Dance and the Body in Western Theatre

1948 to the Present

Sabine Sörgel

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781350316454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

While the body appears in almost all cultural discourses, it is nowhere as visible as in dance. This book captures the resurgence of the dancing body in the second half of the twentieth century by introducing students to the key phenomenological, kinaesthetic and psychological concepts relevant to both theatre and dance studies.

1 The Body, Dance and Phenomenology

Dance and the moving body: From breath to consciousness

One of the major objectives of this book is to look at dance and examine how it has changed images of the body and self throughout the twentieth century and its theatre performances. Movement is in many ways our first bodily encounter of the world, before we start to develop further awareness and language skills to communicate with other people. As Sondra Fraleigh asserts, “[D]ance founds the meaning that words name” (1987, p. 73). Most of our experiences of the world are thus based in movement, and our “sense-making originates in species-specific kinetic understandings emanating from a common body of movement” (Sheets-Johnstone, 2009, p. 15). As Maxine Sheets-Johnstone further explains, to improvise a dance is interestingly our most immediate response to existing in the world:

To say that in improvising, I am in the process of creating the dance out of the possibilities which are mine at any moment of the dance is to say that I am exploring the world in movement; that is, at the same time that I am moving, I am taking into account the world as it exists for me here and now in this ongoing, ever-expanding present. As one might wonder about the world in words, I am wondering the world directly, in movement. (2009, p. 31)

In a sense, this approach towards movement in dance improvisation is assertive of our individual creativity as human beings, who experience the world through movement. Dance, as we will see, choreographs experience and produces knowledge, which sometimes even spurs social movements such as in some of the cases explored in this book. Yet, as much as we forget about our bodies in everyday life, we also tend to forget and not see the dance that unfolds in every little move that we make.

Life begins with the pulsing heart and a scream that inhales oxygen into our lungs, as we take our first breath, and pumps it through our veins into the brain. From then on we start to perceive the world and distinguish between light and shade, colours, shapes and forms to reveal ever more clear images of the world as we slowly begin to make sense. A baby responds to the voice as it hears sounds inside the womb; a little hand grasping for your finger relates touch to a pleasurable feeling, an instinctive reflex, seeking protection perhaps, as wide eyes smile back at you in astonishment of this wonder: what does it all mean? Emotion plays out in a glance and a smile that touches you at the core, often described as a warm feeling rising up from the belly, before it is registered by the brain as something initially felt before worded: joy.

Antonio Damasio, a renowned neuroscientist whose research investigates the relation between brain function and consciousness, refers to the body as the theatre of our emotions (2000, p. 4). He believes that emotion is the evolutionary foundation from which human consciousness was developed and employs the theatrical metaphor to explain how “feelings perform their ultimate and longer-lasting effects in the theatre of the conscious mind” (2000, p. 37). As natural-born performers, we do of course know about this, since we constantly negotiate our own emotional worlds with the social roles we play from day to day as we grow up. Our acting careers start early on in our life, when we begin to perform our self on a daily basis. As human beings, we act in response to our emotions as well as the natural and sociocultural environment we are born into. And yet, before the acting comes the dance, which is the primary movement of breath in our lungs, the inner pulse of life lived and our first encounter with time and rhythm.

Damasio hence identifies three levels of self to demonstrate traces of our evolutionary development located within our bodies’ emotional landscape. He calls the first level the “proto-self” or “nonconscious forerunner”, while “core self” and “autobiographical self”, the second and third levels, both refer to the “conscious protagonists” of our mind (2000, p. 22). Basically, Damasio argues that the self as a notion originated as the backdrop upon which “the feeling of emotion [first became] known to the organism having the emotion” (2000, p. 8). As a matter of fact, we often feel before we know and refer to such wordless premonition of knowledge as our intuition or sixth sense.

Damasio explains how this drama of human consciousness and existence unfolds neurophysiologically:

You know you exist because the narrative exhibits you as protagonist in the act of knowing. You rise above the sea level of knowing, transiently but incessantly, as a felt core of self, renewed again and again, thanks to anything that comes from outside the brain into its sensory machinery or anything that comes from the brain’s memory stores toward sensory, motor, or autonomic recall. (2000, p. 172)

The fact that consciousness is born, when we first perceive the outside world in images of objects, furthermore adheres to a dramaturgy which, again, dance and theatre students know particularly well. As Damasio outlines the structural element of our so-called movies-in-the-brain:

This account is a simple narrative without words. It does have characters (the organism, the object). It unfolds in time. And it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning corresponds to the initial state of the organism. The middle is the arrival of the object. The end is made up of reactions that result in a modified state of the organism. (2000, p. 169)

Damasio claims that it is due to core consciousness that we instantly construct such images on the basis of neural patterning as an evolutionary strategy of survival (2000, pp. 37, 126). Emotions are key in this process, and according to Damasio’s hypothesis, they coincide with core consciousness (2000, pp. 37, 100, 169).

