When I Dance My Walk: A Phenomenological Analysis of Habitual Movement in Dance Practices

Abstract

In this article, I describe the experience of dancing-a-walk. My specific focus is on the shift that I perceive in my body when I dance-a-walk rather than functionally walking. Following a firstperson perspective, I demonstrate how my experience of practicing dancing-a-walk interrogates the habit of walking and makes it come alive again as an expression of the body. First, I show how the practice of dancing-a-walk challenges the dichotomy between abstract and concrete movement proposed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception. Indeed, dancing-a-walk is an example of a concrete and yet already abstract movement. Then, I turn to concepts such as habits and body memory. By identifying how the perception of my body changes when I dance everyday movements (i.e., walking) versus when I execute such movements functionally, I aim to develop a new perspective on and vocabulary for a phenomenological definition of concrete/abstract movements within the context of dance.

[Retracted] Dance‐Specific Action Recognition Method Based on Double‐Stream CNN in Complex Environment

“…In order to further verify the recognition efficiency of this algorithm, tests are carried out in scenes with 0 to more than one person, and the efficiency experimental results of different people are shown in Figure 4 . The algorithms in literature [ 1 ] and literature [ 2 ] and the algorithm in this paper are used to test the efficiency. The efficiency of different numbers of people is shown in Figure 4 .…”

“…Figures 4 and 5 show that the amount of time spent by this algorithm increases gradually, albeit only slightly, with the number of people in the image. The algorithm in [ 1 ] and the algorithm in [ 2 ] both have linearly increasing running times as the population grows. Comparatively speaking, the running time of the algorithm in this study has not really changed all that much.…”

“…The core problem of the automatic generation system of specific dance movements is to explore the relationship between music and movements [ 1 , 2 ]. People have such expectations for the music-driven dance generation effect: in the process of music playing, with the change of music, the specific dance movements will also change accordingly [ 3 , 4 ].…”

“…The optical flow displacement field is also stacked between several consecutive frames to create the model's input. Because the network does not need to implicitly estimate the motion, this operation strengthens the motion trend and characteristics in the optical flow, allowing the model to obtain a better recognition effect [ 1 , 10 ].…”

We Are Travellers: The Body as a Compass

“…The body "knows where our mind may not be able to lead us" (Snowber, 2007(Snowber, , p. 1452) and guides us where we thought we couldn't go. When I started graduate school, I no longer had time for daily dance classes and my dance practice shifted drastically; as a result, I began dancing my walks (Bergonzoni, 2017). Although I did not have time for dance classes, I was able to find time for my walks.…”