to use a spotting action. A spotting action is when your eyes lock into something, perhaps a sign on the wall, the dancer turns around keeping his eyes on that place, snaps his head around and comes back with his
eyes spotting onto that same place. At the same time the dance bends his knees holds his arms in a certain position and keeps the rest of his body straight. So, although there is indeed the actual gesture, for people really are running around on stage, or in the pirouette the dancer is holding his arms, legs and head at the right place, staying on balance and turning, what is expressed and what the audience experience is something else. Langer argues, that it is not the actual movement that the audience experiences. Both kind of gestures are thus present in a complex way: actual gestures are present in the movement, but only metaphorically present in the dance work of art, so that the performance becomes a link between physical sensations as they reside in the movement and abstract concepts of this movement as they exist in the art of dance. To understand dance, is to understand this virtual gesture and its virtual powers, and to recognize the element or aspect of life that is captured in the performance of the work and perceived by the audience in its articulated form.
The human feelings that the dancer expresses are inherently abstracted from their everyday context - and thus presented symbolically- as well. Feelings are somehow
imagined, for the so-called virtual entity that is created by its virtual powers creates a semblance of self-expression. The feeling is not what the dancers feel, but it belongs to the dance itself, it is imagined feeling (Langer, 1953: 177). What is expressed in dance is thus the idea of feelings. What can only be symbolically expressed, or better put, articulated in detail and to great depth, is the form of these feelings. Instead of communication by language using discourse as a medium that serves to express what we know of the life of feeling, the dance thus expresses ideas of the emotive life. Within dance movement this logically expressed, symbolically shown: an outward image of an inward process (Langer, 1981). Following Langer’s arguments of her symbol-philosophical theory in dance, dance-movement should be interpreted according to their function of expressing inner experience presented as an articulated form. Here she sees the dance movement as a virtual power, which abstracts normal every day movement as well as personal emotions. It should thus be stated what is expressed in dance is a symbolic form of life, that abstracts real life. Actual gestures become virtual gestures and actual feelings become imagined feelings. What dance creates, by the virtual gestures and imagined feelings is an illusion of experience. It means that the formal properties of its virtual structure are logically related to the formal
properties of actual human gestures and related feelings. This illusion of experience, the process of symbolizing dance, still functions according to a cognitive process. Although dance movement is a bodily art, the meaning of art is formed through a process of mind and
stays a form of rational knowledge.
The philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone criticizes Langer’s notion of the symbolic nature of dance movement. She critiques, to my mind legitimately, that Langer does not account for the immediate experience of the body, hence does not understand the symbolic nature of dance movement properly. To substantiate this argument Sheets-Johnstone comes up with an explanation for the understanding of dance-movement that is embedded in phenomenology. Instead, how the nature of dance movement should be understood and what the meaning of dance is according to Sheets-Johnstone, will be discussed in the next chapter.
Chapter 3
A Phenomenological approach to dance
The question of the meaning of dance takes on a new significance with the rise of the so-called corporeal turn. The focus on dance hereby shifts: within the corporeal turn the significance of dance is seen from within the immediate practical experience of the body. This primary interest in physicality opened up a vibrant space for dance studies (Leigh-Foster, 1992), where kinetic studies5 of the body were explained in aesthetic theory: the
kinaesthetic (Brandstetter and Klein, 2013). The dance critic John Martin shows us that the relation between dancers and spectators is founded in a kinaesthetic transferal instead of communication founded on the mind, according to the rules of logic. This kinaesthetic approach was greatly influenced by phenomenology. Phenomenology, as a matter of fact, being a method for studying experience, more or less defined the corporeal turn in dance. The main critique within this corporeal turn is that other theories of dance such as symbol-philosophical theories of dance reflect an uncompromising dualism when it comes to dance. Dance movement, defined as a form of knowledge, is seen from within a process of mind that is eventually based on a purely contemplative Cartesian cogito as the provenance of the subject; as something which reaches back to a logical structure of the subject that eventually is (re)presented in its sensuous objective form of dance movement. Accordingly, the sensuous body is reduced to, generated, or somehow absorbed in, the functioning of mind. (The concept of mind here is described as a certain peculiarly ‘pure’ and non-sensuous state and for this reason it is not up to the task of describing our experience of movement). (Brandstetter and Klein, 2013). This critique of symbol-philosophical theories by the
positions inspired by the discussions of the corporeal turn can be brought in relation to the general concept of intuition in phenomenology, as will be elaborated on in this chapter.
