"Thoughts on the Philosophy of Dance" by Aili Bresnahan

Aili Bresnahan teaches philosophy, including an

interdisciplinary philosophy of dance class that
includes a dance movement and choreography
component, at the University of Dayton in Ohio. She
grew up in New York City, where she was a ballet
major at the F.H. LaGuardia High School for Music and
the Arts. Bresnahan then earned a bachelors degree
in philosophy from Columbia University in New York, a
law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in
Washington, DC, and a PhD in philosophy from Temple
University in Philadelphia, where her advisor was
Joseph Margolis. She is also the founder and

moderator of the DancePhilosophers Google group, an

informal
and interdisciplinary discussion
and
networking group for researchers in the philosophy of
dance
broadly
construed.
Her
website: www.artistsmatter.com.
In this entry I am going to claim a rare privilege: Im
going to say in an open way what I think about the
challenges, difficulties and limits of writing philosophy
of dance that captures dance in some essential way.
To begin: Philosophy of dance is not and can never be
limited to just one thing because dance itself is not
limited to just one thing. The set of what the term
dance refers to currently includes all of these things
and more:

Dance as a fine art, pace Hegel (complex high art

on a stage under a proscenium arch)
Theater dance not limited to dance as a fine art
(dance in some sort of concert space to be
appreciated as art -- this includes musical theater
dance, dance in operas, vaudeville and comic
dance, and performance art dance performed in
art galleries)

Dance as therapy (dance as part of spiritual or

somatic practice or as in belly dancing, to prepare
ones body for childbirth)
Dance as exercise (as part of a physical education
class, for example) Social dance (dance done at
bars, at weddings, in barns, in clubs, in the street,
in ballrooms)
Dance as way to celebrate and preserve cultural
history (formal Indian, Chinese dance, stepping)
Competition dance (Irish dance, break dancing)
Political dance (dance in political demonstrations
or to draw attention to a political situation)
War dance (Haka Maori, Native American,
African) Rain and harvest dance (Native
American, African) Erotic dance (burlesque, pole
and lap dances for purposes of sexual titillation)

Dance as religious ritual (Ancient Greek dance)

Dance as entertainment (MTV, halftime shows)

Improvisational dance (this crosses many of the

categories above)
Digital dance (via digital and other technologies)

Mating dances (honeybees)

Dance of the cosmos (movement of the planets
construed as dance)

To understand dance is not to have someone describe it

and then try to understand it through that description
but is better accessed through either 1) dancing (radical
thought, that), or 2) watching live dance. Dance is
fundamentally and thoroughly ineffable, even though
its practical, socio-historical, cultural, biological,
psychological, metaphysical and other implications can
be described. To explain dance to the uninitiated is
similar to describing to a person who has been blind
from birth what it is to see. Or describing what love
is to someone who has never been in love. Or
describing what its like to parent a newborn baby to
someone who has not had that experience. There are
some things for which the full import and meaning
cannot be adequately described no, not even in
poetry. Its even more difficult if ones aim is
explanation and not just description.
When I first started writing dance philosophy I made
the mistake of thinking that I had some sort of leg up
(forgive the pun) on writing about dance because I had
had spent my childhood and teen years training to be a

professional ballet dancer in New York City. The

problem there was that my experience was heaviest in
the perspective of a ballet dancer and not just a ballet
dancer but a Balanchine-style, neo-classical ballet
dancer. A trina of the worst kind, according to the
primarily Martha Graham and Alvin Ailiey-trained
dancers who comprised my high schools Modern
dance majors (trina is short for balletrina a ballet
dancer who can only do ballet). I had very little in the
way of dance history. I knew very little about the
aesthetics of forms of dance other than ballet. And
while I read Dance Magazine and the odd dance
criticism piece in The New York Times or The New
Yorker I focused on the kinds of dance I was learning
ballet, ballet and more ballet.
Whats more, when I watch dance, any kind of dance, I
see fine points of the dance and feel sensations in my
body that non-trained dancers do not. I know not just
what a triple pirouette that stops on a dime looks like, I
know what it feels like, cognitively, emotionally,
qualitatively and physiologically, to perform that
movement. Both of these things show up for me in my
appreciative experience.
So what is the best way to describe the feeling of the
doing, the practice, the composing, the improvisation,

the performing in a way that is accessible to the nondancer? How can one describe the appreciative
experience of dance from the perspective of one who
has danced, practiced, composed, improvised and
performed? Doing this requires some form of
philosophic method that allows phenomenology, or
lived experience, to be relevant in the account. If a
dance philosopher wants to go the phenomenological
route his or her best bet is (arguably) to consider
Continental or Pragmatic philosophy, both of which
credit lived experience as a valid form of evidence for
the truth of a philosophical claim.
Some philosophers, however, do not credit
phenomenological description as adequate to explain
dance because the worry is that this privileges some
experiences over others and makes it difficult for
anyone who hasnt experienced dance to understand it.
I recall my frustration when I attended a session on
the body and the phenomenological experience of
dance at a dance conference that consisted in large
part of an audience watching the presenters experience
dance themselves (with no audience participation)
through their own bodies. That was one of the more
salient moments where I experienced myself as the
philosopher in the room. What the heck? I thought

