Abstract
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.
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Data availability
The interview data, which consists of audio recordings on a computer and word-file transcriptions, are kept safe according to the Norwegian Centre for Research Data restrictions. The five interviewees (all professional dancers) have read and signed a form of consent (in Danish), and received a copy. They have full access to their individual data.
Notes
See Sara Heinämaa’s article ”Anonymity and Personhood: Merleau-Ponty’s Account of the Subject of Perception” for a clarification of these notions.
By the philosophical idea of dualism, I refer to Descartes, and also to Plato’s idealism.
I worked as a dancer, physical actress, and singer from about 1985 to about 2010.
Consciousness is traditionally referred to as being reflective through the mind (in philosophy, as such), as well as bodily, pre-reflective (in phenomenology and fields of embodied cognition). Reflection through the body, as a non-conceptual, high-order experience, is not yet commonly considered.
Contemporary dance is an umbrella notion for western artistic dance complementary to classical ballet. From Legrand and Ravn (2009)
“Flow” is a term coined by the psychologist Mihaly Cskszentmihalyi (1990), and it describes the conditions for optimal experience. Like the terms the “zone” and the “groove”, “flow” is frequently used by practitioners to describe an elevated state of consciousness in artistic and athletic performance – what I would call a bodily reflective state.
Butoh is the name given to a variety of performance practises that emerged around the middle of the twentieth century in Japan.
Swan Lake is a classical ballet with music by Tchaikovsky, that tells the story of princess Odette, who is turned into a swan by an evil sorcerer’s curse.
”Reflexion ist nach dem soeben Ausgeführten ein Titel für Akte, in denen der Erlebnisstrom mit all seinen mannigfachen Vorkommnissen (Erlebnismomenten, Intentionalien) evident fassbar und analysierbar wird. Sie ist, so können wir es auch ausdrücken, der Titel der Bewusstseinsmethode für die Erkenntnis von Bewusstsein überhaupt” (Husserl 1976, p. 165).
Or, cette philosophie qui est à faire, c’est elle qui anime le peintre, non pas quand il exprime des opinions sur le monde, mais à l’instant où sa vision se fait geste, quand, dira Cézanne, il “pense en peinture” (Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit, 1961).
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Acknowledgements
The author thanks the dance theatre Åben Dans, and the dancers who have participated in the research through interviews: Antoinette Helbing and Ole Birger Hansen from Åben Dans, and Ellen Kilsgaard, Yael Gaathon and Eleanor Bauer.
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Buttingsrud, C. Bodies in skilled performance: how dancers reflect through the living body. Synthese 199, 7535–7554 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03127-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03127-2