It is particularly the philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone who claims to base her philosophy of dance extensively on a phenomenological approach within her theory of bodily movement in dance. 6
The phenomenological being
Maxine Sheets Johnstone’s The Phenomenology of Dance (1966) was a pathbreaking
5 Kinetic studies of the body are based on research wherein the body is seen as an object that possesses a form
of energy due to its motion. This current research on kinectic empathy as a sensory-driven approach to knowledge and understanding is also rooted in scientific evidence from neuroscience.
6 Susan Leigh Foster writes about a kinaesthetic approach to dance. Though her notion of dance involves not so
much that of a phenomenological approach, but rather an approach of dance as a form of communication (Leigh-Foster, 1997).
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contribution to the theoretical discussion of dance, especially with her focus on the experience of the body. In this work she explicitly criticizes theorists from other traditions, such as Langer. Dealing with the influence of kinaesthetic concepts that have been
mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, Sheets-Johnstone’s ideas have their origins in phenomenologist theories, especially that of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘bodily
consciousness’.7 Consequently the main ideas from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology that
contribute to an understanding of Sheets-Johsntone’s theory on dance will be discussed first.
The intuitive core of the meaning of the term phenomenology is the science of phenomena, which is based on Edmund Husserl’s view that science of phenomena is the most fruitful way to pursue any philosophical investigations. Husserl propagates a presupposition less descriptive study of phenomena, which inherently means that phenomenological statements are not arrived by inductive generalizations or derivation from unexamined assumptions, but by apprehending phenomena via intentional experience. This means that phenomenology is non-empirical in its approach; it does not seek to
describe empirically observable matters of fact. For Husserl, the only way out of the impasse into which philosophy had been led at the end of the nineteenth century, under the
influence of a certain traditions that made the subject the locus of the properties of the object, was his radical understanding of the intentional structure of consciousness
(Silverman, 1987). All conscious experiences are characterized by ‘aboutness’, an experience of something (Moran, 2000: 16). From Husserl on, the concept of consciousness is
characterized in phenomenology as an intentional consciousness in that it is always
consciousness of something. Hereby intuition is constitutive for the intentional object to be directly present to the intentionality at play; the intention is filled by the direct
apprehension of the object. The phenomenological account of the intentional consciousness has influenced other phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty in a great way, as can be retraced in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception [Phenomenology de la
Perception] (2002, [1945]).
7In her work The Corporal Turn (2009), Sheets-Johnstone eventually criticizes Merleau-Ponty by stating that he fails examining the experience of movement; for he misses its ‘dynamic kinetic structure’ (Sheets-Johnstone, 2009: 263). She also claims that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘motor intentionality’ threatens to reduce ‘the sentient moving person’ to an operative motor, which presents a mechanical conception of looking at dance (Sheets-Johnstone, 2009: 261). The critique is unjust, as Merleau-Ponty’s notion of motility is explicitly a critique on these materialist or behaviourist theories; as the body is more or less reduced to the status of a mere thing obedient to purely scientific physical laws (Merleau-Ponty, 2002).
