Philosophy of Dance

The fiftieth anniversary edition of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's book (the third edition in total) is a welcome reprint of a classic work. The work that she did in this book upon its first publication in the 1960s, and the work that its printing inspired, can be seen today in a much more vibrant and present philosophical study of dance than there was prior to this book's original appearance. The main project of the book is, to illuminate the nature of, and structures inherent in, the phenomenal presence of dance, and, on the basis of that phenomenal presence, to illuminate the vital immediate encounter with dance as both a formed and performed art… a further project is to consider how the phenomenology of dance relates to the teaching of dance, and to determine the place and value of dance within an academic setting (5).

In this article, I describe the experience of dancing-a-walk. My specific focus is on the shift that I perceive in my body when I dance-a-walk rather than functionally walking. Following a firstperson perspective, I demonstrate how my experience of practicing dancing-a-walk interrogates the habit of walking and makes it come alive again as an expression of the body. First, I show how the practice of dancing-a-walk challenges the dichotomy between abstract and concrete movement proposed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception. Indeed, dancing-a-walk is an example of a concrete and yet already abstract movement. Then, I turn to concepts such as habits and body memory. By identifying how the perception of my body changes when I dance everyday movements (i.e., walking) versus when I execute such movements functionally, I aim to develop a new perspective on and vocabulary for a phenomenological definition of concrete/abstract movements within the context of dance.

This paper takes up the philosophical problem of modernism as it arises with respect to dance. While the “of” in the phrase “philosophy of dance” is most often construed as an objective genitive—philosophical which takes dance as its object—the “of” can also be construed as a subjective genitive: philosophical reflection that belongs to dance itself. The paper seeks to clarify the conditions for the possibility of this kind of approach. In the first half of the paper, I characterize a standard approach to philosophy of dance that I take to be implicit in and shared by several attempts to adapt conceptions of modernism, which were developed in the first instance to explain changes in the visual arts, to dance. Once we make the standard approach explicit, I argue, it becomes clear that this approach fails to clarify any sense in which philosophical reflection might genuinely belong to dance that is art. The approach shows only that philosophical reflection is in some sense present in the work of choreographers such as Merce Cunningham or Yvonne Rainer. To say of a form of philosophical reflection that it belongs to dance, I argue, is to make a stronger and a more compelling claim: that there is a necessary relation between the aesthetic and the philosophical achievement of the work. In the second half of the paper, drawing on the conception of modernism developed by Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried, I develop an alternative approach. Following them, I argue that modernism is the condition an art enters when it enters the condition of philosophy. I show that this approach is able to make sense of the following possibility: a reciprocal relation of mutual dependence obtains between the philosophical and aesthetic dimensions of some forms of dance. Through elaborating this idea, I show that the alternative approach affords a far more compelling point of departure for something deserving the title “philosophy of dance”.

В статье аргументируется тезис о том, что смысл танца не может быть выражен исключительно вербально, с помощью описания или нарратива. Если мы говорим в терминах семиотики, то смысл танца не сводится ни к денотату, ни к коннотату. Тело танцовщика в движении способно продуцировать, пользуясь выражением Ролана Барта, некий третий, открытый смысл. И хотя его трудно выразить, этот смысл хорошо ощутим. И хореограф, и исполнитель, и зритель танца переживают, по словам Барта, желание смысла, осознавая, что присутствуют при рождении чего-то нового. Именно открытый смысл танца делает его искусством, способным, согласно философу Нельсону Гудмену, к «созданию миров». Статья завершается цитатами из «металога» Грегори Бейтсона «Что еще за лебедь?» –  о том, что смысл танца для зрителя заключается в непрерывном превращении танцовщицы в лебедя и обратно.

It is well known that the ability to translate across languages is vital to global communication. The world is comprised of nations and people with different social, political, and cultural backgrounds, whose understanding and successful interaction depends on effective translation. For example, the United Nations, which is the largest international organization in existence, has a translator for each of the 193 ambassadors representing member states. Without these translators, international communication would come to a standstill. Translation is also relevant in other important affairs including currency exchange, weights and measures, and even abstract activities like transforming thought into language. One place that translation is rarely talked about is within the arts, yet it is nonetheless important. It is widely accepted that art is a meaningful form of communication that exists separately from other fields like academia, sports, and so on. As with any other communicative process, certain art resonates best with certain people, while other art is more striking to others. Due to this uneven distribution, the question naturally arises of whether it is possible to get these different kinds of people to reach the same states as each other. I will argue that the way to bridge these gaps in appreciating works of art is through artistic translation. Through such a process, the deep level of understanding and appreciation that some are able to reach by experiencing certain artistic works can be shared with a larger community. In this paper I first flesh out what it means to be art, which I argue in its simplest form is 1) experiential, 2) specifically and intentionally structured, 3) open for interpretation, and 4) displays positive unity that is more than mere algebraic simplification. In section 2, I discuss what exactly is meant by artistic truth and its relationship to things like sense, reference, and meaning. Finally, in section 3, I go through the “art” of translation. In this section I discuss what exactly is translated, which I argue is a combination of message and form. I then go through a few sample translations, and close with the possible implications of artistic translation on other fields, particularly that of metaphysics.

