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  • Editor's Note:What Is Dead and What Is Alive in Dance Phenomenology?
  • Mark Franko, Editor

"Phenomenological reduction is a scene, a theater stage."

—Jacques Derrida Speech and Phenomena, 86

Whether one critiques, advocates for, or merely nods to phenomenological methodology, it is with the awareness of a long, seamless analytic fit with Western theatrical dance, as the above quote of Jacques Derrida from his 1967 discussion of Edmund Husserl—the founder of phenomenology—indicates (Derrida 1973). The very operations of reduction and bracketing could be those of the proscenium stage itself. Concert dance is in this sense always already "phenomenal" in its very apparition. And dance phenomenology assumes that the analysis of what happens when dancing occurs is inseparable from the possibility of the adequate description of that dancing. "It is only through an analysis of the visible in dance," wrote Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, "that one might begin to fathom and describe the essential nature of that experience" (1984, 132). Sheets-Johnstone raised not only the primacy of description but, most provocatively, the notion of re-languaging in the phenomenological analysis of movement, thus underlining that, in the words of Anna Pakes in this issue, "Phenomenology is an essentially descriptive philosophy".1 Dance phenomenology is the encounter of "this original, pristine body, the preobjective or preobjectivized body" (Sheets-Johnstone 1984, 133) with language.

In the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, vision became a carnal relation with the world (1968, 83-84). Phenomenological description of dance relied not only on the visual, but also on what would come to be known in dance as both proprioception and kinesthetic relation. What I would like to call the kinesthetic-visual pact of phenomenological description when applied to dance facilitated the integration of the performer's discourse of sensation with the spectator's discourse of visual reception: an anthropology with an aesthetics. This determines its lasting hold on dance writing. A call for papers in this theme issue of DRJ—"Dance and Phenomenality: Critical Reappraisals"—takes the temperature of a moment in which the kinesthetic-visual pact of phenomenological description is under considerable pressure from new concepts of the subject, new theories of cognition, and new technologies in the performance field that alter the terms of the observer's perception of movement.

Ann Cooper Albright's autobiographical narrative of engagement with phenomenology as both dancer and scholar, "Situated Dancing: Notes from Three Decades with Phenomenology," offers personal insight into how she understands situatedness within phenomenology, and how she perceives its political instrumentality. Indeed, Cooper Albright's attention to the feminist turn with respect to Merleau-Ponty, in particular, is an important part of the dance-phenomenology relation in the twentieth century. Her Bildungsroman of the 1980s and its compelling references to Virginia Woolf feel as pertinent today as they were in previous decades.

It is no secret that phenomenology has exerted a preponderant influence on dance writing at least since the 1930s, when John Martin unveiled the idea of metakinesis in his critical account of what [End Page 1] onlookers perceived to be the nonrepresentational aspects of dance modernism. From the 1960s through the 1980s, Sheets-Johnstone and Sondra Horton Fraleigh also dealt influentially with the phenomenological lens on dance in their philosophically oriented writings. In 1965, Merce Cunningham wrote a foreword to Sheets-Johnstone's The Phenomenology of Dance, in which he said:

The continuing aliveness of dance in any situation lies in the individual dancer's solution to the persistent and elusive daily quest for its instant-by-instant behavior, and Mrs. Sheets is pointing out that to look directly at this is a way for the dance in the academic situation to further its already strong and historical achievement.

(Cunningham 1966, n.p.)

Despite the significant evolution within modernism between the 1930s and the 1960s, it is remarkable that the kinesthetic-visual pact of phenomenological description in no way diminished in strength or pertinence (see Jonathan Owen Clark's remarks on Cunningham's Events in this issue). Nor has the pact between dance practice and academic inquiry diminished in the years since—a pact that Cunningham perceived as the gift of phenomenology to dance in the midst of the dance...

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