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III. A Vulnerable Glance: Seeing Dance through Phenomenology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Sondra Fraleigh
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When phenomenology is true to its intent, it never knows where it is going. This is because it is present-centered in its descriptive aims, accounts for temporal change, and does not have appropriate and inappropriate topics. It might move from Zen to dance to baseball to washing dishes, and even isolate a purity of attention that under certain circumstances connects them all. Phenomenology develops unpredictably, according to the contents of consciousness. This is its first level of method. Its second level develops philosophical perspectives from the seed of consciousness. It holds that “philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being”. Here I will discuss phenomenology as a way of describing and defining dance, shifting between the experience of the dancer and that of the audience.

Experiential Truth: Phenomenology depends on immediate experience, but includes more. It hopes to arrive at meaning, perspectives on the phenomena of experience (dance in this case) which can be communicated. It is not devoid of past and future, since both are lived as part of the present. Present time takes its meaning in part from past and future. Heidegger described time as belonging to the totality of being, as “the horizon of being.” He chose the vulnerable image of falling to describe the lived dimension of present time. Falling is both a movement and a symbol of our existential mode of being-in-the-world.

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , Spring 1991 , pp. 11 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 1991

References

Notes

1. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Smith, Colin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. xxi.Google Scholar

2. Ibid.

3. Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie, John and Robinson, Edward (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 164.Google Scholar

4. Ibid., p. 239

5. Ideen zu einer reinen Phanomenologie und phanomenologischen Philosophie. Erster Buch. Allegemeine Einfuhrung in die reine Phanomenologie, ed. Beimen, Walter (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950)Google Scholar. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. Gibson, W. R. Boyce (New York: Humanities Press, 1931: paperback ed., Collier, 1962)Google Scholar. For a comprehensive survey of phenomenology including origins of the phenomenological method, its subsequent development, and its contemporary manifestations see Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction. 2 vols., 2nd ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971).Google Scholar

6. Merleau-Ponty, , p. xix.Google Scholar

7. I dealt with this in terms of dance in the first chapter of Dance and the Lived Body, and Richard Zaner takes it up extensively in The Problem of Embodiment. Fraleigh, Sondra Horton, Dance and the Lived Body (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), pp. 8–15 Google Scholar. Zaner, Richard, The Problem of Embodiment, 2nd ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), pp. 239–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Arturo Fallico believed that the joining of the phenomenological method with existential concerns connected philosophical efforts with ontological, religious, and aesthetic interests. For existentialism, it meant a transition from unsystematic literary expression to technical writing. For phenomenology, it signaled a change in application from pure idea to concrete problems of human life. Fallico, Arturo B., Art and Existentialism (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 7 Google Scholar

8. Fraleigh, Sondra, “Good Intentions and Dancing Moments: Agency, Freedom and Self Knowledge in Dance”, Emory Cognition Project with the Mellon Foundation, Colloquium on the Self, Emory University, Atlanta Georgia, May 5, 1989.Google Scholar

9. Stewart, David and Mickunas, Algis, Exploring Phenomenology (Chicago: American Library Association, 1974), pp. 5–6.Google Scholar