Research Fieldwork: Theory, Practice, and Experience “in Conversation”

The research methods that inform this article are important to briefly contextualize, particularly because the methodology also reflects an epistemology. The methodology was designed, overall, to enable a triangulated “conversation” between original research, my own experience as a trained contemporary dancer, and theory from the relevant literature. I adopt the metaphor of conversation to specify that the research sits at the juncture of theory and practice and that practice and theory “communicate” with each other in this research, particularly in my attempts not to privilege theory over practice or vice versa. Aimee Purser (Reference Purser2008) succinctly describes the metaphor of conversation with dance practice and theory which is applicable here:

The dancers’ interview-discussions serve as the primary fieldwork in the research that informs this article. Reflections on my own experience in dance practice and engagement with ideas in the literature serve as interlocutors, as Purser calls them, and offer opportunities to reflect on the dancers’ interview descriptions from other perspectives.

The main interview material is drawn from a series of qualitative, semistructured interview-discussions, conducted over a six-month period, with fourteen professional-level Western theater dancers, based in London. The interview-discussions were open-ended and exploratory, based on the premise that the researcher and dancer co-construct the meaning in the moment of the interviews (Green and Stinson Reference Green, Stinson, Fraleigh and Hanstein1999; Kvale and Brinkmann Reference Kvale and Brinkmann2009; Mason Reference Mason2002). The interpretive approach is important to interview design and analysis because the purpose is not to proclaim universality about dancer experience; instead it is to try to understand a group of dancers’ reflective processes in particular performance practice contexts. As Green and Stinson (Reference Green, Stinson, Fraleigh and Hanstein1999) argue, “Interpretive research is most helpful in allowing us to understand how participants in dance are making sense of their experiences … . The interpretation offered by the researcher can give readers an opportunity to reflect, to pay attention to what they might otherwise miss in their own [dance] settings” (104). As mentioned above, regarding the sociological approach, the research is designed to consider, according to a small group of dancers, how meaning is made and how they are situated in the dance world (Aalten Reference Aalten2004; Csordas Reference Csordas1993).

The interview-discussion material was analyzed and separated into key themes aiming to develop, clarify, and expand on what was discussed (Kvale and Brinkmann Reference Kvale and Brinkmann2009). The theme of “a kinesthetic mode of attention” emerged after repeated reading of the transcribed discussions and several iterations of coding, as part of the analysis (Green Reference Green2015; Ravn and Hansen Reference Ravn and Hansen2013).

As mentioned above, the researcher's experience as a dancer informs the design, fieldwork, and analysis, in keeping with the work of other dance scholars (Albright Reference Albright2011; Potter Reference Potter2008; Ravn Reference Ravn2009, Reference Ravn2010; Rouhiainen Reference Rouhiainen2003). A shared competence between the dancer-participants and researcher was beneficial because it enabled a mutual understanding of language and lived dancing experience, which helped bring out certain issues in the interview-discussions. As Ravn and Hansen (Reference Ravn and Hansen2013) state, a shared competence can invite dancers to “forefront their overall sense of what their body feels like when moving and, not least, how they [use] this overall sense of their bodies in their dance technique” (210). However, as Ravn and Hansen also point out, to truly ground the accounts “in the flesh,” that is, for the interpretations to reflect as close to the dancers’ experiences as possible (i.e., not misrepresent the dancers’ descriptions), the analysis must include continual reflection on the researcher's presumptions about others’ lived experiences, implicitly acknowledging the impact of her own experience on interview-discussions and analysis. Van Manen (Reference Manen1990), in his discussion of the phenomenological approach, calls this “interrogating assumptions”: “We try to come to terms with our assumptions, not in order to forget them again, but rather to hold them deliberately at bay and even to turn this knowledge against itself, as it were, thereby exposing its shallow or concealing character” (47). During analysis and writing up, it was important to “actively report [my] values and biases” and “position [myself]” as interpreter of this research (Creswell Reference Creswell2007, 18). I acknowledge that the methodology is “inductive, emerging, and shaped by [my] experience in collecting and analyzing the data” (Cresswell Reference Creswell2007, 19). As stated, my previous experiences as a dancer unquestionably color my analysis. However, throughout the larger research project, I explicitly took critical distance from the field and the material, at times, to attempt to address this issue of bias (Green Reference Green2015; Sklar 1994). As Ravn and Hansen (Reference Ravn and Hansen2013) propose, following the phenomenological approach, I took a rigorous stance between writing about private first-person accounts and objective third-person analysis:

