Consciousness Matters

Abstract

What is essential in phenomenology does not lie in its actuality as a philosophical 'movement' ('Richtung'). Higher than actuality stands possibility (1). Martin Heidegger, Being and Time Phenomenology is a method for studying experience. I employ this method in my research because it provides a first-person voice for the dancer, the choreographer, and the teacher/therapist in me. Oddly enough, the critic in all of us already uses a firstperson voice when describing and interpreting the dance from our immediate experience of it, and telling others what we think about it. Written criticism formalizes the critic's sensate proximity to the dance. But what about the voice of the dancer in valuing the experience of dance, and the consciousness of the choreographer in making the dance? Where are they accounted for in the formulas for dance research and writing? The objective third-person voice necessary to a particular historical or social angle is more common. Phenomenology has given me a method for intuitive and theoretical reflections on dance from multiple perspectives. Eventually, I contextualize these within the larger framework of phenomenology as a branch of modern philosophy. I began to write using the tools of phenomenology in 1970 when I became aware that aesthetic discourse on dance was distanced from the actual experience, and that the writers in dance aesthetics, with the notable exception of Susanne Langer, were mostly men. I wanted to use an embodied voice and to see if a woman in dance might add to the field of phenomenology. My interests eventually led me to developmental psychology, a field that has much in common with phenomenology (2). Maxine Sheets-Johnstone had already broken the ice in The Phenomenology of Dance, but she had written more analytically than descriptively, clarifying the formative (creative) basis of dance with values intrinsically located in the moving self (3). I built upon this, but I wanted to weave the intuitive voice of the dancer into a descriptive aesthetics, slipping from the first-person experiential voice to analytical third-person theory, as phenomenology does. These were the goals of my descriptive aesthetics: Dance and the Lived Body (1987) (4). Later I began to explain phenomenology as a research method for dance in my article for Dance Research Journal, "A Vulnerable Glance: Seeing Dance Through Phenomenology" (1991); and in "Witnessing the Frog Pond" (1999), I developed this more explicitly (5). My recent work-in-progress, When We Dance, is influenced by the philosophy of phenomenologists who are opening up new vistas of organic being, mapping our way back to our body, our body back into the natural world. These include Bruce Wilshire's Wild Hunger (1998), which probes the primal roots of modern addictions, demonstrating the necessity of joy in the body; The Imperative (1998), by Alphonso Lingis, whose new phenomenology of perception illuminates the exquisite order of the world around

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