Of Meanings and Movements: Re-Languaging Embodiment in Dance Phenomenology and Cognition

One of my favorite childhood memories is from my first dance class. I ran into the studio and started jumping, jumping, jumping literally for joy when I noticed suddenly that I was not alone. There were other children in class, and they were all jumping too. We jumped together, spontaneously in sync, oblivious to what must have been looks of parental incredulity peeking through the door. The teacher stopped us well before anyone fell to the floor but not so soon as to mistake the extraordinary (teachable) moment. Human beings can bond together through rhythmical movement and expressions like joy, and dance is fundamentally about making those connections: to self, to others, to the world, and beyond. In sixty seconds, our little dance community was born.

If this anecdote hints in some way at the already-given condition in dance—of the lived human experience in dance and possibilities for transformation inherent therein—then it would seem a good starting point for the theorizing of dance consciousness and cognition. In fact, considerable interdisciplinary attention has been given to the study of dance as a unique window on human knowledge and experience. Beginning in the 1960s (cf., Sheets-Johnstone 1966), dance scholarship in particular has drawn heavily on programs of research founded by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl and advanced by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.¹ Dance scholars have applied phenomenological methodologies to help explain various aspects of dance. This work has made significant and ongoing contributions to our understanding of, among other things, aesthetics; the expression and construction of identities; movement practices and the body; the politics of culture; reception and spectatorship; the role of dance in human histories and societies; and ritual practices (Daly 1992; Desmond 1997; Farnell 1999; Fraleigh 1987; Parviainen 1998; Reed 1998; Sheets-Johnstone 1999).

Phenomenology is essentially a philosophical argument for the foundational role that perception plays in understanding and engaging with the world. Although this approach to cognition provides an original perspective, the basic idea is actually very old (Prinz 2002). Early sources emphasizing an ideo-motor principle in thought and language found voice in William James's (1890) Principles of Psychology before they fell into oblivion due to the dominance of behaviorism in the first half of the twentieth century (for a review, see Stock and Stock 2004). Contemporaneous to Husserl was the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget (1952), which emphasized the emergence of cognitive abilities out of sensorimotor skills. What distinguishes Merleau-Ponty as an original thinker with particular relevance to dance studies is his depth of insight about the nature of corporeity, his methodological approach, and his openness to art disciplines outside of phenomenological philosophy. Merleau-Ponty's "phenomenology of embodiment" makes the physical (somatic) being the site of the psyche. The body determines what shows up in our world. The ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson (1979) deepened this insight by seeing the characteristics of the human world, e.g., what affords walking on, picking up, etc., as correlative with our bodily capacities and acquired skills. By embodiment, Merleau-Ponty (1962) indicates three ways that the body opens up a world—as innate structures, basic general skills, and cultural skills:

The body is our general medium for having a world. Sometimes it is restricted to the actions necessary for the conservation of life, and accordingly it posits around us a biological world; at other times, elaborating upon these primary actions and moving from their literal to a figurative meaning, it manifests through them a core of new significance: this is true of motor habits [sic] such as dancing. Sometimes, finally, the meaning aimed at cannot be achieved by the body's natural means; it must then build itself an instrument, and it projects thereby around itself a cultural world.

(146)

Advanced by phenomenology and embraced by dance scholars, the term embodiment has since the mid-1980s also been used extensively in the cognitive science literature. Cognitive science is more of a loose affiliation of disciplines than a discipline of its own. Cognitive psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and philosophy...