As human beings, we thus share a biological core of six primary emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust), as already outlined by Paul Ekman (*1934) in the 1970s, yet we also complicate matters in the way that so-called background emotions are far more diverse and individual (Damasio, 2000, pp. 50–51). Emotions and feelings play out along a three-level continuum which starts from an initial, often non-conscious state of emotion towards a state of feeling then made conscious (2000, p. 37). Thoughts and actions in our mind therefore evolve from a continuous loop of emotion which triggers feeling to result in yet another emotion to create a new feeling and so on (2000, p. 43).

Phenomenology and kinaesthetic awareness

The proposed methodology for our study takes a fresh look at phenomenology for its radical critique of Western rationalism and its ideological premises and conceptualizations. Phenomenology in dance studies has thus far largely been used as a descriptive hermeneutics for movement analysis. While this book follows this tradition to a certain extent, its major challenge is to unveil the hidden politics of a radical phenomenology of life and creative potential in the wake of the philosophical writings of Michel Henry (1922–2002) and Bernhard Waldenfels (*1934). It is argued that phenomenology and dance allow us to rethink the world and its politics at any time by transcending the limited notion of Western anthropocentrism by focusing on our felt response to life and ecology. Suggesting that the self is not so much a scientific but felt subjectivity, a phenomenology of life questions the hegemony of the Western scientific model grounded in seventeenth-century models of geometry and materialism. Rather, in and through dance we assert the fact that our subjectivity is experienced as the immanence of life affect-ing human existence at the core of felt experience. It is by creatively affirming the felt quality of life that the dancer expresses freedom as the outward transcendence of self and individuality – the basic condition for freedom and solidarity in a democratic society.

Phenomenology, as a strand within Western philosophy, is often referred to as an archaeology of the mind, because it traces the different layers of our evolving consciousness which is itself not easy to define as we have seen, but can be described as the mind’s underlying structural matrix upon which experience is inscribed (Fellmann, 2006, pp. 38–40). To look at consciousness as a pre-given matrix allows us to see that consciousness is the necessary precondition for us to not only have experiences in the first place but also recall and reflect upon such experiences to articulate them in more sophisticated ways, such as the evolution of language to name our experiences or to alter and adapt simple movements that we have once learnt into more challenging ones. Human consciousness is thus based in our several kinaesthetic senses which allow us to see, touch, smell, hear, move and taste. With Sondra Fraleigh we may say that dance improvisation is indeed the lived expression of our “pure consciousness” and kinaesthetic awareness of sensually being in space. She explains,

As the dance is fully realized, it ceases to be an object of conscious-ness; it dissolves in perfected action. To understand the dancer as the dance is to understand a point of unification, which is a state of being when the dance is lived not as an object but as a pure consciousness. (1987, p. 40)

Hence, a phenomenological approach starts by interrogating the origin of sense perception so that we can describe how meaning is created in dance by using the body’s sensual apparatus. In dance, self-awareness is often at one with our movement – body and mind are not separated, but one.

As human beings, our bodies are always positioned in relation to the world, and a central phenomenological concept to distinguish human experience by this fact is intentionality (Fellmann, 2006, p. 57). Intentionality refers to our movement-based engagement with the objects of the world as sense-making is characterized by our specific intentions towards engaging with the environment. The body serves as our spatial index according to which our experience of any given situation is measured. Felt intuition and emotional impulse initiate this process as they underlie the intention of any given action. More importantly, intentionality evokes our sense of space as we consider and assess our environment according to objects and phenomena within our reach and view or even by our smell.

While intentionality is directed towards objects outside our conscious awareness, our felt intuition that forms the conscious awareness is pre-given to experience, and Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was perhaps the first philosopher who pointed towards this passivity of consciousness in relation to our feeling-based intentions towards the world (Fellmann, 2006, p. 124). Human experience hence mediates in relation to the perceived sensual data or givens of the environment and does not so much rely on rational or subjective principles but an interior impulse to move or act. Self-consciousness is thus derived from our affective responses to environmental or interpersonal triggers. This affective impulse is often referred to as the spiritual energy of life itself and finds many parallel conceptualizations and healing attributes in non-Western cultures such as Chi in China, Reiki in Japan, or Ashé among the Yoruba in Nigeria, as well as Kundalini in India. In Kundalini yoga, for example, life energy is experienced as a moving force coiled at the bottom of our spine where it instigates all our responsive engagement with the environment as it moves upwards through the different energy centres known as chakras. Our pelvis, belly, solar plexus, throat and third eye (the spot between the eyebrows leading into the crown of the head) thus carry specific levels of energy as the expression of our creativity and potential in life (see Kumar and Larsen, 2004; Zeltzer, 2011). While this energy can be experienced as predominantly sexual and procreative, it is more expansive than that as it ultimately surpasses our ego conception and concern for the self, akin to the experience we may have in deep meditation, sexual union and also dance. Somatically, if we follow this energy up the spine to our brain, we can see how the human skeleton embodies traces of our evolution – from water to the four-footed stand of the animal to our upright standing position – as continued shifts in balance overcoming gravity – phases each human still goes through within the first year of their life (Keleman, 1985, p. 25).

