Embodied Philosophy in Dance: Gaga and Ohad Naharin's Movement Research

© The Author(s) 2016

Einav KatanEmbodied Philosophy in DancePerformance Philosophy10.1057/978-1-137-60186-5_1

1. Dance and Philosophy: Phrasing an Entrance

Einav Katan¹ 

(1)

Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

1 Dance

Fig. 1.1

From Ohad Naharin’s Mamootot, Batsheva Dance Company, 2008 (2003). Dancers: Andrea Martini, Bosmat Nossan. Picture courtesy of Gadi Dagon, 2008

In the middle of the dance, one dancer steps into the center of the stage and gets undressed. A female dancer lies with her back on the floor beneath him, and observes her hands. She wears an outfit resembling the one he wore a moment before: lusterless, pastel, and pale overalls with long sleeves. Her exposed body parts are dyed with grayish powder. His naked body is covered with the same pigment. Seven dancers are sitting among the audience and looking at the two dancers in the middle. Their outfits are similar, yet distinguished from one another by small nuances and tones. In the moment described, the woman stays still; but before the man joined her in the center, she had moved there alone. In her solo, she looked as if she were unsuccessfully trying to hold on to the last forces of movement and life. She slowly folded her body on the floor, pushing it, and collapsing again. When she was shoving her body away from the ground, she gained, for a short while, a floating state in her flesh, but then again these momentary somatic lifts disappeared into breakdowns. In her movements, it seemed as if traces of living forces began to stir inside her. Then she stood up while the living vibrations she had acquired were still moving within her body. As she was slowly vibrating, her arms were flung into the air in repetitive, sharp explosions. While doing so, her fingers became thick and folded, as if she were trying, repeatedly, to reach something beyond her scope. Then her hands, limbs, and face became soft. She appeared to be calmly defeated. She then became thick again and started to shake from inside, then finally to fall, trembling, to the floor and onto her back. Alone in the space, moving as if unwonted physical impacts controlled her actions, she looked as if she were suffering and overpowered. Therefore, at the moment the man steps towards her, it seems as if he is coming to help.

He looks at her briefly, and takes off his suit. On his entrance, the woman folded her body like a baby at his feet. By the time he has gotten undressed, it seems as if perhaps he is going to cover her; however, instead of touching her, he starts to pose naked. The woman rolls on her back again. As the man begins to move, she rests and stares at her empty hands. In his exhibition, he seems to ignore her existence completely, just as he ignores his audience. His attention is directed towards himself. Thus, he seems indifferent to every single gaze in the room. At the same time, his movements and postures express sheer presentation. He shows off his muscles, and his thickly powdered body gives the impression that he is made out of stone. Due to his positions and movements, his pale, muscular body resembles a sculpture rather than a human being. His postures seem to copy an inanimate material, which imitates the celebration of life. Subsequently, the artificiality of his positions protects him from the intimacy of the audience’s stares; he is not Steffan Ferry (the dancer’s name), but rather an aesthetic material that captures the aura of the perfect male. His nudity ceases to be his own. However, since he is focused on his own moves, it looks as if he is aware of his own appearance. Consequently, he acquires a dialectical quality: as a human, admiring spectator and as his object of glorification. His dance turns into a narcissistic display. As if joyfully gaining awareness of his own objectification in praise of the human body, he starts kissing his shoulders. When he kisses himself, the tension in his flesh converts into softness. By means of this new smoothness in his physicality, he appears to regain his exclusive quality as an individual human being, one who possesses feelings and vulnerability. Suddenly, he changes his attitude and spits on his arms, strains his shoulder muscles again, and then returns to kissing his limbs. Alternately kissing and spitting on himself, he transforms between softening and tensing of his skeleton and flesh. He sits down and almost lays himself next to the still female, but then he spits on himself again, and comes back to the ritual of posing, spitting, and kissing. He observes himself; his gaze follows his own bodily positions as he transfers his stiff arms from side to side like a mobile statue.

