Laurence Louppe once advanced the intriguing notion that the dancer is “the veritable avatar of Orpheus: he has no right to turn back on his course, lest he be denied the object of his quest” (Louppe 1994, 32). However, looking across the contemporary dance scene in Europe and the United States, one cannot escape the fact that dancers—contrary to Orpheus, contrary to Louppe's assertion—are increasingly turning back on their and dance history's tracks in order to find the “object of their quest.” Indeed, contemporary dancers and choreographers in the United States and Europe have in recent years been actively engaged in creating re-enactments of sometimes well-known, sometimes obscure, dance works of the twentieth century. Examples abound: we can think of Fabian Barba's Schwingende Landschaft (2008), an evening-length piece where the Ecuadorian choreographer returns to Mary Wigman's seven solo pieces created in 1929 and performed during Wigman's first U.S. tour in 1930; of Elliot Mercer returning in 2009 and 2010 to several of Simone Forti's Construction Pieces (1961/62), performing them at Washington Square Park in New York City; or Anne Collod's 2008 return to Anna Halprin's Parades and Changes (1965), among many other examples.

Dance is frequently described as being “about” movement. “Dance,” writes Ann Daly, “although it has a visual component, is fundamentally a kinesthetic art” (Daly 1992, 243). Audience experiences of dance can therefore be conceptualized in terms of responses to movement, most prominently in terms of what has been described as “kinesthetic empathy.” What does it mean, however, to watch, respond to, or appreciate movement? And how does the historical and theoretical concept of kinesthetic empathy relate to contemporary audiences' articulations of the experience of watching dance?

This article sets out to answer these questions by exploring different kinds of kinesthetic and empathetic responses and pleasures (and indeed displeasures) articulated by spectators of live dance across different styles and contexts. Pleasure is of particular importance to audience studies because it relates to motivations. Why do people seek out dance performances to watch? What are they looking for in the experience? In this context, we are interested in kinesthetic empathy as a mode of engaging with dance that can give pleasure to spectators and can be a strong motivating factor in why people choose to watch dance.

Recently, the field of somatics has provided dance scholarship with a growing body of literature. Research has been conducted in the areas of dance science and education. Dance medicine and somatic education scholars have been able to help dance teachers find ways of using the body effectively in technique classes. For example, Glenna Batson (1990, 1993) and Sylvie Fortin (1993, 1995) have investigated the role of somatics in the improvement of technical dance skills. Further, Fortin (1995) has investigated learning and teaching theory as applied to somatics and dance pedagogy.

As a somaticist and educator, I acknowledge and appreciate the impressive work conducted by these researchers and educators. However, my current work moves somatics into another direction. I am interested in looking at somatic theory and practice through a socio-cultural lens. I am particularly interested in investigating how the body is shaped by society and the dance world, in which performers constantly strive for perfection.

This article is concerned with epistemological questions of dance, specifically, the nature of dance knowledge. The aim is to address the role of our bodily activity and the tactile-kinaesthetic sense in epistemology and to clarify the concept “bodily knowledge”—knowing in and through the body. I start with reflection on the standpoints of traditional epistemology and a feminist critique of it, then, extending the concern with epistemological inquiry of dance knowledge, explore Sondra Fraleigh's and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's notions of cognitive capacities of the moving body. Finally, setting out from the groundwork of Edmund Husserl's, Edith Stein's, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, I use some key concepts from Michael Polanyi's epistemology to describe the nature of bodily knowledge. The argument is that there is a distinction and a connection between “skill” and “knowledge” in respect to the body's movement. Gilbert Ryle's “know how” implies abilities ranging from bodily skills to abstract contemplative cases, but it cannot explain “know how” in the absence of skill. Thus, the rationale underlying this discussion can be put more clearly by asking why dance teachers are able to teach dance students movements they can no longer execute themselves.

What is dance and what is the experience of dancing? What does dancing mean for those who do it?

Dance scholars and critics have written many words in response to these questions. Choreographers give their answers to “what is dance?” in the work they create and, often, in commentary about it. Professional dancers have also spoken, primarily in biographies and autobiographies, of what dance and dancing mean to them. Not all voices are heard in dance literature, however. In particular, the voices of children and adolescents, especial ly those not enrol led in professional schools, are silent. What is the dance experience like, and what does it mean, for them? What do their experiences—and the meanings they make of them—say to us, who work with young people in dance?

These were the questions that propelled three researchers into this study focusing on a group of 16–18 year old young women. In particular we were interested in finding out what young women dancers thought of their place within dance and dancing. This research focused initially on young adolescents and, as such, represents only a beginning of what we view as an important area of investigation.