Interview by Kerstin Germer and Maja Stark, editorial coordination at Excellence Cluster; an Interdisciplinary Laboratory, for the Cluster's newspaper. CZ# 147, May 9, 2016.

"The book deals with embodied philosophy in Gaga, the movement research of Ohad Naharin, the artistic director of Batsheva Dance Company. The research is the outcome of interdisciplinary discourse: that of dancers in the process of inquiring and reflecting on their technique, and of philosophies of embodiment, phenomenology and hermeneutics. Thus, in return, there are also different audiences that the book may appeal to. Of course, the book is primarily aimed at the newly developing field of the philosophy of dance, but it also addresses people who are interested in the philosophies of embodiment, dance studies as well as non-academics who are interested in the philosophy of dance.
In its content, the book has five parts. The first part deals with embodied philosophy in dance. Its main claim is that the philosophy of dance is the philosophical in dancing and not the philosophy concerning the dance. So I comprehend the action of dancing as philosophical. Then there are three parts according to elements and tendencies in the practice of Gaga. Firstly, I discuss the sensual emphasis of the practice, and I analyze the integration between the senses and cognitive capacities within dancing. Then I question the mental emphasis of the practice. This part deals with the integration of body and mind and claims that emotionality also plays its part. The fourth part of the book deals with the conditions for physical intelligence, and the fifth part deals with dance as a medium and as a means of expression from two interrelated directions: on the one hand, what the dancers perceive and how they handle their perceptual process, and on the other hand how it turns into an expressive utterance..."

In the context of the effort undertaken by the Orchesis Study Group of Dora Stratou Theatre to reconstitute the philosophical and wider cultural presuppositions of the ancient Greek dance, from which the Greek-speaking and Roman world successively developed and having been finally detached - in order to return to it in a new European context during the Renaissance - along with the recognition, on the one hand, of the basic anthropological, aesthetic criteria and principles and, in particular, of dance expression, we attempt a theoretical approach of έρως as a representative concept but also as a phenomenon characteristic of the ancient Greek dancing culture.

In diesem Text werde ich der Frage nachgehen, warum Tanz seit der frühen Tanzmoderne bis hin zum zeitgenössischen Tanz in signifikanten Wellen mit Attributen des Rituellen, des Ritus und des Rituals verbunden wird – und warum dies in systematisch-ästhetischer Hinsicht zumindest fragwürdig, wenn nicht falsch und bisweilen hochproblematisch ist.

How do I know when I am dancing? How do I shift from a non-dancing to a dancing state? Is there a continuum, in my lived experience, between the movements that I do when I vacuum-clean my apartment and those that I do when I dance at a party? When and where does my dance begin?
These questions serve as context and frame for a dancing philosophy.

This text is an attempt to make an ontological analysis of American choreographer Deborah Hay's (1941-) 'performance practice' and to reflect its significance for the dance of the 2000-2020s. It bases its argumentation on the writer's participation as a documentarist for two of Hay's artistic processes, Foster 1986) and the writer's artistic PhD (2004) on the paradigm changes of dance ontologies during the 1900s, with the help of the fundamental ontology of Martin Heidegger.
The main argument of the article is that in Hay's dance practice the principles of idealistic aesthetics, ideal pre-images or forms, have been abandoned thoroughly; instead both the dancing and choreography emerges from the fundamentals of our bodily existence: from time and being-in-the-historical-world. With her focus on the embodied perceptual awareness of the uniqueness of the present moment, she is pointing to a possibility of both negotiating with and stepping momentarily over and out, of the conditioned historical continuums, both in choreographic language and in one's own embodied consciousness.
The fact that Hay proposes a series of bodily-perception questions to dancers instead of a specific movement language, does change the dancer's role and agency to a creative co-agent and the choreographic work to a score-based emergent event. Her practice offers a space to notice the body-mind's tendency to hold on representations of the world but also its potentiality to let go of them and play with movement as actualization of potentiality as potentiality. In Hay's practice the semantic, language, and somatic, movement, are negotiating and interacting with each other, and this interaction opens a space for embodied ecstatic temporal-horizon and topological spatiality as choreographic form-in-the-making.
Hay brought her performance practice back to the professional dance field at just that time in the beginning of the 2000s when much of European contemporary dance was recognizing the problems with often generic and inherited modern dance movement techniques. The article claims that with Hay's radical approach, dancer's technique and skill, rather than understood as a causal technique of production, is considered as situated embodied understanding and articulation, with which one can work on, in Heideggerian terms, the disclosure of being.

