The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory

The body and pedagogy: beyond absent, moving bodies in pedagogic practice

“…Spontaneous actions are imagined to spring from them without agency going through minds as: fundamental creativity founded upon the bodily logos, that is, upon a mindful body, a thinking body, a body which opens up into movement, a body, which, in improvisational dance, breaks forth continuously into dance and into this dance, a body which moment by moment fulfils a kinetic density and invests the world with meaning. (Sheets-Johnstone 1981, 406, cited in Williams 2005 However, reversing the location of intentionality from mind to body, even through the idea of the subjective body, is problematic (Farnell 1994;Varela 1994;Williams 2005). In order to get beyond dualisms, Varela argued that Merleau-Ponty needed a complex rather than linear notion of causality.…”

“…Second, this sociological concern with structure-agency leads to a section dedicated to causality and argues that causal complexity provides a useful way to understand pedagogy. This section is indebted to Charles Varela (1994) and Drid Williams (2005). Theoretical developments can be extended to semiosis and semiotics within multimodal (Kress et al 2001) pedagogic practice.…”

“…Language (la langue) is the written, enduring form of speech (la parole) and it is this quality of language that renders it a resource. There is no equivalent system for recording body movement, although attempts have been made to develop them; for example, in Sutton Movement shorthand and Laban script (Williams 2005), where:…”