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‘The life of consciousness – cognitive life, the life of desire or perceptual life – is subtended by an ‘intentional arc’, which projects round about us our past, our future, our human setting, our physical, ideological and moral situation, or rather which results in our being situated in all these respects’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 157)
Although the Husserlian treatment of intentional conscious cannot be separated from an intentional mental ‘act’, Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of consciousness is an intentional
bodily ‘act’ (Hickerson, 2007: 76). Primarily, Merleau-Ponty’s theory is a theory of
perception, and his concept of perception is grounded in the body - hence the bodily consciousness. How we perceive things, how we perceive the world, is thus always in direct reference to the body, because there is a direct awareness of the body itself as it exists ‘ towards’ the world (Merleau-Ponty, 2002). ‘Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 233). The body is the viewpoint on the world, characterized by an intentional arc that springs from the
perceptional body towards the world. The body is therefore always embedded in a situation that is already pregnant of meaning. His notion of intentional arc thus refers to the way the body is ‘lived significance’, in which impressions resonate intuitively and unreflectively through the body towards its living and non-living surroundings. They way we should understand ourselves as our bodily consciousness is through our experienced and lived body-in-the-world, that cannot be separated from the world as experienced, as it is in direct relation with the world. Hence the body cannot be understood from within a psychological perspective, as an affective object, for the body does not have a function of representation. We know where our limbs are without having to look for them (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 115). Traditionally it has been claimed that objective space would be prior to bodily space. Although there is a difference between bodily and external space according to Ponty, it is only within the immanent relationship between them. Consequently Merleau-Ponty argues the traditional notion of space cannot lie out there, for the notion of incarnate intentionality that was just mentioned already implies the arc of that global bodily purpose and the external space would not be there if the body was not there. The bodily space is in Merleau-Ponty’s words ‘the darkness needed in the theatre to show up the performance’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 115). The lived spatiality of the body thus constitutes the basis of that external space, and therefore space is primarily space that unfolds through the background of the bodily space. This relation must be pre-objective, for there is a pre-reflective
knowledge of the body in space. Consequently bodily space is not an awareness of ‘spatiality
of position’ but ones awareness of the body as incarnate intentionality as a ‘spatiality of situation’ which implies a crucial shift from the body as object to the body of experience (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 113).
It is therefore that Merleau-Ponty states our body is neither in space nor in time, but
inhabits space and time. The body is our general means by which we have a world and its
existential consistency is reflected in the action of the body. Inhabiting is for Merleau-Ponty an expression of the fundamental grounding in the world of our being familiar with and in the world as the original phenomenon. He uses the term ‘habiter’: a concept that presents an indication of the initial familiarity of man with the things around him. It is by considering the body act in movement that according to Merleau-Ponty we can see better how the body not only moves through space, but inhabits space (as well as time), because movement is not limited to submitting passively to space and time ‘it actively assumes them’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 117).
‘The originality of the movements which I perform with my body: they directly anticipate the final situation, for my intention initiates a movement through space merely to attain the objective initially given at the starting point. I move external objects with the aid of my body, which takes hold of them in one place and shifts them to another. But my body itself I move directly, I do not find it at one point of objective space and transfer it to another. I have no need to look for it, it is already with me – I do not need to lead it towards the movement’s completion, it is in contact with it from the start and propels itself towards that end’ (Merleau- Ponty, 2002: 108)
What Merleau-Ponty hereby claims is that movement is learned when the body has understood it; that is, when it has incorporated it into its world. Movement, should not be understood as a bodily mechanic principle, where the formation of habits follows a certain system: such as the body that has the capacity to react causally on certain situations in a certain way, with answers of a certain kind. Merleau-Ponty thinks it is the body that catches and understands the movement in a non-mechanical manner. To move one’s body is to aim at things through it: it is to allow oneself to respond to their call, which is made upon it independently of any representation.
‘ To know how to type is not, then, to know the place of each letter among the keys, not even to have acquired a condition reflex for each one, which is set in motion by the letter as it comes before our eye. If habit is neither a form of knowledge nor an involuntary action, what then is it? It is knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated in detachment from that effort. The subject knows where the letters are on the
typewriter as we know where one of our limbs is, through a knowledge bred of familiarity which does not give u a position in objective space’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 166).