This paper fosters the term Dancing Metaphors in order to illuminate embodied cognitive processes within dancing. Dancing Metaphors suggests that processes of realizing new bodily movements in dance are metaphorically constructed. Thus, using the medium of bodily movements, dancers actually establish, create, and generate movements, which follow the rule of ‘as if’. The argument here builds on the experience of dancing and the methodology and terminology follow from the cognitive account in metaphors studies, from enactive approaches in aesthetics and in philosophy of perception, and from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body- schema. Following from Merleau-Ponty, I demonstrate that dance movements do not have an already existing situated purpose. For that reason, I claim, dancing always embodies an imaginary score. Building on Lakoff and Johnson, I discuss movement capacities in dance as metaphorical interplays, which bring the score of the dance to life. Following from enactivism, as well as from the experience of dancing, I deal with the dancing metaphor as an act of embodied thinking. While dancing, dancers recall and invoke sensory-information and thereby bring the metaphor into current effect. This process, I finally claim, is enactive and involves a comprehensive engagement of body and mind.

(ESA proceedings, 9, 2017)

This article is concerned with dance from an aesthetic perspective e.g it looks at dance, alongside painting and sculpture, as a form of art that might be addressed by way of aesthetic categories. Specifically it examines the tension between the sensible and the idea which is at the core of aesthetic thought in the case of dance: how are we to understand the art of dance as a unique configuration of the sensible and the intelligible – with the human body as the sensible fabric, and the ideas that it conveys as the intelligible form? How is the medium, the human body, or more accurately the subject herself, both a phenomenological “lived body” and an “aesthetic object”? This paper attempts to address these questions.

Българският текст е подготвен през 2004 г. и е  мислен като есе, базиращо се на "включени" наблюдения от  периода  2000-2003 г. Като доклад на английски език той е представен по време на срещата на изследователската група по етнохореология при ICTM (International Council for Traditional Music) в Болоня през 2004 г. Сборникът с доклади е публикуван през 2008 г. Вж.
“Paneurhythmy in Bulgaria: philosophical aspects.” Elsie Ivancich Dunun; Ann von Bibra Wharton (editors), Proceedings for The 23rd Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology, 2004: 221-226. Monghidoro (Bologna), Italy: ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology; ‘E Bene Vega Maggio’ Association, Monghidoro; Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb, Croatia.
https://www.academia.edu/20276850/Philosophical_Aspects_of_Paneurhythmy

In this article, I describe the experience of dancing-a-walk. My specific focus is on the shift that I perceive in my body when I dance-a-walk rather than functionally walking. Following a first-person perspective, I demonstrate how my experience of practicing dancing-a-walk interrogates the habit of walking and makes it come alive again as an expression of the body. First, I show how the practice of dancing-a-walk challenges the dichotomy between abstract and concrete movement proposed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception. Indeed, dancing-a-walk is an example of a concrete and yet already abstract movement. Then, I turn to concepts such as habits and body memory. By identifying how the perception of my body changes when I dance everyday movements (i.e., walking) versus when I execute such movements functionally, I aim to develop a new perspective on and vocabulary for a phenomenological definition of concrete/abstract movements within the context of dance.

Un ricco e stimolante scritto teorico sugli orizzonti concettuali di un"arte eminentemente antidualistica. Da Nietzsche e Valéry a Mallarmé e Merleau-Ponty sono diversi e importanti i pensatori della modernità che hanno riflettuto sulla pratica coreutica come esperienza di trascendimento, come slancio impermanente a dare visibilità all"invisibile; un"esperienza capace di decostruire la nostra finitezza e di "ricostruire" il reale, giungendo nelle zone mobili dell"essere.

In an essay entirely devoted to the subject of dance in Alain Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics [Petit manuel d'inesthétique (Badiou 2005b)], we find the following contentious statement: “Dance is not an art, because it is the sign of the possibility of art as inscribed in the body” (69). At first glance, this statement seems strangely familiar to the reader versed in writing about dance, particularly philosophical writing. “Dance is not an art”: Badiou critiques Mallarmé as not realizing this as the true import of his ideas. It is familiar because it attests to a certain problem in aesthetic thinking, one that relates to the placement and position of dance and the works that comprise its history into what can be seen as certain evaluative hierarchies, particularly vis à vis the relation of dance to other art forms, and in particular, those involving speech and writing. Dance seems to suffer from a certain marginalization, subtraction, or exclusion, and its practice seems to occupy a place of the perennial exception, problem, or special case. The strangeness of the statement, on the other hand, relates to the widespread view outside of academic writing that the status of dance as art is actually completely unproblematic. What follows therefore is a critical commentary on this assertion of Badiou, placed both in the context of Badiou's writing, and in the wider one pertaining to the problem of exclusion just outlined.

