Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance by Susan Leigh Foster (review)

Cognitive science has become a topic of increasing interest in the field of performance studies, and Susan Leigh Foster’s Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance is a notable, dance-focused addition to this growing body of scholarship. Where much of this scholarship focuses on new scientific models of cognition, Foster’s book offers insight into how the body and its movements have been historically constructed through medical and scientific discourses, as well as aesthestic and sociopolitical registers. Providing a rigorous genealogy of three key terms—“choreography,” “kinesthesia,” and “empathy”—Foster traces the paths these terms have taken from the sixteenth century to the present, showing how these concepts “function together to construct corporeality in a given historical and cultural moment” (13).

Foster’s introduction lays out the political stakes of her project, claiming that the intersecting histories of these three terms reveal the assumptions that underlie different subjective responses, including aesthetic valuations, of dance. While she maintains that such understandings and valuations are always culturally and historically specific, Foster also considers the ways in which bodies, and the relations among bodies, allow us to communicate across cultures and through time. She argues throughout that the shifting definitions of choreography, kinesthesia, and empathy each implicate our understanding of the other two terms. Foster’s goals in demonstrating the intertwined nature of these three terms are to reveal how current conceptions of the body are rooted in prior formulations, and to propose a working framework for understanding how spectators perceptually respond to dance.

Foster’s book is divided into three chapters, each focusing on one of her key terms, all of which demonstrate her considerable facility with the archives of dance history and practice. She begins, for example, by tracing the conceptions of space and time underlying dance documentation from Thoinot Arbeau in the 1590s through Raoul Auger Feuillet’s system of notation in the early 1700s, observing that, for the majority during this time period, choreography referred to the art of notating dances. This term was revised in the early twentieth century to refer to the act of creating dances (typically performed by a single creative genius). As modern dance moves away from representation, the term is also used to refer to the expression of emotions through an intentional set of movements. Yet these meanings, too, are not without cultural assumptions, and Foster does a neat job of unpacking the racial bias underlying twentieth-century dance critics’ use of the term to deny the artistry of African American dance. Foster concludes the chapter with a look at contemporary understandings of the term, considering how choreography has been revised by postmodern practitioners to refer to the philosophy of creating movement for movement’s sake—something that often occurs in collaboration and in very different ways in different global contexts.

Foster’s chapter on kinesthesia builds nicely on her treatment of choreography, linking the history of chorography, or map-making and map-reading, to different ways of understanding how one inhabits space. As she points out, the term “chorography” was used by John Essex in his English translation of Feuillet in the early 1700s to describe the study of a specific region, its culture and geography. Noting that eighteenth-century chorography invited a new way of viewing space by presenting an ichno-graphic, or bird’s eye, point of view, Foster argues that such renderings of space likewise influenced contemporary understandings of what we call “kinesthesia,” or an awareness of the body as it moves through space. Assumptions about nationalism, imperialism, and colonial privilege are implicit in an ichnographic model of spatial awareness, Foster maintains, especially as chorography developed into choreography.

This prehistory allows Foster to show how kinesthesia marked a departure from earlier understandings of spatial awareness by emphasizing the bodily experience of individuals. The term, coined in 1880 by Henry Charlton Bastian, was used to refer to various fitness regimens aimed at rehabilitating bodies enervated by modern life. It was later replaced by the term “proprioception” in medical fields, although...