In Knowing as Moving: Perception, Memory, Place, the eminent dance scholar Susan Leigh Foster renders an account of the phenomenology of moving, through neuroscience, new materialisms, and Native American or indigenous relations to place. The book reassembles decades of writing and thinking about movement – how we experience dancing within our bodies - as a way of practising and sharing meanings, responsibilities and enactments in the world. Indeed, the gorgeous cover image of Foster striding forth along a dirt path above a city skyline, haloed by circles of deepening shadow, provides the perfect introduction to the central thematics of motion, place and experience.
The book is structured as a series of essays, each with their own questions and speculations, and Foster provides close readings of a diverse repertoire of texts, arguments and concepts alongside her reflections on moments within the everyday, experiences in the studio, and ongoing conversations. Most significant is her attempt throughout the book to respond respectfully to the insights of indigenous and place-based philosophy as a contribution towards decolonising western ways of thinking about the ‘body-mind’. To embark on the research that informs this book, Foster persistently acknowledges that power and privilege in relation to scholarly structures are unequal, and therefore all those in the academy who appear ‘unmarked’ (and they are identified as such) need to account for how they know, and how they move, while listening and learning from those who move differently in relation to cultural and ethical systems of responsibility to place and land.
Chapter One, with its focus on the practice of walking, examines the neuroscience of perception with a particular focus on the integrative function of the senses as an ecology of experience. Indeed, James Gibson’s (Reference Gibson1966) concept of ‘affordances’ that are distinctive, agential, adaptive, and non-discriminatory, is one that travels throughout the book. An affordance is not just what human sensing enables, but also the ways in which other matter, all types of material things – bones in the sternum or ankle, stones, trees, rivers, classrooms, words, and wheelchairs – act and react to changes in their environment; and thus reorganise, and inflect, our experience. Bringing into critical dialogue human geographers and spatial theorists, such as Edward Casey, Paul Carter, Tim Ingold, and phenomenologists, Merleau-Ponty or the feminist Iris Marion Young, with Indigenous writers and scholars, such as Gregory Cajete, Eva Garroutte and Kathleen Westcott, Foster dismantles the idea that the phenomenology of perception can ever be without location, indeed every movement path involves reading the ground, as well as leaving a trace.
Chapter Two engages with the new materialism of writers, such as Karen Barad, to expand this consideration of ‘knowing’ as a ‘product of being and moving in the world’ (46), a process that involves attending to, absorbing, and inquiring into the intermingling of things in any localised orientation to place and community. This process is not one that divides knowledge and experience into categories, subjects or borders, but attempts an awareness of parts within realities moving together. A reader might extend these arguments about ‘movement subjectivity’ with the settler Australian author Philipa Rothfield’s book, Dance and the Corporeal Uncanny: Philosophy in Motion; that postulates an understanding of movement informed by the ‘body schema’ (the organisation of perception), such as proposed by phenomenology, but also in relation to forces (external to the subject) acting on ‘experience, thought and perception’ that can render the hermeneutic of consciousness as social, or as a ‘vehicle of the group’ (Reference Rothfield2020: 229). Foster herself describes how this process of awareness, both personal and political, must operate: ‘Patience is thus a combination of movements that continually kindle the curiosity that invites knowing’ (48). That ‘curiosity’ is not one, however, that privileges the mind, the ego, or the coloniser but rather it must resist the authority of the head, the self, and the colonial powers that appropriate without recognition and respect, bodies, peoples and land for systems of knowledge. The moral and philosophical systems of the West have for too long usurped most bodies into their expropriative models of capitalism in the service of colonisation.
Chapter Three declares what is at stake in decolonising our ways of knowing. It begins with unravelling the ‘embodiment’ paradigm. To claim that something is ‘embodied’ suggests that a given practice can be disembodied, therefore automated, or autonomic, without a material or corporeal reality. If, on the other hand, every mode of perception, enactment and interpretation is ‘embodied’, then the concept of the body needs more fully to be realised as particular, located, rehearsed and inflected by its environment. Moreover, as Foster points out, the idea that there can be disembodiment stems from a ‘patriarchal and settler-colonial relationship between something called “mind” and something called “body”’ (59). Critical to this analysis is the strategic alliance wrought during colonialism by the British, the Spanish and the Dutch, that measured and divided assets, whether land, goods or people. Using conquest and conversion, surveillance and violence, material practices that involved ‘whips or rifles’ gave precedence to ‘ownership’ in knowledge systems that made bodies interchangeable and disposable. Therefore, disembodiment is the reproduction of an episteme based on destroying relations between body, land and knowledge.
Any project of decolonising thus must reject the control mechanisms that have determined how we practice movement. For indigenous dancers and scholars, such as Brian Burkhart, the ongoing and careful preparation of the space for performance is embedded in daily rituals, and these are enhanced by awareness of spirits that endure and transmit knowledges for the community. The settler dance scholar Jacqueline Shea-Murphy, who has learnt from and with the wisdom and practices of Native American dancers, writes in Dancing Indigenous Worlds: Choreographies of Relation of a ‘perspectival relationality’ recorded and activated in the Native American choreography and practices that surround the making of it’ (2022: 147). This relationality, that accommodates young or old, senior member or newly arrived visitor, is both ‘a way of being and knowing’ that includes human and non-human persons in ‘relation to particular places, in interconnected relationships’ (Shea-Murphy Reference Shea-Murphy2022: 149). In Foster’s text, the relational mode of knowing provided by Native American writers, such as Andy Garcia (66), or settler sociologists, such as Loic Wacquant, understand the movement of the body within its surroundings as ‘webs of forces’ generating connections that ‘are inert and alive, not inert and immobile’ (67-68).
