Thinking Sensory Experience with Contemporary Dance
Contemporary dance, which arose out of Merce Cunningham’s break from classical ballet, makes it possible to see what we don’t habitually perceive in everyday life: the succession and imbrication of micro-movements and minuscule interactions. But it also brings about possibilities of bodily movement that we would never have imagined. Alert to the state of the world, contemporary dance often shows us chaos but also prefigures, through the ways it brings dancers into relation, new social ties. Immersion in the act of dancing makes it possible to bring back into knowledge a dimension of sensory experience which has largely gone unrecognized by Western anthropology, that of breath or respiration. Contemporary choreographies, like Asian artistic traditions, aim not so much to express forms as to capture forces. They are animated by an energy of incorporation and exteriorization which maintains privileged connections with our environment and each of the elements. But this energy is entirely dependent upon creating a specific relation between dancers and spectators. It is the social phenomenon engendered by the encounter between the stage and the auditorium which counts most and leads to this question: how can an act of motion elicit emotion and produce thought?