In that sense, our birth figures as a somewhat traumatic experience. Thrown into the world, we gasp for air and feel ourselves in motion, continuously learning from suffering as the world forthwith evolves around us more than we actually control it. Michel Henry’s phenomenology of life refers to such emotional responding as “pathos” (2002), an intense suffering or pain as we psychologically depart from the curled creature swimming happily sheltered in the womb to individuality and separation from our mothers first but further on entering the cycle of change and impermanence of our lived reality. Suffering is therefore often considered as the quintessential experience of human existence as described in world religions ranging from Christianity to Buddhism as well as modern philosophy or even the history of Western drama, where pathos – a suffering from fate – marked the archetypal heroes of Greek tragedy and initiated audiences into a powerful recognition of their moral sensibility referred to as catharsis or ritualistic cleansing (Aristotle, 1996 [335 BCE]). Religion, philosophy and psychology have long since marvelled at the origin of our feeling-toned response to the world and located core consciousness or intuition not so much in the human brain but the soul. The soul, however, is a troubled concept today as we can neither scientifically measure its scale nor locate it anatomically, leading many people to doubt its existence. And yet, philosophers and artists persistently cherish the soul as the source of our initial response to music, love or nature. It is the feeling-toned soul rather than the mind that helps us to think what we feel, and yet we fail to measure it adequately in mathematical scales or words. The soul thus refers to the yet-unresolved mystery of life and existence. It is the invisible key to our self as experienced in feeling.

Now, before you continue reading this book, take a minute and experience your own body: how do you feel? Is there any particular part of your body that you notice and why? After you woke up this morning, was there anything you did to your body to make it look the way it does just now? Is your body a he or a she – and how do you know? Do you identify with your body – is it you? Take a few minutes and consider your answers and note how we often feel our body one way from the inside, while the outside appearance may tell us yet another story. We usually take our body for granted, and interestingly enough we often tend to almost forget about the body unless it starts to hurt and makes us feel unwell. Our personal experience of the body is thus shaped by an inside feeling-toned perception that directly relates to the outside environment and other people.

As this experiment shows, we notice our body most severely when we feel pain, but the body also allows for the feeling of great pleasure and exhilaration, as in orgasm. Philosopher Jean-Luc Marion (*1946) argues that such intense feeling saturates experience to the extent that the body feels itself from the inside, while paradoxically this feeling is given from elsewhere, the lover or an accident, for example (see Marion, 2002). This is so because such intense feelings are not only anatomical but also imagined in a complex working of body–mind continuum, and memory, pain and pleasure involve all three levels of our proto-self, core self and autobiographical self. The body in these instances is also referred to as “flesh” in order to account for the vulnerability of our embodied existence, as well as the receiving openness our bodies allow for when lived existence is seen as a metaphysical gift (see Marion, 2002). Birth and death, and hopefully love, are such great gifts beyond our control as we await the event of their coming into being. These events play a major role in defining human existence on the levels of proto-self, core self and autobiographical self and have often been responded to and celebrated in dance. Although we do invest a whole lot of feeling in our experience of pleasure and pain, we have to notice that these are not emotions in the strict neurophysiological sense, but events or givens. The feeling of pain affiliated with death will be particularly interesting when we turn to our case studies in the following chapters of this book, as many a theatre dance has evolved around this theme between the two world wars of the twentieth century.

Body–mind in Western philosophy

Taking a phenomenological perspective on feeling and emotion as embodied experiences of mind and consciousness, it appears quite strange that Western philosophy from the Greeks up to the present has perceived the body in terms of a subject/object dichotomy. Performance artists in the 1960s rebelled against this flawed separation which is still very prevalent in Western capitalist societies. Later on, we consider the political implications of the artists’ resistance in order to demonstrate how their increased interest in the body initiates an aesthetic return towards dance as a privileged paradigm for counter-knowledge formation today. Not only does this shift impact the formal aspects of theatre work that increasingly looks and feels like dance but we will discover how the dancing body also redefines the relationship of the individual performer in relation to the ensemble and audience.

However, before we can understand how this shift towards dance occurred in the mid-twentieth century, it is important to review some of the history behind the old and lasting prejudices against the body. Philosophers traditionally saw it as the natural body, physiological body, and its cultural counterpart. Since the seventeenth century, this mode of thinking privileged the mind as a separate spiritual entity in the wake of René Descartes’s (1596–1650) Latin “cogito” as “thinking I”, somewhat independent and more importantly in control of the body’s more carnal activities (eating, digestion, sex, etc.). Bodily secretions and carnal pleasures were considered as a sign of human weakness, whereas the mind became the powerhouse and centre of control.

Along those lines, we find a philosophic tendency which separates thought processes from our emotional responses, although this is hardly the case as Damasio’s more recent findings in neuroscience show. However, following this tradition of neglect, we often mistrust our emotions and privilege the rational as the superior response. In that sense, the mind was regarded as active and in rational control of the emotional and therefore passive and weak body. While the body was a natural given, the mind could be culturally formed and enlightened and thus influence and shape the body accordingly. The problem with the prevalent body–mind dualism in Western philosophy is not only that it ignored the interdependency of body– mind but more importantly that it objectified the body, which is in fact never an object but subject to our world. As anthropologist Thomas J. Csordas describes this dilemma: “Objectification is the product of reflective, ideological knowledge, whether it be in the for...