Somatic dance as a means of cultivating ethically embodied subjects

This article introduces a phenomenological understanding of embodiment and discusses it in relation to a somatic approach to teaching dance. The nature of bodily knowledge is scrutinized especially through Maurice Merleau‐Ponty's conceptions of perception, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. The article offers insight into the relationship between bodily awareness and the self as well as embodied ethical relationships with others. It is argued that the inclusion of somatic activities in curriculum in different fields can enhance students' self‐understanding and their capacity to form ethical relationships with others. Keywords: dance pedagogysomaticsphenomenologyembodimentself‐understandingethical relationships Notes 1. Following Jaana Parviainen, in this article, bodily knowledge is understood as a corporeal form of tacit knowledge. Bodily knowledge is knowing in and through the body and involves bodily awareness, perception, and all the habitual bodily skills we have acquired in our lives (Parviainen Citation1998, 51). 2. By bodily awareness I mean a conscious awareness of one's own body that can be of two basic kinds: (1) A performative and marginal form of consciousness of the body. Here the body is apprehended as a pre‐reflective flow of experiences with different degrees of clarity and presence in awareness depending on individual and situation. (2) Attentional consciousness that takes the body as its observational focus (e.g. Gallagher Citation2005, 27–8). 3. In phenomenology the lived body is differentiated from the thing‐like objective body. The lived body relates to the body as it is experienced by the embodied subject. It is that dimension of our bodies that we can become conscious of, that we move, perceive, and that remembers and even acquires skills. The lived body involves a sense of mineness, as will become clear further on in this paper. In turn the objective body is the material body with its organic functions. It is that dimension of our bodies that we can become aware of through a third‐person perspective when we relate to the body as a thing‐like entity perceivable by others as well (Parviainen Citation2006, 69–70; Parviainen Citation1998, 33, 35). 4. The pre‐reflective dimension is that realm of consciousness, in which we are non‐observationally and non‐focally, that is somewhat ambiguously, aware of our own being and the surroundings (Gallagher Citation2005, 73; Merleau‐Ponty Citation1962/1995). 5. Thomas Hanna is often cited as having coined the term somatics in the 1970s and to have initiated the somatic movement with his publications and work as a body therapist. In the 1980s he wrote a series of articles in Somatics – Magazine Journal (a periodical that he founded) in which he describes what he means by somatics. According to him, it is a field of study that addresses the soma or the body as it is viewed from within – from a first person or experiential in contrast to a third person and more objective perspective (Rouhiainen Citation2006; Hanna Citation1995; Citation1976). Currently, especially in the Anglo‐American contexts, several bodywork approaches that appreciate the felt‐sense of the body and enhance well‐being through movement and manipulation are often called somatic practices (Rouhiainen Citation2006; Eddy Citation2002; Fortin Citation2002; Green Citation2002b; Johnson Citation1995). 6. In the field of somatics, 'proprioception' is a term that is often used to denote the internal sense of bodily movements, posture and balance. For more a more detailed description see note 9. 7. According to a phenomenological view, wonder is a process of opening upon the unknown, a struggle to regard things anew. This process requires time and a capacity to bear insecurity before the unknown ultimately unexpectedly seizes and surprises us (Dastur Citation2000, 185–6; Heinämaa Citation2000, 104–5; Merleau‐Ponty Citation1962/1995, xiii). 8. In using the term body‐subject, I am referring to an embodied subjectivity emphasizing the pre‐reflective and pre‐personal bodily functions that inform our more reflective and personal conceptions. 9. Bill Brewer suggests that there is a cluster of so‐called internal senses that are generally placed under the title 'bodily awareness.' These include: 'sense of joint position and sense of balance (which inform us of the current configuration of our bodies and limbs); kinesthetic sensation (which tells us about our active and passive bodily movements); and tactual perception, very generally of body‐surface contact, moving stimulation, temperature and pressure' (Brewer Citation1998, 292). Naomi Eilan, Anthony Marcel, and José Luis Bermúdes likewise argue that proprioception or the internal information systems of the body are various. They add to Brewer's list by including skin‐stretch information on bodily disposition and volume, information from receptors of internal organs on nutritional and other states relevant to homeostasis and well‐being, information on effort and muscular fatigue from muscles, and information on general fatigue from cerebral systems sensitive to blood disposition (Eilan, Marcel, and Bermúdes Citation1998, 13). What is interesting is that they also point out that these internal information systems vary in the manner in which they offer information only about the body or about the environment or about both the environment and the body (Eilan, Marcel, and Bermúdes Citation1998, 12–5). With this they mean to say that there is not such a clear distinction between the so‐called internal and external perceptual systems as is often believed. 