The Afro-Latin dance known as ‘salsa’ is a fusion of multiple dances from West Africa, Muslim Spain, enslaved communities in the Caribbean, and the United States. In part due to its global origins, salsa was pivotal in the development of the Figuration philosophy of dance, and for ‘dancing with,’ the theoretical method for social justice derived therefrom. In the present article, I apply the completed theory Figuration exclusively to salsa for the first time, after situating the latter in the dance studies literature. My first section explores Juliet McMains’ recent history, Spinning Mambo into Salsa, with an emphasis on the dynamics of class, race and sex therein. My second section explores a resonant Afro-Latin dance history, Marta E. Savigliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, where she deploys salsa’s sister-dance (tango) as a ‘counter-choreography’ to the choreography of postmodern neocolonialism. And my third section applies Figuration’s four central aspects of dance (or ‘Moves’) to salsa qua member of its ‘societal’

This presentation suggests that processes of realizing new bodily movements in dance are metaphorically constructed. I will propose the term “Dancing Metaphors” in order to follow embodied cognitive processes of realization within dancing. Following Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception the presentation will demonstrate the lack of a situated reason within dancing, and therefore its perceptual complexity. The term “Dancing metaphors” relates physical movements that their processes of designing are enacted in terms of other physical experiences in order to define their motor-intentionality. Following cognitive (and embodied) accounts in metaphor studies, this term considers the act of dancing as a case of imaginative rationality, which is embodied. Moreover, within the act of dancing metaphors there is another layer of embodiment; the metaphoric act is physically incorporated within the design of bodily movements.

The file attached is ESA 2017 abstracts booklet.

Voy a intentar compartir con ustedes algunas reflexiones en torno a mi trabajo de investigación que circula entre danza y filosofía, y con esta precisión de entrada: que no tomo a la danza como un objeto de estudio, sino que, de alguna manera, se trata de volver a la danza una situación de pensamiento, considerar a la danza como una situación de pensamiento. Voy a intentar trazar algunos de los desplazamientos que tuvieron que operar para mí dentro de la práctica conceptual, la práctica filosófica, a partir de trabajar desde la danza más que sobre la danza.
Lo primero que quiero puntualizar es el desplazamiento de cierto logocentrismo del pensamiento occidental, heredado de lo que podríamos llamar una acumulación de dualismos que produce y ha producido buena parte del pensamiento occidental y, en particular, para tipificarlo aquí, voy a traer el dualismo cartesiano. Es decir, voy a intentar mostrar cómo este desplazamiento que se opera para mí dentro de la filosofía se opera en tres niveles al mismo tiempo; en el nivel ontológico, en el nivel epistemológico- metodológico y en el nivel ético-político. Voy a intentar describir de qué manera se desplaza a los tres niveles al mismo tiempo.

Wilbur, S. (2018). The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics. Dance Research Journal, 50(2), 78-87.

At 656 pages wide and 31 authors deep, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics collection contains a veritable who's who of US, UK, and EU dance scholarship. It also importantly documents the weight of the loss to the field of coeditor Randy Martin, whose materialist investigations of dance and politics influence the volume's contributions in powerful and explicit ways. Through the dedicated energies of Martin's fellow coeditors Rebekah Kowal and Gerald Siegmund, the volume updates an editorial burden assumed by earlier collections and field progenitors: interpreting dance's irreconcilable relationship to politics, a tension that the volume's contributors do not promise to reconcile. But what the text does, and with great urgency, is to revise and update long-standing debates on dance's politics of representation while also flagging hierarchical issues internal to dance research as areas for future investigation.

Review of two books by Francis Sparshott: After a long and distinguished career considering the philosophical problems of virtually every art form except dance, Sparshott. . . published two voluminous works to make amends.' They were Sparshott's "first steps to a philosophical consideration of the dance," but they most  certainly were not the first attention paid to the art form by serious  philosophers.

As the audience’ spectacle has shifted from the proscenium to the screen, creating an experience that engages and immerses the audience back to the
stage has become quite a task in the world of dance. With its own power structure at work, on one hand, dancers are trying hard to preserve and maintain
the ‘purity of their respective dance forms. On the other hand, with a growing scale of the audience waiting for new experiences, and newly emerging
technologies, there is a huge scope for remediation in stage performance methods, exploring endless possibilities.
The world today is crafting its own experiences of reality in almost all walks of life with immersive technology trends. The new emerging immersive
platforms like Mixed Reality are gaining momentum, with Augmented and Virtual reality already have found their way through a number of immersive
applications that are changing people’s experience and interaction with the world. The project attempts to experiment with how these new platforms could
find their way into the world of dance and enhance the experience of live performances.
The project proposes an immersive and participatory performance by involving virtual props that can interact with as well as move from one position
to another, by the audience. By doing so, the audience can actively participate in shaping the dancer’s performance.
The dance takes shape as the dancer improvises and choreographs the performance, live, based on her/his interaction with these virtual props.
The project also intends to satirically represent the construct in which the scholarly dance world has been functioning, like political gameplay, with the
audience influencing a dancer’s performance at every stage without both parties being actively aware of it.