After his performance, the female dancer rolls back towards him and stands up. He lifts her and carries her in his arms; her covered stomach touches his naked belly. They look at the audience and present themselves; her face is soft and tranquil, his face is stretched into a big smile from his mouth to his eyes, as if he is wearing a mask. She appears in front of us covered, yet exposed in her simplicity and vulnerability. He stands there unclothed, yet protected by his heroic gestures.¹

2 Words

The description relates to a short sequence from Ohad Naharin’s Mamootot, a dance he created for the Batsheva Dance Company in 2003. The words describe two solos that take place successively. Translating the dance into words provides the dance with explicit verbal narration; the dancers’ actions gain metaphorical meaning, and tell a human story that goes beyond the actual movements. Watching the dance and translating it into words is an interpretative act, like the effort of describing any phenomenon; in Heideggerian terms: it puts the movement at hand (Zuhandenheit).² That is to say, words provide movements with meaning by evoking their context. Consequently, the attempt to translate movement into linguistic sense is a hermeneutical act of understanding; it elaborates a tacit body of knowledge by contemplating its acts of sense making.

Following the hermeneutical tradition, making sense is an integrative act, which involves personal reformation and construction by the interpreter. Thus, on the one hand, making implicit knowledge explicit adds meanings to a phenomenon. On the other hand, this claim does not mean that this world of added meanings transgresses the phenomenon. Rather, meaning that is added needs to derive from its tacit source³; that is to say, the added meaning is already embodied in the phenomenon.

The hermeneutical definition of understanding stands in line with the essence of philosophy according to the Aristotelian tradition. Sophia, philosophical wisdom, is scientific knowledge (Episteme) combined with intuitive reason (Nous).⁴ Episteme is the ability to argue about things and the competence of demonstrating a conclusion through its analysis. Nous, on the other hand, is the capacity to grasp the first principle; that is to say, to perceive the origin of things.⁵ Thus, philosophical knowledge, accordingly, is explicit argumentation that finds its lines of analysis in a recognizable phenomenon as its source. It is following a line that is found by intuitive intelligence (the definition of Nous) rather than running with production without a source. The art of phenomenological understanding is the skill of putting into explicit argumentation implicit knowledge that one can intuitively perceive. Consequently, since philosophy of dance claims that language comprises the non-linguistic phenomena of bodily processes and aesthetic experience, it is necessary first to follow the essence of a dance, and to grasp its first principle.

The philosophical challenge of understanding dance is to elaborate implicit embodied knowledge within explicit argumentation. Thus, before dealing with the logic of linguistic argumentation, philosophy becomes a perceptual challenge. For that reason, philosophical reflections here do not lean merely on logic and theoretical grounds. Rather, the elaboration of the embodied wisdom of Gaga is first and foremost through the physical act of dancing and reflecting its bodily feeling. Physical feelings and recognitions that are evoked within the practice lead the direction of the philosophical questioning, and therefore of the argument. As a result, beyond claiming that philosophy is embodied in Gaga, this account is an inquiry concerning embodied processes of thinking, and therefore concerning the origin of understanding. Consequently, the two main arguments here are as follows. First, to deal with the embodied philosophy of dance is not merely to claim that dance conveys philosophical meanings. It is rather to claim, as Paul Valery already has, that dance is philosophical.⁶ Secondly, an inquiry into philosophical ideas in dance, which are physically embodied, can elaborate dance as a communicative act, but it also has the potential to clarify tacit cognitive processes within understanding and thinking.

Footnotes

1

The description of Mamootot was published first in Einav Katan, Move and Rest in Peace: Pathosformel in Mamootot, a Dancework by Ohad Naharin, Batsheva Dance Company, in: Ulrike Feist, Markus Rath (ed.) Et in imagine ego. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012, pp. 239–54.

2

Zuhandenheit is the ability to grasp a phenomenon, in respect of knowing what it is good for. The term stands for knowing a phenomenon as a useful thing. In this sense, Zuhandenheit also encompasses the worldliness within a phenomenon. It is comprehension of something by understanding its world of reference and signs. See Martin Heidegger, Reference and Signs, in: Being and Time (1927), Joan Stambaugh (trans.), New York: State University of New York Press, 1996, pp. 71–7.

3

Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, vol. III, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, Rudolf A. Makkreel, Frithjof Rodi (ed.), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 235: Understanding as such is an operation running inverse to the course of production. But a fully sympathetic reliving requires that understanding go forward with the line of the events themselves.

4

Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI: Intellectual Virtue. David Ross (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 108.

5

Ibid.

6

Paul Valery, Philosophy of the Dance, in: Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen (ed.), What is Dance, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 55.

