Chapter 1.6 the negotiation of significance in dance performance: aesthetic value in the context of difference (original) (raw)

I explore how dance may be appreciated in a contemporary context in which it can no longer be assumed that performers and audience make sense of dancing with reference to a shared culture. I do not write as a philosopher, but rather from my position as a former dancer and now dance academic, to draw upon my experiences of dancing, researching and teaching dance with the aim of proposing some avenues ripe for philosophical investigation. I will start by emphasizing that dancing is a communicative phenomenon. In this context, I find the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty provides a welcome recognition of the human capacity for intersubjective, embodied experience which is of key importance to engagement with dancing as meaningful. This is not to suggest dancing can be conceived as communicative in the naïve terms that propose some sort of universal expression or movement language. Nor can the meaning of dance be directly intuited through kinesthetic empathy as proposed by early theorists of Modern dance. Rather, I consider how the significance of dance performance might be understood through a process of negotiation grounded in intercorporeal experience. Here I recognize the challenge of difference – in relation to gender, sexualities, and/or cultures and abilities - to the self-other relationships which sustain such negotiations. Finally, I situate these reflections within the broader field of philosophical aesthetics to consider the potential of such encounters to contribute to aesthetic values attributed to dance.