Learning Movement: Integrating Kinaesthetic Sense with Cognitive Skills

A goal of dance is expressive performance. Though specific meaning of movement may remain indeterminate, its intent nonetheless becomes apparent to an audience through both skill and precision of execution and, more importantly, through criteria established uniquely for each dance in act of its being performed. Successful performance guides a sensitive spectator to apperceive movement with an openness and receptivity that permit dance to unveil itself. Martin Heidegger argued that moment of experiencing truth was a moment of appropriation in which a knower's sensitivity created a within which Being could reveal itself.1 Similarly, dance reveals itself, unveils itself, as a spectator's sensitivity creates a clearing for its appropriation. This collaboration between choreographer, dancer, and audience frames what we may call the objectivity of dance; it is an objectivity that demands participatory appropriation, not uninvolved detachment. Dance movement, in which dancer becomes dance, is mediate term of this threefold relation, making possible adequate apperception for audience through its embodied integration of choreographic intent. The dancer is not a passive technician mechanically executing choreographer's plan, but an interpreter actively shaping and refining given choreographed movement. It is on dancer at nexus of expression between audience and choreographer that we wish to focus. In particular, our concern is with cognitive and kinaesthetic dynamics that must complement a dancer's physicality. It is through inhabiting these dynamics that a dancer's movement becomes expressive. Learning movement entails active yielding by dancer to dance. Just as in effective acting one sees not an actor acting but a living character in dramatic context, so in dance one does not apperceive a dancer dancing.