© The Author(s) 2016

Einav KatanEmbodied Philosophy in DancePerformance Philosophy10.1057/978-1-137-60186-5_2

2. Dance as Embodied Philosophy

Einav Katan¹ 

(1)

Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

1 Expressivity, Semblance, and Actuality

So what is the act of dance and why does it embody philosophical ideas? Broadly speaking, dance is an act of moving bodies in space and time. As such, its combinations form the relations between bodies, the spatiality, and the timing of an action. This relationship is integrative and contextual, and a buildup through these integrations is what might first evoke the meanings of a dance. While the description of Mamootot at the first entrance portrays primarily bodily movements, the actions are read as related to each other and to the humanity of the dancers who enact them. The sentence a female dancer lies with her back on the floor beneath him, and observes her hands draws attention to the movement of the female, the gender of the dancers, and the correlation between the simultaneous positions of the dancers in a spatial composition. The idea of a composition and actions starts to develop a story line. Within this context, bodily movements become acts of communication. The grammar of the relationship, and of the composition, offers a story. Thus, providing a dance with context is paying attention to its actual process in space and time.

Yet, compositional ideas cannot be separated from the essence of the movements and the bodily textures of dancers. When, at the end of this duet, the dancers look at the audience, the suggested interpretation is shaped not merely by the fact that the man is carrying the woman. The softness within the female’s face, and the big extended smile that stretches across the male’s face, are also responsible for the emergence of meaning. Movement is a physical process in space and time. Thus, the physicality of the dancers cannot be separated from the dance. Consequently, dance is not just a matter of forms and compositions; it is the living process of their shaping. Dance movements are defined, inter alia, by the physical dynamics and the bodily textures of dancers. Since bodily movements are guided and shaped by the living human body, dancing is a perceptual process. The shapes and postures that the dancers manifest are inseparable from consciousness itself and the wholeness of human experience.¹ For that reason, the communicative act of dancing is first and foremost perceptual, and consequently it is expressive.²

An idea in dance is developed into further contextual meanings once the relations within a dance are connected to a world that is further removed from the dance acts per se. One instance, applicable to the example from Mamootot, is the interpretation of the dancers’ actions according to cultural conventions regarding relationships between females and males. In this case, movements can evoke worlds of images that seemingly go beyond their physical realm. However, it is not enough to look at the gender of the dancers, or their compositions, in order to analyze the meaning behind the dance conceptually. The idea is established by the expressivity of the physical dynamics. Bodily textures express human qualities. When the woman is folding her body at the man’s feet, her movement may make her appear fragile like a baby, and the male’s position above her can be interpreted as a manifestation of someone in control, because of the physical dynamics that they manifest. Those meanings are added to the act of dance as its expression.

The additional human quality is the semblance that physical actions convey as their expression. The female dancer is not fragile and the male dancer is not controlling her, but her physical softness and his stability express fragility and control as additional human qualities. Yet, being a semblance, that is not to say that the human quality of fragility and control are not present. Susanne K. Langer points out in Feeling and Form that in dance, the illusion is something that is created at first touch, or motion. For Langer, this claim lies at the core of her theory concerning the living transition of meaning that aesthetic symbols convey. Accordingly, concrete physicality and abstract ideas are not a negation or a dichotomy. Likewise, she stresses the paradox that originates from the common division between the position of the artist as expressionist and the standpoint of the viewer as impressionist. While the artist is believed to deal with expressions of inner feelings and instincts, the spectator—especially the professional one, the theorist or critic—is expected to analyze the beauty of artworks by means of recognizing symmetries and formal patterns.³ This dichotomous way of thinking is reductionist since it ignores both the intelligence that enacts artistic processes, and the emotional and sensitive mode of a viewer or analyst.⁴ Moreover, these paradoxes tend not merely to reduce the position of an artist or a perceiver; raather, they diminish the meaning of aesthetic experience per se. Reductionist terms tend to miss the living force of sense that aesthetic symbols enact. Meanings in aesthetics are not procedures of human minds, as if they were separated entities of the being. Meaning is a communicative act that emerges here and now in the aesthetic process. Thus, the process, in all its implications and complexity, cannot be ignored.

Given that the meaning of dance movements is not about the psychology of a dancer, there is a risk of falling into another reduction and of claiming that a dancer merely presents a semblance of personality, which she/he fakes. However, it is crucial for dance that what is shown equals what is there. The appearance is a direct result of artistic actuality. Frank Thiess remarks on this integration when he writes about the ballerina who performs a grand jeté: The body is supposed to appear weightless, and thus, from the artistic standpoint to be so.⁵ Semblance is not a mere illusion, inasmuch as it is not merely based on contingent cultural convention. Semblance is an outcome of actual forces and dynamics. It is a surplus of meaning that is created in the aesthetic process and emerges by its exceptional organization and materiality.⁶ Integrations between physical acts and their metaphorical meanings make sense. Accordingly, dance gestures are living forms. As an emergence by a living process, the gesture contains its process of inventive creation as an expression.

