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

Exploring the aesthetic uniqueness of the art of dance

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy: Part I: Phenomenological Perspectives on Aesthetics and Art, 2023

The aesthetic unity of dancer and dance is a unique phenomenon in the art world. In exploring the nature and consequences of the aesthetic unity, this chapter first focuses on a dancer's and an audience's experience of dance, pointing out in the process an affective difference and a difference evident in an audience's recognition of technical virtuosity. The chapter then turns to writings of writer and filmmaker Susan Sontag and of eminent choreographer/dancer Merce Cunningham, and to those of Cunningham dancer Carolyn Brown and world-renown choreographer Pina Bausch, all of which describe in different ways the aesthetic unity of dancer and dance, ways that heighten understandings of dance, its uniqueness in the world of art, and its challenges. The well-known ending line from Yeats's poem "Among School Children"-"How can we know the dancer from the dance?"epitomizes just such a range of perspectives. The temporal awareness that runs like an undercurrent through the perspectives centers on the fleeting "nowness" of dance, its existential impermanence, hence the temporal unity of dancer and dance, and the temporality of movement itself, both of which are major factors in the challenge of preserving the art of dance. The chapter shows how this challenge may explain wayward phenomenological assessments and understandings of movement and of being a body, hence wayward phenomenological assessments and understandings of the aesthetic realities of dance and of dancing the dance, and more particularly the phenomenological neglect or faulty assessment and understanding of the sensory modality of kinesthesia. The writings of Merleau-Ponty and of Heidegger, and of various present-day phenomenologists such as Gallagher and Zahavi are of particular concern in this regard. Of contrasting concern are the highly informative and indeed edifying first-person experiential writings of notably famous choreographers/dancers Doris Humphrey and Merce Cunningham that highlight the centrality of kinesthesia to life as well as to dance, of notably famous theater directors Jacques Lecoq and Stanton Garner, and of music composer Roger Sessions, all three of whom write pointedly, experientially, and in thought-provoking ways of the centrality of movement to their art, in no way diminishing the uniqueness of the art of dance but both documenting and broadening the relevance of movement to aesthetic creativity.