angrily. Thats all very nice for you. But tell us whats
going on in terms that do more than say what you are
feeling! Wheres the scholarly analysis of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty? Wheres the philosophy?
Some dance-trained philosophers have tried to make
sense of their lived experience of dance by using
research from psychology, cognitive science and
neuroscience in order to bolster the claims of what it
feels like with explanations of causal chains that can
be demonstrated or measured via scientific method.
Here there is never a perfect correlation between the
what it feels like and scientific evidence, and
evidence of this sort say nothing about the meaning
or value of the experience of dance. But it seems that
the hope is to legitimate what seems to some like the
subjective or privileged nature of lived experience with
some sort of plausible correlative account from fields
that are typically considered more value-neutral and
demonstratively reliable than phenomenological
accounts that rely on an acknowledgement from the
reader that yes, thats what its like.
At a philosophy conference someone often says
something like this to me: Its not so hard to write
analytic philosophy of dance. Just isolate what makes
dance as art what it and nothing else is and survey the

literature and come up with a theory. Thats when I

feel like a dancer rather than a philosopher. I have
interpreted this kind of direction as requiring a 5-step
process:
1.

2.

3.

4.

Figure out how to construe dance as art. (This will

involve distinguishing dance from non-art similar
practices like sports or other bodily activities like
yoga and you will need to provide some kind of
legitimate definition of art.)
Figure out which art is closest to dance. (Try music
since theater has the problem/difficulty of text
and although dance is visual it is temporal in a
way that is closer to music than to literature,
painting or sculpture.)
Figure out what features dance shares with music.
(They both have primary instances that do not
involve words, performances usually involve live
performers who are in many cases distinguishable
from the composers.)
Figure out which features distinguish it from
music. (Music practice relies far more heavily on a
notated score, the instrument in music is in

many more cases separable from the body of the

performer.)
5.

From these try to isolate the essence or

definition of dance as art what isolates dance
as art that no other art has precisely that is what
(ostensibly) makes dance what it is.

Problem: Once Ive done all this what do I have? Ive

got some sort of definition of dance as art, which I may
tweak in order to make it an open or a cluster
concept of some sort or some sort of list of family
resemblances of features of dance as art if I want to go
the later Wittgenstein route. Now do I understand
dance? Have I reached the essence of dance itself? Is
Susanne Langer right that each art has a primary
essence and that the essence of dance can be
encapsulated by using a method such as this?
I submit that one does not reach the essence of dance
in this way, by which I mean that one has not reached
dance qua dance in a way that imparts a deep or full
understanding of what is important to understand and
get about dance so that one can say, with confidence,
that one knows or (more colloquially) feels dance.
This is not to bash philosophy. Philosophy often excites

me, intrigues me and motivates me to read and think in

a deep way. Ive never been in a bar fight (about
philosophy or about anything else) but I have been
heated enough after a philosophical debate to have
trouble sleeping that night. So whats at stake? What
are we getting to when we try to get to a
philosophical understanding of dance?
I suggest that what we get when we write and read
dance philosophy is a special kind of understanding of
dance, a kind of dance interpreted or understood
through the lens of philosophy. What we get when we
do that is not dance itself. What we get is a better
understanding of philosophy what it can help to
elucidate, what it cannot, and how limited it truly is
when dealing with something as experiential and
bodily and live as dance. What we have is a philosophic
work of art (on a concept of art that conceives of
art broadly as a sort of constructive, creative practice)
that has dance as its focal subject or content. Yes. Thats
what I said. Thats the best philosophy can do. But if
one loves philosophy, and the kinds of constructions it
makes, this might be enough for a lifetime of
interesting work. It just doesnt give us dance. Its not
even close to giving us dance. And this is why (I
conjecture) dance studies, dance education, dancers

and dance choreographers often view dance

philosophers with suspicion if not outright hostility.
And this is why Francis Sparshott can say without
irony, as he does in the introduction to his dance
philosophy book, A Measured Pace, that one need not
have experience of dance to write dance philosophy.
To conclude I will just point you to 13 examples of my
favorite publicly accessible dance video clips to give
you a sense of some of what there is to love and to
understand about dance that can never be given to us
in philosophy. Of course this is all on the appreciative
side and it cannot take the place of either dancing or
attending a live dance performance. But it should
provide a small taste of why I claim that most of what
there is to get about dance goes far beyond
philosophical
description
or
explanation.
A
philosopher might call this hand-waving in the
direction of dance. Guilty as charged.
Japanese Butoh performed by Imre Thormann:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ms7MGs2Nh8
African elementary school students dancing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9qu9JcgqMI

Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov in The

Nutcracker:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsL5VzBqTFk
Pina Bauschs Vollmond (Full Moon):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnUesmL-1CQ
Lars Lubovitchs Duet from Concerto Six TwentyTwo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgKvzhJWXhE
Savion Glover tap dancing exhibition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6OwHvKL4jU
Martha Graham in Lamentation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb4-kpClZns
Natalia Markarova and Ivan Nagy in Swan Lake:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sARqFuqJ_7E
Lil Buck dancing to Swan Lake accompanied by YoYo Ma:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9jghLeYufQ
Axis Dance Company Light Shelter, choreographed
by
David
Dorfmann: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=qOnkwniLRvI

Fred Astaire Hat Rack Dance in Royal Wedding:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pYOOErZ_xM
Alvin Aileys Sinnerman from Revelations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-OuqB1pgys
Molissa Fenley in State of Darkness:
http://www.molissafenley.com/video.php?start=6
Posted by Christy Mag Uidhir at 11:04 AM
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest
Labels: Guest Posts