Contemporary Dancers’ “Kinesthetic Mode of Attention”

As mentioned above, a kinesthetic mode of attention is generally conceived as a directing of intentionality toward one's own bodily sensations, and perceptions and maintaining a particular awareness of the ways the body moves and responds to movement—a sort of listening and openness to the body and its movements in a mode of discovery. The contemporary dancers’ descriptions from the interviews, particularly descriptions of their kinesthetic experiences of dancing, consistently indicate a predominant mode of attention toward “internal” and pre-reflective bodily experiences, although there is an element of attention and awareness of the environment too (e.g., the studio space, another dancer's touch, the choreography, the music)—a particular kinesthetic awareness, sensitivity, and curiosity.Footnote ⁷ Other descriptive verbs attributed to this mode of attention, evident in more detail below, are navigating, problem solving, experimenting, exploring, enmeshing, and attuning.

Erdem is one of the contemporary dancers whose descriptions exemplify a kinesthetic mode of attention. For example, just after doing a contemporary dance phrase, Erdem describes her kinesthetic experience of the phrase this way:

What is distinctive in Erdem's description, related to the idea of a kinesthetic mode of attention, is the overall sense of process and exploration expressed of her dancing experience. It is also the way in which she indicates that, while dancing, she maintains a mode of attention on what her body is doing and feeling as much as on the anticipation or imagination of her next movements. Erdem describes her experiences of the movement using exploratory and open-ended phrases, such as, “there is a sense of a fluidity …” or “things bleeding into …,” indicating a metaphoric imagining in the moment of dancing. Her descriptions of her kinesthetic experience suggest constant flux and continual process, both in reflection and as a way she intentionally directs her movement while dancing.

Parviainen (Reference Parviainen1998) describes dance experience as “bodily knowledge” in a way that resonates with Erdem's description and a kinesthetic mode of attention. Parviainen writes: “Listening to bodily movements and the body's answers in a movement pattern, various dimensions emerge from the same movement” (52). Parviainen poses dance experience as having a pattern and structure that the dancer can navigate, explore, and “answer” with the body. Similarly, Erdem indicates a sense of listening to the patterns her body falls into, yet also an imagining of what her body can do in the space and in that moment—a sort of kinesthetic problem solving that makes up her dancing experience and knowledge. This is particularly evident when Erdem talks about the sensation of “tight hips” and utilizing this perception to move toward more smoothness with the phrase. She comments on feeling both the space and her body as part of this, or how her body transfers different feelings into different types of spaces. She indicates an enmeshment of memories of previous spaces/feelings her body has experienced with the present perceptions of current spaces/feelings. Knowledge also implies curiosity, and Erdem likewise indicates a curiosity in the moment of her dancing, exploring kinesthetically what she feels, as well as a curiosity in continually reflecting on that kinesthetic experience.

Descriptions from Potter (Reference Potter2008), likewise, resonate with Erdem's description. Although Potter foregrounds gravity, her descriptions also affirm the idea of a kinesthetic mode of attention. For example, Potter writes: “Phrases employed by contemporary dance instructors such as ‘melt into the floor,’ ‘feel the weight of the head,’ and ‘anchor the [heavy] pelvis into the ground’ prompted students to bring the body's relationship with gravity to explicit attention” (450). These metaphoric phrases, such as “melt into the floor,” are both to be sensed, or attended to kinesthetically, and enacted by the dancers. Potter likewise provides evidence as to how contemporary dancers are instructed and learn to attend to bodily sensations by directing kinesthetic awareness in a particular way. However, contemporary dance is not just about sensing gravity. Potter also notes that she and other students were directed to attend to “the center” and that “a contemporary dancer's highly developed sense of motion” entails a keen, yet diffuse, sensing of and enacting the differences between tension and relaxation (450). What is consistent is that the issue of attention to one's own movement sensations is continually foregrounded. In different ways, Potter's description is similar to Erdem's regarding the metaphors of listening and navigating the body's movements, whether it is listening and/or navigating the weight of the body or the center as impetus. The basic premise is that this heightened kinesthetic perception is continually moving at the core of contemporary dancers’ experiential dancing knowledge. To be clear, this is not sensing in a solely passive way, but moving through this sensing, as Erdem and Parviainen (1998) also support with their descriptions. Or as Sklar (Reference Sklar2000, 72) puts it, writing about dancer experience: “a doubled act of moving and feeling oneself moving.”