This quote explains how the body inhabits space as it moves. It is not, as it were, a handmaid of consciousness, a mental or intellectual representation that transports the body to that point in space of which we have formed an image beforehand. Through movement one can see that bodily consciousness inhabits the world by being familiar with the world. It is not the objective body that we move in objective space, but our phenomenal body through the inherent working of intentional threads wit the world, that is directly given in the existence of bodily consciousness of lived experience. In his own words: ‘Before the formula of the
new dance can incorporate certain elements of general motility, it must first have had, as it were, the stamp of movement set upon it’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 165). This familiarity with
the world can be seen as a bodily memory, which is again not a mental memory, not a purely physical motoric act, but a memory that is ensured by the body itself as a what Merleau-Ponty calls a ‘motor intentionality’, or ‘motility’. It is again the intentional arc that brings about this motility. Because the body has the ability to carry out those movements by its bodily memory that is ensured by its motility, it can be said that one can immediately grasp the totality of his body in relation with the world. We thus have an overview of our body. Because we have this overview, we can use our material in a creative and potential way. What it means to have an overview is explicated by Merleau-Ponty’s distinction of concrete and abstract movement. He defines concrete movement as movement in which a goal is inherently decided; such as the example of typing that was mentioned earlier on or grabbing your cup of coffee next to your computer whilst typing. Merleau-Ponty speaks of another movement that is enabled by the body: abstract movement. With abstract movement, the body is not only available in real situations into which it is drawn. Somehow it can turn aside from the world, that is to say, apply its activity to stimuli that affect its sensory surfaces, lend itself to experimentation, and generally speaking take its place in the realm of the
‘potential’. Each stimulus applied to the body of a normal person arouses a kind of potential
movement, rather than an actual one as well (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 125; 128). Upon
physical space, it imposes a virtual space. This potential movement, or abstract movement is not relevant to any actual situation, such as pointing towards something. To be able to make such an abstract movement, to make the orientation towards the possible, towards a new meaning, an overview is necessary. The overview is present by the inherent working of motor intentionality or motility of the phenomenological body.
Merleau-Ponty turns his attention to an examination of pathological motility in order to illuminate our usual mode of orienting ourselves in the world. With pathological or morbid motility, someone’s ability is hindered to make an abstract movement, for there is no object that can be accessed by the body. He manages the abstract movement only if he is allowed to watch the limb required to perform them, or to go through preparatory
movements involving the body, in other words to observe it in a dualist way, reaching for an object. Someone with morbid motility needs ‘objectifying power’: a function of
representation: it creates a symbolic function. The ability of this function is to set out the making of a reasonable order, and to give the immediate expression a form. When this happens the body can no longer be defined by immediate sensation, its body gets the status of an object, a thing, which eventually not becomes a for-itself, which is towards the world, but an on-itself. And therefore the body becomes an intellectual meaning instead of a bodily meaning. Merleau-Ponty continues his argument, claiming that in general the abstract movement is endangered in so far as it presupposes awareness of an objective, making an object of it instead. This power of objectification, as a representative function is, moreover, already at work in forming things. Lacking the ability of motility consists in the need of giving a meaning to sense data by systematizing them and consequently giving abstract movement a form (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 118-138). This ‘power’ of systemizing and giving experience form, is what Merleau-Ponty sees as a diminishment of the phenomenal body and therefore of the real productive power of man. The need for giving form to experience can thus be analyzed as what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the disturbance of fully being able to experience being (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 138).
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology can be interpreted as a direct critique of the Neo-Kantian tradition of Cassirer, whose concept of being cannot perceive the world without the mediation of the symbol(ic consciousness); where symbols are needed, as a transcendental
condition to be able to ‘invent’ meanings and man thus delay their meaning of things by
inserting a complex process of mind and tools which present the world to them. In Merleau-Ponty’s theory the body is transcendental, constitutive of the world. Yet the body is not a condition – in the sense of a requirement - of perceiving the world, the world is immediately given with the body. Merleau-Ponty’s central concern is that one has to
recognize that objective thought fundamentally distorts the phenomena of our lived
experience, thereby estranging us from our own selves, the world in which we live and other people with whom we interact (Langer, 1989). Such thinking is not confined to a single discipline or to a particular philosophical tradition, but it does expose the bias of objective
thought such as the theory of Cassirer’s way of thinking of the human condition and its world. The Neo-Kantian tradition, argues that the body is reducible to, generated by, or somehow absorbed in, the functioning of mind, and thus stands in direct opposition with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological bodily consciousness. Although in both theories the world is constituted actively by mind or body, for Merleau-Ponty the body is not a condition for the world to be able to experience. The world is immediately given with bodily
consciousness.
