Philosophy of the Performing Arts

performance ii: audience and embodiment 195
Proprioception operates by means of receptors situated throughout the
body – in the tendons and ligaments, for example – which provide infor-
mation to the brain as to how the body is disposed at any given moment.
It is this information that enables the body schema to direct our actions in
a monitored way without our being consciously aware of how this is being
accomplished. More significantly in the present context, empirical research
has established that the same receptors that provide the information neces-
sary for the operation of the body schema (“proprioceptive information”)
are also responsible for our awareness of how our bodies are positioned, or
how we are moving our bodies, at a given time (“proprioceptive aware-
ness”). This awareness is usually only at the periphery of consciousness, but
it can be brought into focus when we deliberately attend to our bodies.
Barbara Montero (2006) has argued that proprioceptive awareness plays
a crucial role in both dance performance itself and the appreciation of
dance performance. She argues, first, that proprioception can function as an
aesthetic sense – a sense whereby we are able to grasp aesthetic properties
of things. What we are able to grasp through proprioception are aesthetic
properties such as the grace or beauty of a bodily movement. Proprioceptive
beauty is a felt property of the movement not reducible to the ways in
which, qua visible movement, it would aesthetically affect an observer. But
our judgments of visual beauty and our judgments of proprioceptive beauty
are related in complex ways:
In some cases, one might proprioceptively judge that a movement is beautiful
because one knows that the movement, if seen, would look beautiful. But in
other cases one might visually judge that a movement is beautiful because one
knows that, if proprioceived, this movement would feel beautiful. (Montero
2006, 236)
There are two possible readings of the relationship between propriocep-
tive beauty and visual beauty. On the first reading, they are closely related
but distinct aesthetic properties. On the second reading, beauty is a uniform
property of bodily movement that applies to certain movements on the basis
of both their look and their feel: if we are aware of only one of these things,
then our aesthetic judgments may be mistaken. While the passage just cited
suggests that Montero subscribes to the second reading, the first reading fits
better with her claim that dancers can sense directly whether their move-
ments possess certain aesthetic qualities by the way those movements feel,
without having to see, or imagine seeing, them.
The claim that proprioception can be an aesthetic sense goes against a long
tradition that has restricted experiential access to the aesthetic properties of
things, including artworks, to those senses that most obviously provide us