Work by children in every art form has been both romanticized and criticized by adults. Child art has been emulated as “natural” by artists seeking to free themselves from social and historical conventions (Lowenfeld and Brittain 1987; Read 1957, 1973) and to reconnect with qualities of purity and simplicity (Coleman 1998). Such values have been challenged by those seeking a rationale for instructional programs in the arts (Clark, Day, and Greer 1987). It often seems that educators view children as incomplete adults, in need of education and training to make them mature as well as civilized (Torgovnick 1990). This may be why the ideas and opinions of children are rarely found in research literature, even in education.

Similarly, books about how to teach young people rarely include the perspective of the student. Except in child-centered programs for young children, teachers and educational administrators generally decide what children should learn and then, at least sometimes, assess to see if it has been learned. Very little is known about how young students experience the educational activities designed by adults or construct meaning from them.

Ever since the publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), educational literature and the popular press have been filled with concern over low achievement levels among students in this country. One of the more recent responses has been the development of rigorous national standards, including standards in all the arts (National Standards for Arts Education, 1994). At the same time, there is recognition that far too many students are not motivated to meet even existing standards. The September 1995 issue of Educational Leadership, a publication whose themes reflect issues of current significance to public school administrators, was devoted to strengthening student engagement. Editor Ron Brandt opened the issue with a description that is familiar to almost anyone who walks into a typical high school class in any community:

Some [students] see no connection whatever between their priorities and what teachers expect of them, so they refuse lessons and even refuse to try. Others realize they must play the game, but go through the motions with minimal attachment to what they are supposedly learning. Teachers, thwarted by resistance or passivity, complain that students are unmotivated, and either search valiantly for novel approaches or resign themselves to routines they no longer expect to be productive. (1995, 7)

Certainly this dismal picture does not apply to young children, who arrive so eager to learn in kindergarten. It is reasonable to ask what happens to children, especially as they move through adolescence, to leave so many so unmotivated and disengaged.

In 1991, when my essay, “On Dance Ethnography,” appeared in this journal, there was a small body of American research in dance that examined movement in cultural context (1). Since then, a radical shift has occurred in American dance scholarship. Cultural critique, with its attention to ethnicity, race, class, and gender, has permeated the academy, and dance historians have turned to sociocultural issues, blurring the boundaries between the sub-fields of dance. We now have a range of theories, methods, and case studies that address the cultural situatedness of dance and movement, a range reflected in the names applied to the subject: “dance ethnology,” “cultural studies in dance,” “ethnochoreology,” “performance studies,” “anthropology of dance,” and “anthropology of human movement.” While long-established paradigms continue to inspire work from structural, symbolic, and functional perspectives, two new trajectories have risen in ethnographic dance studies in this decade.

One trajectory is sociopolitical; it draws on the rapidly developing ideas and language of cultural studies. Here we talk about dance in terms of the “socially constructed nature of human movement” (Reed 1998, 503) and of “bodily theories— armatures of relations through which bodies perform individual, gendered, ethnic, or community identities” (Foster 1995, 8). We discuss globalization, transmigration, de- and re-contextualization, invented communities, kinesthetic homes, all of which address the way dance works and is worked upon in the changing contexts of world politics. We specify whether a dance affirms, resists, re-creates, challenges, undermines, or reenforces the status quo, and sometimes whether it does several of these at once, for we agree that dance as social action can be ambiguous (Desmond 1994) (2).

One of my favorite childhood memories is from my first dance class. I ran into the studio and started jumping, jumping, jumping literally for joy when I noticed suddenly that I was not alone. There were other children in class, and they were all jumping too. We jumped together, spontaneously in sync, oblivious to what must have been looks of parental incredulity peeking through the door. The teacher stopped us well before anyone fell to the floor but not so soon as to mistake the extraordinary (teachable) moment. Human beings can bond together through rhythmical movement and expressions like joy, and dance is fundamentally about making those connections: to self, to others, to the world, and beyond. In sixty seconds, our little dance community was born.

The strength of ethnography and ethnographic criticism is their focus on detail, their enduring respect for context in the making of any generalization, and their full recognition of persistent ambiguity and multiple possibilities in any situation. (Marcus and Fischer 1986:159)

Movement as Cultural Knowledge: The term “ethnography” literally means “portrait of a people.” Perhaps “portrait” is too thin and two-dimensional a metaphor to represent the goal of ethnography, for an ethnographer seeks not only to describe but to understand what constitutes a people's cultural knowledge. Cultural knowledge includes, in anthropologist Clifford Geertz's words, “a people's ethos—the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood—and their world view—the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order” (1973:89). The ethnographer wants to know nothing less than how a given group of people find or, more accurately, make meaning.