Sheets-Johnstone’s corporeal turn of the human condition
Sheets-Johnstone’s most dominant concept within her oeuvre is that of bodily movement. Within years of research, the essays she has written deal with all sorts of topics: evolution, consciousness, language, memory, and dance. All of these topics converge to the same story: bodily movement is crucial to an understanding of life (Overgaard, 2010: 139). Given the centrality of bodily movement, she laments the tendency in science and (western) society to be focused so intensely on the brain, representing a dualist approach of mind. It is the phenomenological approach of the lived body in direct contact with the world that is not only the foundation within the dance theory of Sheets-Johnstone, but also the foundation of her notion of the human condition. In line with Merleau-Ponty she claims that the
phenomenologist’s attitude toward the phenomenon should be neither objective nor subjective, but rather an attitude of being present to the phenomenon, without pre-shaping it in any way by prior mental interpretations or beliefs. Again, in line with Merleau-Ponty, she argues that the action of reflection nullifies lived experience, because reflection transforms the experiential event into an object of thought (Sheets-Johnstone, 1966). Following Merleau-Ponty’s concept of bodily intentionality, Sheets-Johnstone thinks that a quest for knowledge about a phenomenon should begin with the direct bodily intuition of the phenomenon. This means that intuition towards a phenomenon is direct, initial, pre-rational, and therefore pre-reflective:
‘As the idea of an immediate insight into the essence of the object, or a moment of clear
perception of the thing in and of itself; a lived experience of the phenomenon’ (Sheets-Johnstone,
1966: 12).
The description of the lived experience of the phenomenon is thus only possible since consciousness is a bodily consciousness of something, a direct intentionality of the body with the world.
Sheets-Johnstone’s idea of the phenomenological consciousness, seeking the heart
of lived experience itself instead of seeing man as an objective structure in relationship to the world, is the starting point in her theory on dance as well. In her work The
Phenomenology of dance (1966), she criticizes the dualist approaches on dance – such as
Langer’s theory - and proposes a new understanding of the nature of dance-movement, that of lived experience, and thus of the meaning of dance. In what way she proposes this new understanding will be discussed in the next section.
Sheets-Johnstone’s: what is dance?
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s starting point for her argument is that dance is a phenomenon as well, but that of a special kind; a kinetic phenomenon. Her kinetic approach of the body seems to get assigned primary importance as a mechanical approach and therefore an objectified form of movement. This is however not the case. She describes the kinetic in dance movement within her phenomenological approach. Following Merleau-Ponty she claims that a lived experience of the body incorporates a pre-reflective awareness. Consciousness-body knows itself to be present in the midst-of the world, not through a factual perception of its parts, but through a kinetic perception, a bodily movement that has the pre-reflective awareness of itself as present totality. According to Sheets-Johnstone dance movement is first and foremost a pre-reflective and bodily-created phenomenon, as a form-in-the-making. Dance cannot be wholly captured or understood by a dualistic approach of objectively describing what is happening when someone dances. When the dancer
mentally reflects on dance and defines its elements as a body moving in spatial and rhythmic patterns, he only captures some small aspects of what happens.
‘The meaning of any dance comes alive for us only as we ourselves have a lived experience of the dance, and is not the result of either prior knowledge of dance or of any later reflective efforts. If we reflect upon the dance after it has been presented in the hope of discovering its meaning, we can only arrive at its significance from a distance’ […] It is the lived experience which is of paramount significance. Through the lived experience we arrive at not only the sense of any particular dance, but also at the essence of dance’ (Sheets Johnstone, 1966: 4).
Sheets-Johnstone’s ambition is to show that the meaning of dance can only be understood through dance-movement. Her worry is that seeing dance-movement as a symbol, an articulated form and therefore as a representation, it fails to capture our experience. She claims that dance movement and their properties should not be interpreted according to their function of some inner experience that is expressed (and presented) in an outer form. Sheets-Johnstone thus reaches beyond theories on dance as a form of language, as well as
that of dance as the expression of emotions, or other forms of (re)presentation. Rather she denotes dance movement as a process, a dynamic event, creates lived experience, without denoting to something else but that experience. Dance immediately exists within the totality of lived experience. Dance movement thus expresses the immediate life of the dancer. The idea of expressing immediate life through dance movement should not be understood as life in the sense of internal emotions, that are represented in a certain way.
