Choreographing Empathy Kinesthesia In Performance – Susan Foster

If by some chance we had never experienced anger ourselves…, we would have no way of knowing it when we saw it. It is because our own body reacts in kinesthetic sympathy that we are enabled to recognize and escape the wrath upon which we have intruded.115 Because movement and emotion were so closely connected in life and in dance, the majority of “associational connotations” that the viewer experienced were states and developments of feeling.

Martin believed that as a product of Victorian educational values that promoted only intellectual and never physical education, kinesthesia had been undervalued and uncultivated for decades. Like Sherrington, he distinguished between one’s “mental equipment” that determined when and where and how to move, and one’s “motor equipment” that executed those commands.116 More like Titchener than Sherrington, however, Martin believed that both mental and motor capacities could be brought into greater self-awareness. Dance in the US had suffered precisely because of the failure to acknowledge the importance of kinesthesia.

Those with a meager or impaired kinesthetic sense, he argued, would have difficulty apprehending dance’s power and message. The best way to awaken a deadened kinesthetic sense was to undertake the study of dance itself. The technique classes that the new modern dance choreographers began to develop cultivated the musculature in distinctive ways, but each focused on the body as a volume subject to the laws of gravity and momentum, and each developed a relationship to the ground that contrasted radically with earlier forms of concert.

Martha Graham’s investment in the contraction and release and her exploration of the Fig 2.11 In this photograph of The Desperate Heart (1943) choreographed and performed by Valerie Bettis, Barbara Morgan’s double exposure suggests the volume and dynamism at the core of the choreography. Photograph by Barbara Morgan. Courtesy of The Barbara Morgan Estate spiral suggested a body that no longer embodied a set of lines to be formed into geometric shapes, but instead, an amalgam of forces to be harnessed according to flow.

Similarly, Doris Humphrey’s investigation of fall and rebound foregrounded the body’s weightiness and its ability to succumb to and then soar away from the force of gravity. Like the contraction and release, the fall and rebound fashioned the body as a vortex of endlessly repeating cycles. No longer dancing on top of an abstract geometric plane and tracking their progress across it, dancers now explored their dynamic relationship with earth, not as a specific piece of land, but rather as the abstract and universal but nonetheless palpable principle of gravity.

“This is an urgently needed book – as the question of choreographing behavior enters into realms outside of the aesthetic domains of theatrical dance, Susan Foster writes a thoroughly compelling argument.” André Lepecki, New York University, USA “May well prove to be one of Susan Foster’s most important works.” Ramsay Burt, De Montford University, UK What do we feel when we watch dancing? Do we “dance along” inwardly? Do we sense what the dancer’s body is feeling? Do we imagine what it might feel like to perform those same moves?

If we do, how do these responses influence how we experience dancing and how we derive significance from it? Choreographing Empathy challenges the idea of a direct psychophysical connection between the body of a dancer and that of their observer. In this groundbreaking investigation, Susan Foster argues that the connection is in fact highly mediated and influenced by ever-changing sociocultural mores.

Foster examines the relationships among three central components in the experience of watching a dance – the choreography, the kinesthetic sensations it puts forward, and the empathetic connection that it proposes to viewers. Tracing the changing definitions of choreography, kinesthesia, and empathy from the 1700s to the present day, she shows how the observation, study, and discussion of dance have changed over time.

Understanding this development is key to understanding corporeality and its involvement in the body politic. Susan Leigh Foster, choreographer and scholar, is Distinguished Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA, USA. She is the author of Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in contemporary American Dance; Choreography and Narrative: Ballet’s Staging of Story and Desire; and Dances that Describe Themselves: The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull, and editor of Choreographing History; Corporealities; and Worlding Dance. 1kitap1.com/en Choreographing Empathy Kinesthesia in Performance Susan Leigh Foster LONDON AND NEW YORK 1kitap1.com/en First published 2011 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada By Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance © 2011 Susan Leigh Foster The right of Susan Leigh Foster to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: a44b7d0c68d3449c
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 10,188,228 bytes (9.716 MB)
• Title: –
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• ISBN: 9780415596558, 9780415596565, 9780203840702, 0203840704
• Pages: 321
• Language: English (en)

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