To examine dance from an ethnographic perspective, then, is to focus on dance as a kind of cultural knowledge. Dance ethnography depends upon the postulate that cultural knowledge is embodied in movement, especially the highly stylized and codified movement we call dance. This statement implies that the knowledge involved in dancing is not just somatic, but mental and emotional as well, encompassing cultural history, beliefs, values, and feelings. If movement encodes cultural knowledge then, for example, ballet can be examined for the messages it embodies about enduring gender conventions derived from the court society of Renaissance Europe and performance art can be examined as a response to the demands of survival in urban America.

My main focus is to reveal the existence of global influences on the development and teaching of somatic principles and disciplines and to discuss why these influences are not in the forefront of somatic inquiry. I hypothesize that the search for “the universal” or “the humanistic” or “the biological” as a throughline of body-mind investigation has encouraged a monocultural approach to somatic pedagogy and the promotion of the field. Second, it is of interest that it has been through the work of those founders of somatic disciplines who are women that it has become possible to retrace more easily some of these global influences on twenty-first-century somatic studies. I also posit that through the lives and experiences of women leaders a more emotional voice enters the holistic paradigm. This paper aims to raise questions, not to be exhaustive in its pursuit of data regarding all the intercultural complications of somatic practices, including questions emerging from gender politics. It is a continuation of the inquiry, begun during the panel “Paradigms and Approaches: The Future of Somatics in Dance” at the Dancing in the Millennium conference in July 2000 (jointly sponsored by CORD, SDHS, DCA, NDEO. LIMS, NDA. among others) regarding the dissolution of any potentially monolithic views of the history and etiology of “somatics,” as well as somatic movement applications in dance (Green 2000; Fortin 2000), with a specific eye to examining how cultural and religious movement practices from diverse cultures have provided philosophical underpinnings and influential theories and practices to the field.

As western theatrical dance has developed through the centuries, dance educators, artists, and researchers have sought methods to improve dance skills and to refine the quality of dance performance. In the pursuit of ever-increasing technical skills, improved alignment, freedom from injury, and enhanced artistic capabilities such as expanded dynamic and expressive range, dancers have explored numerous training systems developed for these purposes. These systems are often used in conjunction with dance technique classes, and they explore a range of approaches addressing different aspects of the neural and motor mechanisms underlying dance skills. In general, the systems can be seen as operating within two large concerns. The first includes systems using imagery and/or mental practice designed to affect alignment and dance performance on the subcortical or neurological level, with minimal or no physical action (Bartenieff 1980; Dowd 1990; Sweigard 1974; Todd 1937). The second emphasizes consistent and specialized exercise programs designed to encourage muscular strength and endurance, flexibility, and/or cardio-respiratory endurance, with the claim that these physical changes will enhance alignment, dance technique, and performance (Clippinger-Robertson 1990; Fitt 1988; Kravitz 1990; Lauffenburger 1990; Pilates 1945; Russell 1992; Solomon 1990; Stephens 1990; Trepman, Walaszek, & Micheli 1990). While there is often overlap in these two categories, the first group emphasizes neuromuscular repatterning to alter alignment or movement habits, while the second addresses muscular/structural alterations to affect change. For example, the body therapies, including the work of Bartenieff, Alexander, Feldenkrais, and Sweigard, attempt to alter the way muscles pattern themselves, stressing whole body activity, connections, and awareness, not exercises for specific muscles (Myers 1980). Conditioning programs, on the other hand, do engage particular muscles, in order to make gains in muscular strength and range of motion.

From the precepts of civility and physical deportment in the early modern era to modern gestural routines found in physical therapy and gymnastics, cultural historians of the body have studied the physical practices of hygiene, sports, and medicine. The history of dance is marked by these dance-related practices, which are peripheral to dance itself. One set of contemporary peripheral practices sought out by dancers themselves has been called “somatics,” a term Thomas Hanna proposed in the 1970s (1995). Somatics has since made its way into the dance world, where by now it has achieved widespread recognition as a form of bodily knowledge. This article is concerned with the epistemological status of somatics and, therefore, with the discursive production characteristic of its methods and practices.

The first value that we usually attribute to these practices is prophylactic: they serve to prevent professional accidents or provide functional rehabilitation following injuries. Although increasingly integrated into dancer training and dance pedagogy, somatics first found its way into dance as a means to limit accidents. Somatics is also often a resource for the improvement of virtuosity in dance. But it has nevertheless transformed pedagogy into a more “active” and exploratory experience for the student, in which physical sensations are more important than the mirroring and reproduction of forms (Fortin 1996, 2005; Fortin, Long, and Lord 2002). We often see it presented as a “counter power,” an antidote to dominant dance practices. This point of view is poorly documented—possibly because it would not hold up against a strong argument—but it is common knowledge that somatics stands opposed to virtuosity and the “perfect” body image, as seen, for example, in the role these techniques played in the early part of Trisha Brown's choreographic career.

