Situated Dancing: Notes from Three Decades in Contact with Phenomenology

I began to study philosophy at the same time that I began to study dance, at college in the early 1980s. Both of these choices surprised me at first, as I had originally planned to study politics and become a civil rights lawyer after college. I see now that these two areas of inquiry were routes toward figuring out how to bridge the divides between my academic self and my increasingly explosive physicality. Figuratively as well as literally divided into day and night, my academic experience and the club scene I thrived in were separated by geographic distance and differing class values—a study in the cultural bifurcation produced by the hierarchies of brain and brawn. But these body/mind boundaries were always porous for me, and they became increasingly so as I explored the epistemological origins of the Cartesian split in my survey of Western philosophy course while also taking my first modern dance class. My desire was to become both verbally and physically articulate, and I savored those moments when vague impulses or ideas found the right expressive gesture or crucial wording. By the time I was a senior, I was choreographing a quartet and writing a thesis on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1962). Somewhere along the way, philosophy and dance leaned into one another, beginning a duet that would lead to a life spent thinking and moving.

This essay is just that—an attempt to situate and reflect on the various intersections of phenomenology and dance that have captured my curiosity over the past three decades. It maps out both a personal journey and a disciplinary trajectory, for my own career as a dancer and a scholar traces many of the intellectual shifts that have taken place in dance studies over this time. What follows is neither a thorough nor an encyclopedic documentation of these developments, however, but rather an individual (and admittedly quixotic) investigation of the ways in which phenomenology has helped dance scholars to think about dancing bodies beyond the walls of the studio or the arch of the proscenium stage. The structure of my analysis follows my journey from philosophy through feminist theory to performance studies and back to philosophy, albeit with a critical distance. This intellectual pathway intersects with my dance training, as I moved from a BA in philosophy to an MFA in choreography to a PhD in performance studies and then began to teach in a dance department at a liberal arts college, where, for the first time in my academic life, I could teach intellectual analysis and physical training in the space of one class session. Engaging students across the traditional mind/body divides of dance studio and academic classroom has, surprisingly, brought me back to philosophy, specifically phenomenology.

Over the course of the last thirty years, phenomenology has replaced aesthetics as the philosophical discourse of choice for dance studies, prodding scholars to think about a broad continuum of moving bodies within the cultures they inhabit. Generally speaking, phenomenology is the study of how the world is perceived, rather than the study of the essence of things as objects or images of our consciousness. It is a way of describing the world as we live in it—a philosophical approach that positions the body as a central aspect of that lived experience. Flipping Descartes's "cogito" ("I think therefore I am") on its (in)famous head, phenomenology, as developed by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, seeks to account for the structures of our situated "being-in-the-world."¹ This approach focuses on the body-based somatic and perceptual senses (including space and touch), as well as the more verbal and conscious aspects of our existence. I am deeply appreciative of phenomenology's multifaceted analysis—from discussions of posture to issues of ethical behavior—of the ways our bodies both shape and are shaped by our life experiences. Paying attention to how our corporeal engagement with the world creates meaning in our lives, phenomenology revises classical notions of the self as subject and the world as object...