10. In this article, I will not pay special attention to the nature and meaning of emotion in relation to bodily knowledge and dance. Although this certainly is an issue that should be elaborated upon in further research, this time I will concentrate on perception and bodily knowledge more generally. Yet it is evident that emotion has a strong bodily basis and is related to the sensuous and motional characteristics of the body. In addition, when one explores the felt‐sense of one's own body, what is often also revealed is different emotional attitudes that inform the manner in which one relates to various situations (e.g. Damasio Citation1994; Lyon and Barbalet Citation1994; Mazis Citation1993; Moen Citation1991). Soili Hämäläinen (Citation2007) has recently explored the nature and meaning of emotions in a dance‐making process. 11. As an extension to the above notions, Jaana Parviainen terms the sensuous experiences the body renders through its actions in a first‐person modality kinesthetic knowledge. She underlines the fact that this kind of knowledge concerns not only one's own bodily experiences but allows for the epistemic access that individuals have to the world more generally. In agreement with Noë's understanding of perception, Parviainen points out that bodily knowledge requires functional interaction with the world. (Parviainen Citation2006, 74, 76.) 12. Noë describes the same matter by writing: 'Our success as perceivers depends on the fact that we are very good at noticing flickers of movement and other attention‐grabbing concomittants of change' (Noë Citation2004b, 420). Perception draws on the distinctions that come about through the movement our body accomplishes or the movement that occurs independently of us in our perceptual field. Relating to this facticity, Jaana Parviainen goes on to argue that perceiving motion or movement is one of our most primordial modes of identifying with objects of perception (Parvianen Citation2006, 119). 13. We are commonly familiar with the fact that our body has two modes of awareness. It is simultaneously a sensuous body, through its sentient nature it perceives itself and the world, and a thing‐like body, which is sensed or perceived as a tangible or visible object. Hence, the body possesses a dimension of proximity and distance in which it can feel itself touched as a subject and viewed by itself or others as an object. Nevertheless, while engaged in an act of perception the dual nature of the body is unified and it is through the interrelation of its dual aspects that we comprehend its experiences. This dual nature of the body answers for its self‐reflexivity as well as offers the ground upon which we build our self‐understanding and understanding of others and the world more generally (Rouhiainen Citation2003, 104). 14. Noë describes experience itself to be a field when he writes that 'experience is always a field, with structure; you can never comprehend the whole field in a single act of consciousness… Qualities are available in experience as possibilities, as potentialities, but not as completed givens. Experience is a dynamic process of navigating the pathways of these possibilities' (Noë Citation2004b, 428). 15. These are general categories and in the case of some of the internal senses they overlap (see note 9). 16. Leder describes the sub‐phenomenal field of our body at length and relates to the foreground‐background nature of our perception: 'That organ which subtends embodied consciousness is itself also unavailable to conscious apprehension. Yet this disappearance is nothing but the radicalization of the phenomenon already discussed: the focal disappearance of the surface body. That from which I perceive and act necessarily resists my thematization. As I gaze upon the world, I cannot see my own eyes … Similarly, the several areas of the brain that govern movement, along with the nerves that innervate my hand, are not themselves thematized objects of my reach; they are part of the neurological grouping from which I reach. Another could observe my neuronal firings at such moments and draw the correlations. But my brain‐as‐lived is not yet an objectification. It is part of my ecstatic mode of access to the world. It thus recedes from my direct apprehension even as it grounds my experience' (Leder Citation1990, 113). 17. Here 'body politic' refers to the fact that the body is inscribed by social norms and forms of behavior. Following Michel Foucault, who has written extensively on how the body is formed, controlled, and suppressed by authoritarian institutions in society, Levin describes this by writing that 'the body is shaped by its society, shaped in conformity with a specific vision, a specific image of the political. Once it has been shaped in that image, the body carries within its frame an implicit schema of comportments, a tacit knowledge, the character of which is defined through its experience of the body politic' (Levin Citation1985, 255; Parviainen Citation1998, 26). However, I also believe that the body resists normalizing tendencies and has a capacity to transgress cultural systems, because it always contains a streak of otherness that cannot be fully grasped or molded (see further Rouhiainen Citation2003). 18. In relation to dance, these are issues that Jill Green has been addressing in her ongoing research on social somatics (Green Citation2002–2003; Citation1999).