III. A Vulnerable Glance: Seeing Dance through Phenomenology

Abstract

When phenomenology is true to its intent, it never knows where it is going. This is because it is present-centered in its descriptive aims, accounts for temporal change, and does not have appropriate and inappropriate topics. It might move from Zen to dance to baseball to washing dishes, and even isolate a purity of attention that under certain circumstances connects them all. Phenomenology develops unpredictably, according to the contents of consciousness. This is its first level of method. Its second level develops philosophical perspectives from the seed of consciousness. It holds that “philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being”. Here I will discuss phenomenology as a way of describing and defining dance, shifting between the experience of the dancer and that of the audience. Experiential Truth: Phenomenology depends on immediate experience, but includes more. It hopes to arrive at meaning, perspectives on the phenomena of experience (dance in this case) which can be communicated. It is not devoid of past and future, since both are lived as part of the present. Present time takes its meaning in part from past and future. Heidegger described time as belonging to the totality of being, as “the horizon of being.” He chose the vulnerable image of falling to describe the lived dimension of present time. Falling is both a movement and a symbol of our existential mode of being-in-the-world.

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