Philosophy of the Performing Arts

performance ii: audience and embodiment 191
for example, writes that “the human body, as the instrument of commu-
nication, has to transcend its personal limitations; it must be trained ... to
make neuromuscular discriminations; to sense degrees of action, textures,
qualities ... It must respond sensitively to the dancer’s feelings and needs
and to the demands of the choreographer” (1971, 23). And a text on dance
technique states that through such technique “you learn how to control your
body and make it your instrument” (Minton 1984, 3).
However, writers on dance influenced by the French phenomenologist
Maurice Merleau-Ponty reject such a dualistic conception of human agency in
general, and its application to dance in particular.^12 Phenomenologists coun-
ter the idea of the human body as an instrument for the use of the mind in two
ways, which effectively provide two perspectives on the same phenomenon.
First, they maintain that the body itself is a “lived body” whose engagements
with the world are always inflected by the “ intentionality” – the purposes,
projects, and perspectives – of the agent. The human body encounters objects
in its world in ways that reflect both its capacities for embodied agency and
the agent’s intentionality. When I reach to pick up a glass in front of me, my
hand shapes itself to grasp the glass without any explicit awareness on my
part of its so doing, for example. This is what Merleau-Ponty termed “pri-
mary consciousness,” our embodied ability to negotiate our lived world suc-
cessfully without the need for explicit awareness of relevant features of that
world. When we walk across a room to greet someone, we are conscious of
what we are doing in terms of this purpose, with no explicit awareness of
the ways in which we navigate around the furniture of the room. The lived
body relies upon what can be termed a “body schema,” a system of sensory-
motor capacities that function without conscious awareness or the need for
perceptual monitoring. These capacities operate in ways that can be precisely
shaped by our intentionality, as in the preceding examples.^13 The psycholo-
gist J. J. Gibson (1979) talks here of the “affordances” in terms of which crea-
tures like us perceive and interact with their environments, an “affordance”
being a way in which something fits with our projects and purposes given
our physical capacities.
Complementing such talk of the lived body is talk of the “embodied
mind,” whose cognitive and practical activities are structured by the intel-
ligence of the lived body. In How the Body Shapes the Mind , Shaun Gallagher
(2005) reworks the Merleau-Pontian project by drawing upon recent work
in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. He argues that our conscious
apprehension and understanding of the world depends on experiences that
are informed in their very structure by a body with various perceptual and motor
capacities. To understand our cognitive engagement with the world, Gallagher
argues, we must focus not merely on the brain but also on the body under-
stood as embedded within physical and social environments and situations