The importance of these insights to dance, and other somatic or physical training methods, is profound: a realignment of movement subjectivity to relationality with the human and non-human in an experience requires us to think carefully about the words, and spatial arrangements, that are used to determine the transmission of knowledge from teacher to student, or between participants in any public forum, workshop or celebration. One response, suggested by Foster, might involve making the powerful presence smaller, by softening through the bones, developing a mode of listening and making space for a different orientation to place narratives.
The last two chapters focus more directly on how we remember the experience of dancing, and how relational dancing could, and can, offer modes of knowing that are distinctively present to the unexpected, of place, story and community. A dance studies researcher or student may select these two chapters and try to locate more precisely their own practice in relation to Foster’s thinking about how a dance class is arranged, what body parts and memories are activated during a dance rehearsal, and how such dance knowledges enact intricate, and implicated, forms of being present in the world. In a sense, we ‘improvise’ with moving even when it is deeply imprinted in a learned set of behaviours, and it is this flexible and continuous repositioning of the body as it ages, or responds to a different milieu that constitutes ‘the motionality and mutability at the center of cognition’ (81).
In her chapter on ‘Dancing’s Affordances’, Foster describes four different modalities of dancing – an organisation of content that reminds me of her seminal book, Reading Dancing (Reference Foster1986) – that might activate these modes of knowing as moving; a group of ‘mixed ability’ dancers, a corps de ballet, a hip-hop battle troupe, and a Native American dance ensemble. They share amongst themselves distinctive ways of moving their bodies, of organising space, but also of enacting and engaging a collective form of participation in the world that facilitates unique knowledges. These dance practices are discrete, habitual, and reflective of perceptions and memories that have accumulated but are not mutually exclusive; and they can, or could, learn from one another. With attention, they can enhance novel understandings about reciprocity, respect and attunement to the environment in which they are sustained. For the wheelchair dancer, the chair becomes an extension of the body’s capacity to turn, bounce, or cover ground and this knowledge is ‘empowered by a technology that extends and expands it’ (105). Instead of being colonised or limited by habits and histories, the experience of dancing intensifies the ‘nowness’ of bodies as they change, and adapt to the actions of others, daily life, and the diverse materialities which heighten the immediacy and complexity of movement.
This intersubjective relationality serves not merely as an integrative functionality for the individual, giving form to intention, but also, as Foster suggests, a speculative capacity, that is anticipatory, an agential responsiveness to novel thoughts and perceptions of person, place and world (85). It can be protest as well as steadfast application. Dancing, with the agency of sensory motor-awareness, deserves thus a unique place in the academy because it is not only a resource for remembering, and thinking, but one that potentially underpins the capacity to improvise with the ‘quality of what is experienced’ as knowledge. Taken beyond the academy, the epistemological horizon turns towards the communal energies associated with knowing in place, and with others, about moving.
Following the invitation of the cover, much of this book is grounded in Foster’s daily walk up the trail behind her house in the Los Angeles hills; reminding the reader that the lands on which she walks belong to named Native American communities, such as the Tongva, Chumash and Paiute peoples. In this sense, every step involves recognition of colonialism as a force that has altered the landscape, as much as attention to the perceptual apparatus that makes the action of walking possible. The narrative is filled with rich descriptions of the geologies of the canyons, the types of plant-life that survive there, the birds that fly past and the animals, such as foxes, that die by the path. Along with these interspecies interactions, there are the small domestic intimacies of the regular walkers greeting each other, sharing snippets of news, or simply taking account of each other’s ways of walking and being in that environment as a way of moving through the world.
These passages illuminate much of what Foster is arguing throughout the book, that moving is intrinsic to how we know because it is connected to sensory perception in ways that are only partially understood, by cognitive scientists and phenomenologists alike. And, that the perception of movement is an affordance of the body at work in the remembering of experience. It is this combination of movement in a body, and in relation to all other entities within the environment, human and non-human, that aligns dancing with a more respectful understanding of what First Nations scholars and artists have been teaching for decades – that we are connected, or inter-animate, with other living things. Hence, we (white settler scholars and artists) have a unique responsibility through memory and through collective participation to unlearn models of knowing that require command and control. Dancing is one of those practices, that is both of the bodily self and a practice attuned to others and to space, that provides the affordances that might make possible a decolonising of philosophy.
To summarise, I have highlighted Foster’s engagement with Indigenous ways of knowing, and the detailed exposition of complex theoretical texts, as well as the close attention to models of dance knowing that could produce greater agency for the abilities of different bodies, locally situated. There is also the poesis of her writing that gives the reader a way to tune themselves into their own bodily belongings (in my case, swimming) and therefore to de-hierarchise the knowledges that arise from one way of moving or another. Her tone is that of cheerful optimism, a positivity or universality towards relationality in dancing that, from my own chastened Australian perspective on colonial powers, may not always be realised as a potential. And there is the problematic risk that a settler writing on indigenous understandings, taken from diverse voices, places, and narratives, will diminish the distinctiveness of specific community and place-based practices. This partiality, which Foster too acknowledges, requires a vigilant unlearning, and coming-to-know; an account that must become a respectful, and necessary, attempt to listen to, acknowledge, practice, and incorporate alternative worldviews into ways of knowing as moving.
With the legacy from years of dancing with many presences in the world, Foster shares the most recent paths of her reading, research and reflection in Knowing as Moving. This characteristic invitation to dialogue has its own inflections, a whimsy and a seriousness, that does not let the thought slide but holds fast to the lift and placing of each step she takes. We should join her.