The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences. (Said 1978,1)

The past century has witnessed the phenomenon of belly dancing becoming a key icon of the Middle East in the West. This iconic representation often causes outrage, resentment, and even protest among Arabs who resent Westerners (mis)representing them by focusing on cabaret-style belly dance, a low-class and disreputable symbol for many in the Arab world, as a primary media image of the Middle East. Since the 1970s, millions of women and some men in the West have been attracted to belly dancing, investing millions of dollars and enormous time acquiring the basic skill of the dance in order to perform it. This essay will address several issues that are raised by the phenomenon of belly dancing and its transformation, globalization, and acculturation in the West; it is designed to develop a newly emerging area of performance/cultural research, drawing from the fields of dance and transnational studies.

As Brooks Schmitz recognized, the improvement of dance education will arise from a better understanding of the dance teacher's knowledge in relation to its pedagogical delivery. Although research on teacher knowledge has become a major focus of research in general education (Elbaz 1993; Leinhardt 1990; Schön 1983; Shulman 1986), such research is absent in dance.

“Activating Whiteness: Racializing the Ordinary in US American Postmodern Dance” explores how the choreographic turn to postmodernism twisted the trope of racial exclusion from a focus on trained bodies to a focus on ordinary bodies. Analyses of Yvonne Rainer's Trio A (1966) and Trisha Brown's Locus (1975) demonstrate how ordinary bodies shape racially exclusive spaces and activate the biopolitical mechanisms of normalization that their choreography allegedly contests. This essay argues that the spaces activated by the bodies that shaped them carry the physical trace of the performers’ race through the enduring invisibility of whiteness.

In this statement the American dancer Merrill Ashley, who had a memorable 30-year career with the New York City Ballet, expresses a view on injuries that goes against the grain of dominant thinking within the world of ballet. According to Ashley, who suffered from several injuries in her first two years with the company, an injury can be a positive experience for a dancer, because it heightens her awareness of her body and teaches her about its possibilities and limitations. This is a rather exceptional view in a world where the vast majority of professionals commonly see injuries as a disaster (Wulff 1998; Wainwright, Williams and Turner 2005). The dominant realization that a dancer's career is short makes dancers fear an injury, because it will prevent them from dancing and cause them to lose roles. Because “there is a rule in the ballet world against casting or promoting dancers who are injured” (Wulff 1998, 106), dancers who suffer from an injury will wait as long as possible before letting others know, because they are afraid it will stop them dancing (Mainwaring, Krasnow and Kerr 2001).

While recent research in the United States indicates that gay and bisexual men comprise half the male population in dance, a very limited amount of scholarship focuses on the experiences of gay men and boys in dance education (Hamilton 1999). Cultural heterosexism and homophobia certainly contribute to this conspicuous absence of scholarship and discourse, as does institutionalized heterosexism in concert dance and Western social dance forms (Adair 1992; Burt 1995; Hanna 1988). Given the rich and compelling dance research in gender (Albright 1997, 1998; Bond 1994; Case et al. 1995; Crawford 1994; Daly 1998; Stinson et al. 1990; Stinson 1998; Thomas 1993) and feminist theory (Albright 1990; Banes 1998; Daly 1991, 2000; Foster 1996; Shapiro 1998; Stinson 1993), one questions the absence of scholarly analysis surrounding gay issues in dance education. Unfortunately, dance and dance education may unwittingly reproduce asymmetrical power relationships, social inequities, and sexist patriarchy by reaffirming the status quo operating in contemporary American culture. In doing so, the profession ignores vast educative opportunities for diminishing homophobia and antigay bias. In view of the relatively large numbers of gay men and young adults in the field, the lack of serious discourse and study of these critical issues is disheartening. I am reminded that Susan Stinson importantly asked the dance community these ethical questions nearly two decades ago. Regrettably, her cogent questions remain largely unanswered:

More than any other era in the history of ballet, the nineteenth century belongs to the ballerina. She haunts its lithographs and paintings, an ethereal creature touched with the charm of another age. Yet even when she turned into the fast, leggy ballerina of modern times, her ideology survived. If today the art of ballet celebrates the danseur nearly as often as the danseuse, it has yet to rid it aesthetic of yesterday's cult of the eternal feminine. Like her nineteenth-century forbear, today's ballerina, an icon of teen youth, athleticism, and anorexic vulnerability, incarnates a feminine ideal defined overwhelmingly by men.