To approach dance as a phenomenal presence is to presuppose nothing in advance of the immediate experience of dance-movement. Merleau-Ponty’s influence on this idea is significant again. As a dancer, it is not the mental image of a remembrance in which the dancer eventually knows what movements he should make. The dancer becomes so familiar with the dance movement that the body remembers what it should do. The dancer knows which parts of the body he should use, and which direction the body should go. It is in Merleau-Ponty’s words, its bodily memory that makes dance movement possible. Dance is looked upon as a totality whose structures are intrinsic to it. Within this present totality of the kinetic dance phenomenon, the two structures inherently existing within the kinetic dance phenomenon that have to be described are time and space. The structures of time and space – temporality and spatiality – are defined by Sheets-Johnstone as the inherent structures of human consciousness-body; rooted in the pre-reflective awareness of the dancer. She thus finds her ideas based on the phenomenological concepts of space and time. Time and space exist because human bodily intention exists. Because the dancer is pre-reflectively aware of himself, a pre-reflective awareness of time and space is intrinsic to any lived experience of consciousness body, of gesture. The pre-reflective awareness of time is an awareness of temporality. The dancer negates himself as being past, present or future. The same counts for the body’s spatiality. The pre-reflective consciousness is the foundation for intuitive knowledge of the spatial presence and meaning of the environment. It is
because our body moves within the meaning of its spatiality that we are conscious of spatiality. Thus in any lived experience, one is always pre-reflectively aware of the spatial-temporal totality of our being because one is never conscious of ourselves as being at any one moment in time or at any one point in space: the spatial-temporal units of our being which constitute our spatial-temporal totality are not explicitly recognized (Sheets-Johnstone, 1966: 22-26).
Sheets-Johnstone thinks the nature of the creative process that brings a dance to life, can only be explained by (perceiving) the process from the dancer’s perspective; unravelling the nature of its on-going, temporality, its on-going present. The lived
experience of space and time is inherent with the gestures a dancer makes, for the dance movement is immediately made by the gestures of the dance, and the dancer has an immediate knowledge and sense of its gestures. The movement that the dancer creates at any moment is then not a thing that the dancer does, an action that he takes, but a passing moment within a dynamic process of its being, a process that cannot be divided into beginnings and endings (Sheets-Johnstone, 1966).
This explanation of dance movement within Sheets-Johnstone theory can again be analysed through Merleau-Ponty’s notion of motility, although she does not adopt this concept explicitly. The body remembers dance movement as a bodily memory, in which the body does not understand the movement through a mechanical or intellectual way. The dancer learns to impose the intentional threads that are made possible by the motility of the dancer’s bodily movement. The memory of dance is thus the remembrance made possible by the motility. By these intentional threads, through its movement the dancer is familiar with the oriented space and inhabits space. It is the body that understands the movement it has to make with and amidst his background. It is thus his motility what constitutes the revelation of force through movement and creates movement abstracted from all mediation or representation. Dance movement can never be an articulated form of movement that expresses something else than its immediately expressiveness.
Sheets-Johnstone also argues that once does see dance movement as an articulated form, that is to say that the moment a mentally reflectional awareness becomes explicit, the moment of its experience shatters. This counts for the audience as well as the dancer. The audience shatters the creation of dance by constituting the dancer as an object in a symbolic sense, by breaking down the action into its corporeal moments or by analysing it. The dancer, respectively, shatters the dance movement by being conscious of creating dance, of the dance itself, for then she construes her body as an object and she is not really dancing, according to Sheets-Johnstone. For the dancer the body and the movement appear as separate and distinct phenomena because the dancer is no longer pre-reflectively aware of her body in movement. This could be compared to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of morbid motility, of trying to systemize and form the movement that normally would be experienced directly through the process of motility.
This would mean that the audience should be able to perceive the immediate expressiveness of life of the dancer as well. Following Langer’s theory on dance this cannot be possible, for what dance-movement expresses and what the audience perceives is a virtual movement; a movement that abstracts from experience. Yet philosopher and dancer
