Philosophy of the Performing Arts

192 performance as art
that motivate thought and action. Relatedly, Richard Shusterman character-
izes what he terms “body consciousness” as “the embodied consciousness that
a living sentient body directs at the world.”
On such a phenomenological picture of human cognition and agency,
what sense can we make of the idea – central, as we have seen, to writings
on dance training and dance technique – that the dancer trains her body as
an instrument to be used to execute her artistic intentions in the dance?
Writers sympathetic to the phenomenological picture have addressed
this question in different ways. Sondra Fraleigh, for example, argues that,
while there is an indissoluble lived unity of body and mind, it is possible,
either in states of personal disintegration or through deliberate effort, for
a person to take her physical body as an object, abstracting, in so doing,
from its lived nature. She cites Merleau-Ponty, who writes of the body as
“the bearer of a dialectic” which can lead to a rupture in the lived unity of
embodied agency:
Our body does not always have meaning, and our thoughts, on the other
hand – in timidity, for example – do not always find in it the plenitude of
their vital expression. In these cases of disintegration, the soul and the body
are apparently distinct; and this is the truth of dualism. (Merleau-Ponty
1963, 209)
The dancer who wishes to train her body to perform must bring about such
an objectification voluntarily. As she learns the dance, such a dualism
grows of necessity from an objectification of the body in rehearsal and per-
formance through creative experiment with, and critical observation of, the
body in motion. A psychic distance from the body is necessitated in the dialec-
tical creative process of dance. It is significant, though, that such a phenomenal
(or lived) duality is formulated upon a basic unity and according to intent, as
existential phenomenology has held. (Fraleigh 1987, 13)
Gallagher’s work, and work on dance that falls within the broadly Merleau-
Pontian tradition, suggests how empirical work in psychology and neuroscience
can bear indirectly upon our most fundamental assumptions about dance and
the terms in which we describe what is going on in dance performance. As
noted above, both Merleau-Ponty and Gallagher ground their claims about
the lived body and the embodied mind in the empirical studies of their time in
various areas of cognitive science. Gallagher, for example, draws upon a broad
range of research in developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience,
including extended studies of pathological conditions. If our philosophical
interest in dance comprises questions about the nature of the artistic vehicle
and the ways in which the dancer is able to articulate an artistic content