In her bo ok Pornography, the Theory (w hich is tellin g ly subtitled, "What Utilitarianism Did to Action") literary th e orist Frances Ferguson advances the m ain reason w hy pornography is a key en tryw ay in to the ration ality that produced m o d ern ity and its corporeal realities: "por-nography raised issues for modernity that were not being addressed" by oth er d isciplin es or practices. For Fergusson, on e o f the m ain issues that pornography raised, is that w h en "talking about pornography" one is also and inevitably and always talking about those 'basic techniques developed by utilitarian philosophers [such as David H um e and Sam uel Bentham ] and practitioners that w ere designed to capture actions and give them extreme perceptibility." (p. ix). Now, I could not th in k o f a b etter d efin itio n o f chore-ography, w h ich in d eed can be described as a "techn ique designed to capture actions and give them extrem e 67

In the mid-1970s, the dance community was ecstatic that choreographic works were finally being recognized for protection under the Copyright Law of 1976. Dance came into its own as an art form, worthy not only of legal protection but of recognition that its work could be individuated and identified. This development, along with the earth-shaking contributions of Nelson Goodman in Languages of Art, seemed to mark a dramatic change in how we understand identity in dance, a paradigm shift. But it never happened. I explore how what seemed to portend a dramatic rethinking of identity almost four decades ago fizzled.

"Connect Effort into Pleasure" analyzes the mental instructions in Gaga as means to overcome a perceptual gap between body and mind. The text is in Hebrew, and deals with ideas that are as well discussed in "Embodied Philosophy in Dance" - "The Mental Emphasis of Gaga." 
Published in "Dance Today" no. 28, August 2014.

In her article "Towards a Framework of a Semiotics of Dance" Nicoleta Popa Blanariu constructs a framework of based on de Saussure's, Peirce's, and Barthes's thought. She applies Ferdinand de Saussure's concept of semiosis defined as a cultural system of conventions. In dance this occurs when choreographic signs are encoded, for example in magic, ritual, or religious expressions of movement. Further, Charles Sanders Peirce's concept of the role of "intelligent consciousness" is crucial for the engendering of signification and thus to dance. In dance, the choreographer "interprets" the world and by means of selection and interpretation, the choreographic sign reveals its object and this process is related to abstraction. In semiosis dance involves a process of "culturalization" (Barthes), whereby codes of dance represent the spontaneity of "natural" of movements and feelings within a repeatable system of expression. Last but not least, Edmund Husserl's notion that dance belongs to the domain of "pre-reflexivity" of signal and entails symbolic qualities derived from its embedding of cultural codes is employed by Popa Blanariu in her building a framework of the semiotics of dance.

M a r i e B a r d e t-L'A t t e nt i on à t r a v e r s l e M o u v e m e nt : d e l a m é t h o d e F e l d e n k r a i s c o m m e a m o r c e d ' u n e p e n s é e d e l ' a t t e n t i o n Rev. Bras. Estud. Presença, Porto Alegre, v. 5, n. 1, p. 191-205, jan./avr. 2015. D i s p o n i b l e s u r : < h t t p : / / w w w. s e e r. u f r g s. b r / p r e s e n c a > RÉSUMÉ – L'Attention à travers le Mouvement: de la méthode Feldenkrais comme amorce d'une pensée de l'attention – Le présent article propose de reprendre certains aspects théoriques et pratiques de la méthode Feldenkrais, en tant que cette méthode somatique annonce déplacer la perspective d'un travail corporel sur un corps-objet vers celle d'une éducation à certaine attention à travers le mouvement. L'étude philosophique d'un tel déplacement permet d'en discuter les effets conceptuels et concrets à partir d'une triple caractérisation de cette attention (awareness): dynamique, différentielle et tendancielle. Chacun de ces caractères est étudié tour à tour, à partir d'exemples concrets de la pratique, de citations de textes de Feldenkrais, et en revenant sur une référence fondatrice: la loi de Weber-Fechner. ABSTRACT – Awareness through Movement: Feldenkrais method as a way of thinking awareness – Our proposal in this paper aims at clarifying some of the theoretical and practical assumptions of the Feldenkrais method, considering the change implied by his project of a somatic method that does not want to exercise a body-object, but much more to teach what he named awareness through movements. A philosophical study of such a change allows us to discuss its concrete and conceptual effects, from a triple characterization of this awareness: dynamic, differential, and made of tendencies. Each one of those three aspects is successively considered studying some examples of the lessons, some Moshe Feldenkrais writings and a historical reference: the Weber-Fechner law. RESUMO – A Atenção através do Movimento: o método Feldenkrais como disparador de um pensamento sobre a atenção – O presente artigo propõe retomar certos aspectos teóricos e práticos do método Feldenkrais, compreendendo-o como método somático que pretende deslocar a perspectiva do trabalho corporal sobre um corpo-objeto para a de uma educação centrada na atenção através do movimento. O estudo filosófico de tal deslocamento permite discutir seus efeitos conceituais e concretos a partir de uma tripla caracterização dessa atenção (awareness): dinâmica, diferencial e tendencial. Cada uma dessas características é estudada uma a uma, a partir de exemplos concretos da prática, de citações de textos de Feldenkrais, e retomando uma referência fundadora: a lei de Weber-Fechner. Palavras-chave: Atenção. Sensação. Fechner. Feldenkrais. Filosofia.