When the male dancer in the description of Mamootot directs his gaze and attention towards himself, his action and attention actually happen. The dancer directs his attention and movement; he grabs the muscles on his bones in the position of a hero, and softens them. He looks at himself and follows his movement, either by sight or by sensation, in order to reply to it with his next move. Thus, at the same time, he reacts to the information his body supplies. The dancer works in order to create the form, he articulates it, and reactivates meaning by following and directing the logic of movement as it happens here and now. Likewise, when the female lies on her back and observes her hands, physically, even if not in a self-aware mental respect, observation is what she really does. Consequently, as the female’s physicality expresses a moment of grasping her agency, the male’s physicality expresses a concentration on himself and indifference to the other people in the room. The expression of the act belongs to the act of dance itself. The act is nonetheless a semblance, since the expression here is not necessarily what happens to the psychology of a dancer here and now. He does not have to perceive himself as a hero in order that his physicality will express such a perception. He does not even have to be aware of the meaning of his act as articulating the image of a hero; rather, he articulates the form within his movements, and his concentration focuses on providing the movement with stiffness.

Although there is still a distinction between the psychological process of a dancer and the expression of what the dancer enacts and performs, the action of the male dancer is not a presentation of meaning. His dance is instead a manifestation of a meaning through movement. He does not show, he lives through. The dancer actually moves and is occupied with the act of forming precise physical textures and dynamics. Dancers articulate meaning by dancing. Articulation of movement is not an illustration or a demonstration. It is preciseness with physical qualities. Consequently, aesthetic expressions are created and submitted by physical acts. In performance arts, and mostly in dance, this point is crucial.

2 Dance as Hermeneutical Experience

Aesthetic theories often deal with the relationship between the corporeality of the artistic symbol and its meaning. The expressionist essence of the aesthetic sign, as integrated with its materiality and worldliness, has been dealt with in major works in aesthetics, such as those by Hegel,⁷ Heiddeger,⁸ Adorno,⁹ Dewey,¹⁰ and Cassirer,¹¹ to name a few. It can already be recognized in Aristotle’s philosophy and his account of the immanent integration of matter and form.¹² Correspondingly, also in dance there is an immanent interrelatedness of bodily movements with their semblance. Tension in the muscles expresses tension in the soul. In this respect, dance is no different from other communicative acts.

In order to elaborate further the communicative expressionist feature of dancing, there is a need to reflect on its cognitive nature. As with any other act of communication, dance is also a perceptual process. The process of perception generates actions with meanings. Consequently, they can be further perceived and understood. Following the hermeneutical tradition, meaning is understood as a process of emergence, which is based on an event that influences its occurrence. Hans-Georg Gadamer equalizes hermeneutics and the act of ontological explanation with the act of a play, in which the rules are defined within a situation. Play is not something that someone does, but rather something in which one participates. Thus, ontological explanations are based on mutual understandings of a situation. Mutual understanding is created between participants, while the situation is the playground where comprehension is established.¹³

Gadamer’s sense of hermeneutics is based in the aesthetic realm. In return, his theory of understanding influenced further current theories in aesthetics that relate to the intelligent nature of the work of art.¹⁴ Accordingly, artworks are not merely artifacts. The dynamics of artworks are active, not merely due to? former creations of artists who embodied their ideas in them. Similarly, meanings are not the sole act of the receiver who develops them from forms. In the matrix of meaning and perception in aesthetics, the artifact becomes an event. The artist and the audience, in different stages, participate within it. Thus, the artistic process of creation is defined by the elements of the artistic process itself—the encounter of an artist with his/her work. In dance, answers to implicit questions such as Where is there physical tension and how can I release or increase it?, How can I keep physical, or compositional, balance?, What is the amount of energy, or stretch, that my body currently has and what does the movement demand for its further shaping? are defined by the process of choreography and dancing. The process itself shapes the artistic results no less than the first conceptual intentions of dancers or choreographers. From the point of view of spectators, a similar process takes place. The dance and its dynamics lead the gaze of viewers and impact them in a physical sense, no less than in their minds, in perceiving the emergence of meaning.

Artworks—and danceworks are included here—are dynamic procedures. For that reason, John Dewey defines art as experience. Dewey’s pragmatic aesthetics