Choreographing Resistances: Spatial–Kinaesthetic Intelligence and Bodily Knowledge as Political Tools in Activist Work

Bodies have been used as a political tool in activism, but many scholars have ignored activists’ highly sophisticated and intelligent ways of using their moving bodies. This paper focuses on analysing three choreographies of resistance: the group crawling performance for striking nurses in Helsinki in 2007, the protest by Greenpeace at a nuclear construction site in 2007 and a protest in the 1989 Chinese student movement. The purpose is to shed light on how resisting choreographies can generate interactions and relations between agents keeping these interactions dynamic by the motivations and affections of these agents. I will apply Edmund Husserl’s and Edith Stein’s phenomenological method of analysing movement and their notion of kinaesthesia. One of the keywords here is ‘the kinaesthetic field’ that offers a new perspective to account for resisting choreography and its dynamics in socially, politically and emotionally complex environments. Drawing on Howard Gardner’s notion of kinaesthetic intelligence, I suggest that the core element of kinaesthetic intelligence is not only control of one’s bodily motion but also capabilities for working with kinaesthetic fields. The paper argues that the activists can operate gestures, the vulnerability of the body and timing by drawing various agents into their choreography. When activists are able to express their political ideas as concrete gestures, postures or kinaesthetic relations, it also supports their capabilities of articulating their moral intuitions. Even when witnesses disagree with protesters’ positions, protests frequently force them to reconsider their own.