Does dance convey meaning? Dancers and choreographers will offer a range of answers to this question, running the gamut from “Of course it does!” to “No way! It does something else.” Responses, predictably, seem to depend on artistic temperament. Some choreographers keep their audience in view during the entire creative process, striving for a complete, clear transmission of their intentions (without remainder, as it were). While, for others, choreography grows out of “deep improvisation” sessions in the course of what is largely an intuitive process.

Ask philosophers the same question (many of whom are practicing artists) and similar disparities arise. Analytic philosophers of art, for instance, typically cling to some variety of intentionalism, the position that the meaning of a work art is - to certain extent - bound up with the intentions of its creator. On the other hand, those hailing from a more continental tradition will offer a variety of reasons for claiming that a work of art severs itself from the animating intentions of its creator. Once that dissociation is accomplished, it is easy to infer an irreducible polysemy, openness to interpretation, or even a “withdrawal” of the artwork from cognitive disclosure1. While one dance-theorist labors to preserve the dancer’s meaning-bestowing powers, another stridently maintains that dance productively disrupts meaning, or the closure and irreversibility that meaning implies.

It is my conviction that both of the somewhat caricatured philosophers mentioned above have bought into the idea that one must answer the question from the vantage-point of a global assessment of the art form. To me, a “sometimes yes, sometimes no” response seems more defensible, but, will be, for many, less satisfying. I aim to compensate for that initial deficiency by examining a remarkable choreographic practice that upends a set of assumptions that philosophers across the board have uncritically adopted vis a vis dance. So while either philosopher can be right (depending on the case), both are, in another sense, completely mistaken about what dance can do.

The assumption that I aim to dispose of is the following: regardless of whether dance can convey meaning, it cannot convey discursive, linguistically articulated meaning, at least, not by itself. Obviously, if a series of “movement-phrases” are accompanied by text in a dance, then the dance conveys meaning in a sense. But the written or spoken words are the vehicle for that meaning, while the dancing functions as a kind of ornament, or more charitably, a sort of aesthetic response or interpretation. Through examining the “movenglish” dance practice of Charly and Eriel Santagado, I will argue that their choreographic language - while completely bodily, that is, not reliant on the display of written or spoken words for its intelligibility - can convey meaning in exactly the same way that discursive representations do. But I’ll go even further than this to argue that movenglish can convey the sort of meaning that written or spoken words transmit in a way that makes certain aspects of that meaning more salient. In other words, movenglish doesn’t merely translate meaning from one signifying system to another; it reveals meanings or aspects of meaning nested within the initial system, which tend to fly under the radar in ordinary communicative contexts.

This paper discusses the role of intuition in dance research by looking at two scholarly publications: The first is entitled " The typology of the archaic layers in Bulgarian music and dance folklore, " by Iskra Racheva and Anna Ilieva (A History of Bulgarian Music Culture, Volume 1, Folklore, Sofia, Prof. Marin Drinov Academic Publication, 1998). The second is the seminal article, " Theory and methods in dance research: a European approach to the holistic study of dance " (Yearbook for Traditional Music, XXIII, pp. 1-10, 1991) by Anca Giurchescu and Lisbet Torp. " Intuition " is understood more broadly as " entering into the things " (inspired by Henri Bergson). It raises questions such as " How shall one define the role of intuition in dance research? " " In which ways does intuition help the dance scholar in reconstructing phenomena of the past? " and " In which ways does intuition help a dance scholar in his/her constant endeavors to expand one's knowledge? " Racheva and Ilieva's reconstruction sheds light on the very foundation of Bulgarian music and dance culture where the artefacts are very limited. However, because of their broad research background and powerful intuition, they succeeded in producing a publication that connects multiple resources (history, mythology, culturology, philosophy, and others). This gave Bulgarian music and dance research disciplines an especially valuable contribution: an example for a research into Bulgaria's historic and cultural past that inspired other scholars. While Racheva's and Ilieva's intuition facilitates the reconstruction of the past, Giurchescu and Torp's shared intuition was directed toward the future. They recognized the meeting ground between the anthropological and ethnochoreological research approaches-although they do not overlap and opened the horizon for the further development of the discipline. This work stimulated further exploration of the dynamics of the field and the opportunities to combine multiple research approaches. Proposed answers are brought mainly from the field of philosophy.

