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From movement to dance

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Abstract

This article begins with a summary phenomenological analysis of movement in conjunction with the question of “quality” in movement. It then specifies the particular kind of memory involved in a dancer’s memorization of a dance. On the basis of the phenomenological analysis and specification of memory, it proceeds to a clarification of meaning in dance. Taking its clue from the preceding sections, the concluding section of the article sets forth reasons why present-day cognitive science is unable to provide insights into dance, notably because being largely tethered to happenings in the brain, it lacks foundational grounding in experience, specifically, the actual experience of movement, which is to say in kinesthesia.

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Notes

  1. To be noted and even underscored is that, as the subtitle (“What Actions Tell the Self”) and the foreword to Motor Cognition make unequivocally clear from the very beginning, Jeannerod’s newly defined field of motor cognition has to do with action. The point, of course, is that action is not movement, and the study of action is therefore not equivalent to the study of movement any more than the study of behavior is equivalent to the study of movement (Sheets-Johnstone 2008b).

  2. A reviewer commented: “[T]he author’s ‘phenomenological analysis of movement’ is more a (Laban inspired) qualitative analysis than a phenomenological description and analysis of movement and/or dance (e.g., of being in the world).” I knew nothing of Laban’s analysis at the time of writing The Phenomenology of Dance. Laban analysts have since told me that my phenomenological analysis of movement is distinctive, but dovetails in significant ways with their analysis.

  3. The qualities are in fact evident not only in self-movement, or more generally in what is now commonly termed “human biological movement,” but also in the movement of waves, for example, and of tree limbs in a windstorm.

  4. A reviewer noted by way of counterexample that a Paul Taylor dance involved two unmoving dancers, dancers simply sitting on stage. Yvonne Rainer and Robert Morris, a number of years earlier, did something similar to Taylor’s two sitting dancers in their dance Waterman Switch, a dance in which both Rainer and Morris, nude and locked in an embrace, walked slowly from center stage into the wings, accompanied by a Verdi aria. Novel explorations are indeed the driving force of artistry and can at times bring to awareness, precisely by their seeming contrariness, stark realities of movement.

  5. For anyone doubtful about intuitive knowledge or wishing reputable empirical references to the topic, see Sheets-Johnstone 1999a, Chapter 4, on the confluence of Husserl’s and von Helmholtz’s characterization of intuitive knowledge as an effortless and immediate form of knowing.

  6. A reviewer wrote that “near and far are words but it is unclear whether they are concepts in the same way that for example ‘gift’ is a concept.” I refer any similarly dubious readers to Sheets-Johnstone 1990 which showed in fine detail through eight paleoanthropological case studies ranging from tool-making to paleolithic cave art, language, and to the concept of death that fundamental human concepts derive from the body: the body is a semantic template. See also Sheets-Johnstone 2008b, 2010.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, 97403-1295, USA

    Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

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Sheets-Johnstone, M. From movement to dance. Phenom Cogn Sci 11, 39–57 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9200-8

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