In this chapter we are interested in understanding how contemporary dance involves a series of epistemological contributions, so for this reason we review and analyze the work of iconic and representative dancers and choreographers who are at the pinnacle in the history of performing arts. We guide our discussion on some key concepts and inquiries about dance and movement, related to the work of Isadora Duncan, Jirí Kylián, Merce Cunningham, and Phillipe Decouflé, whose ideas have deeply influenced the epistemological perspectives of dance and movement in our time.

NIETZSCHE&#x27;S DANCERS ISADORA DUNCAN, MARTHA GRAHAM, AND THE REVALUATION OF CHRISTIAN VALUES KIMERER L. LAMOTHE ... I was choreographing and performing professionally and training regularly while completing doctoral work in Christian theology. ...

Based on the analysis of four dances, this work intends to make a first approach and  reflect  on  the  following  question:  in  what  way  the  dances  involved  in  the initiation ritual –and with them, their experience as a dancing body– of the Wapté- Xavante  form  it  ontologically?  The  hypothesis  that  we  maintain  is  that  in  these  dances  the  ontological  transformation  that  the  boy  has  to  experience  is  expressed.  In this ontology, some capacities are developed: the ability to deal with one’s own body  weight  and  integrate  the  dialectic  between  light  and  heavy  into  one’s  own  movement; the ability to repeat and, with it, to be able to move between the poles of differentiation and identity; the abilities to listen, think, observe and remember dreams; and the ability to bond emotionally to his age group. But these ontological characteristics are reached because of the experience of limits and suffering; In other words, it is through the limits that the Xavante becomes a full person.

Ο χορός ως αντικείμενο επιστημονικής έρευνας και φιλοσοφίας. Προλεγόμενα Άννα Λάζου, Τμήμα Φιλοσοφίας Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών Περίληψη Η τέχνη του χορού μελετάται σήμερα από τις επιστήμες και τη φιλοσοφία. Από την εποχή των αρχαίων Ελλήνων στοχαστών μέχρι τη σύγχρονη εποχή, ο χορός δεν έπαψε να θεωρείται τρόπος έκφρασης πολλαπλών δυνατοτήτων του πολιτισμού. Ο τρόπος που εκφράστηκε χορευτικά ο άνθρωπος στην ιστορία είναι και αποτύπωση σε κάθε εποχή της σχέσης του με τη φύση, το σύμπαν και τις κοινωνικές δομές. Επιλέγοντας τις κυριότερες από το σύνολο των αναφορών στον χορό που μπορεί να συναντήσει σήμερα ο σύγχρονος αναγνώστης διαπιστώνουμε τον πλούτο και την πολυμέρεια των πληροφοριών και των προσεγγίσεων καθώς και τον διεπιστημονικό χαρακτήρα των μελετών. Ωστόσο, τόσο η ιστορική όσο και η φιλολογική, καθώς και η πιο πρόσφατη εθνολογική και ανθρωπολογική προσέγγιση δεν παύουν να παραμένουν σε ένα πληροφοριακό και εγκυκλοπαιδικού τύπου πεδίο, χωρίς να ολοκληρώνεται η θεωρητική εξήγηση και κατανόηση του φαινομένου, παρά μόνο εφ' όσον τεθούν και απαντηθούν φιλοσοφικής υφής ερωτήματα. Αυτά τα τελευταία λοιπόν έχουν να κάνουν τόσο με την ταυτότητα της χορευτικής εμπειρίας-βάσει των δεδομένων της έρευνας των υπολοίπων μαθήσεων, τη σχέση του χορού με την γλώσσα, την επιστήμη ή τις επιστήμες (ιστορία, φιλολογία, φυσικές επιστήμες μαθηματικά), τη μεταφυσική και την κοσμολογία, τη λειτουργικότητα κι εφαρμοσιμότητα των χρήσεων του χορού στην κοινωνία, τη θρησκεία και στην πολιτική. Ακόμα και το νόημα του χορού ή οι αισθητικές αρχές αλλά και οι ηθικές και παιδευτικές αξίες της χορευτικής δραστηριότητας των αρχαίων, εμπίπτουν σε παραδοσιακούς τομείς του φιλοσοφικού στοχασμού ή τουλάχιστον δεν συστηματοποιούνται επαρκώς στην κατεύθυνση μιας μεθοδικής έρευνας, παρά μόνο εάν υπαχθούν σε φιλοσοφική διερεύνηση. Θα επικεντρωθούμε στα δεδομένα εκείνα που μπορούν να δείξουν ότι ο χορός και η όρχηση αντιμετωπίζεται από την φιλοσοφία ως μια ανθρωπολογική και συνάμα κοσμολογική έννοια που αναφέρεται στη σχέση του ανθρώπινου όντος τόσο με τον εσωτερικό ψυχισμό του όσο και με τον περιβάλλοντα κόσμο. Η «ευφυία» του αρχαίου ελληνικού χορευτικού πολιτισμού που ως φαινόμενο ξεδιπλώνεται σε πολλούς αιώνες, σε ποικίλα σχήματα και μουσικοποιητικά είδη, αλλά και με πλούσια κοινωνική, εκπαιδευτική και θεραπευτική λειτουργικότητα, δεν είναι άλλο από μια ακόμη ανακάλυψη των Ελλήνων από τις απαρχές της ιστορίας τους. Λέξεις κλειδιά: Χορευτική εμπειρία, διεπιστημονική έρευνα, αρχαίος ελληνικός χορός, φιλοσοφία του χορού, ιστορικές πηγές, εννοιολογική ανάλυση

M a r i e B a r d e t-A A t e n ç ã o a t r a v é s d o M o v i m e n t o : o m é t o d o Fe lden k r a i s c omo d i spa r a dor de u m p en s a mento sobre a atenç ão Rev. Bras. Estud. Presença, Porto Alegre, v. 5, n. 1, p. 191-205, jan./abr. 2015. D i s p o n í v e l e m : < h t t p : / / w w w. s e e r. u f r g s. b r / p r e s e n c a > RESUMO – A Atenção através do Movimento: o método Feldenkrais como disparador de um pensamento sobre a atenção – O presente artigo propõe retomar certos aspectos teóricos e práticos do método Feldenkrais, compreendendo-o como método somático que pretende deslocar a perspectiva do trabalho corporal sobre um corpo-objeto para a de uma educação centrada na atenção através do movimento. O estudo filosófico de tal deslocamento permite discutir seus efeitos conceituais e concretos a partir de uma tripla caracterização dessa atenção (awareness): dinâmica, diferencial e tendencial. Cada uma dessas características é estudada uma a uma, a partir de exemplos concretos da prática, de citações de textos de Feldenkrais, e retomando uma referência fundadora: a lei de Weber-Fechner. Palavras-chave: Atenção. Sensação. Fechner. Feldenkrais. Filosofia. ABSTRACT – Awareness through Movement: Feldenkrais method as a way of thinking awareness – Our proposal in this paper aims at clarifying some of the theoretical and practical assumptions of the Feldenkrais method, considering the change implied by his project of a somatic method that does not want to exercise a body-object, but much more to teach what he named awareness through movements. A philosophical study of such a change allows us to discuss its concrete and conceptual effects, from a triple characterization of this awareness: dynamic, differential, and made of tendencies. Each one of those three aspects is successively considered studying some examples of the lessons, some Moshe Feldenkrais writings and a historical reference: the Weber-Fechner law.

An analogy between dancing and writing deals intrinsically with the question of embodied fantasy. Dancer and spectator create together an image of dance as a radically ornamental and therefore opaque figuration of moving letters and ephemeral lineaments, existing neither merely on the stage nor simply in the perception of the spectator, but rather in the complex interdependency that arises between them. Thus, the notion of dance as an écriture corporelle —which has a history dating back to the 17th century— is too often discussed in a phenomenologically oversimplified fashion which neglects the interweaving of fantasy and corporeality by focusing only on the materiality of dancing and the passive gaze of the spectator.

In order to properly examine the highly complex interweaving of fantasy and embodiment in dance I ask: where exactly does the figuration of pré-écriture-like forms take place? How does the Gestalt of a spatial writing suddenly emerge in the perception of the spectator as a fantasy always already embodied in his mind? And how does this impression vanish within the next moment, leaving a perceptual afterimage of the bodily movement that then becomes part of an imaginative diagram of lines or a phantasmagoric spatial calligraphy?

I will address these questions in regard to 'The Dance Sections' (1987) by the Flemish choreographer Jan Fabre dedicated to the exploration of the analogy between classical ballet and  calligraphy. By focusing in particular on the figuration and de-figuration of the bodily shapes of the dancers I will argue that their movement blended with the constantly shifting imaginings of the spectator, create a synaesthetic and kinaesthetic vision of dance as an embodied form of writing.