Rouhiainen (Reference Rouhiainen2003, 319) identifies “a bodily knowledge or a kinaesthetic intelligence” when writing about a central aspect of a group of independent Finnish dancers’ practices. Rouhiainen similarly describes this intelligence as being based around the felt experience of dancing and what she refers to as “a reflective and imaginative process” linked to kinesthetic awareness. She refers to this kinesthetic intelligence as “a detailed sense of the motional happening” and states that the dancers’ “rich sense of their bodily motion” is based on attending to their lived experience of motion (308). She alludes to the dancers “valuing a certain mode of dancing” and signals that a key part of this mode is a sensitivity to body awareness, or what she calls “the somatic state of being” (321).

One of the other dancers, Mads, particularly reiterates Rouhainen's (Reference Rouhiainen2003) description of a “rich kinesthetic exploration of motional happening.” He does so in discussion after his dancing experience in the interviews.

Like Erdem, Mads expresses a unique imaginative mode of attention in his dancing experience of this phrase that includes a particularly focused sensing and responding to his kinesthetic awareness, in a complex, highly self-reflective way. For instance, he indicates that he explores his kinesthetic range with the movements—stretching, pulling, sensing rhythms—and uses kinesthetic awareness as a central device to survey what he feels and imagines feeling with different aspects of the choreographic phrase. And he uses this sensing to make decisions as he performs the phrase.

Dorothée Legrand and Susanne Ravn (Reference Ravn2009) write about the idea of listening and problem solving to describe another small group of contemporary dancers’ experiences of dancing in their fieldwork. They describe this aspect of contemporary dance experience as a “kinesthetic logic,” reiterating Parviainen's (Reference Parviainen1998) analytically framed notion of “bodily knowledge” and Sklar's (Reference Sklar2000) proposition that “bodies become laboratories for experimentation with kinetic details in dance contexts” (72): “In different ways the [contemporary] dancers describe how they ‘listen’ to the ‘kinaesthetic logic’ of the musculoskeletal dimension of the body to perform movement and to use movement to investigate corporeality” (Legrand and Ravn Reference Legrand and Ravn2009, 403). Legrand and Ravn also suggest that contemporary dance is not so much about a mastery of steps but a particular way of approaching movement and the body, which foregrounds sensation and perception, and thus proprioception. As they describe from their fieldwork:

Legrand and Ravn (Reference Legrand and Ravn2009) echo the ideas of exploration in sensation, investigating a range of kinesthetic sensations and increasing knowledge of the body by experimenting with what the body does and can do. Awareness and attention are described as central to the dancers’ experience in training and practice as well.

Jasper, during his interview, describes his dancing experience using the metaphor of conversation between his kinesthetic experience and the choreography, which highlights the listening and responding notions introduced above to describe a kinesthetic mode of attention. Jasper further demonstrates Legrand and Ravn's (Reference Legrand and Ravn2009) discussion of experimentation, particularly because of how he uses the idea of discovery in his descriptions. In the excerpt below, Jasper describes his experience of the phrase he did in the interviews, by explaining how he helped another dancer execute the same choreographic phrase in a recent rehearsal.

Jasper mentions weight and gravity, echoing Ravn (Reference Ravn2010) and Potter (Reference Potter2008) on this theme, and yet he also supports the argument for a kinesthetic mode of attention because of the way he encourages another dancer to explore the choreography, with a particular active perceiving of the spine and weight distribution (“find” where it is), and also to explore bodily responses when pushing and reaching out from the floor (and trying to be fascinated by the possibilities this acting and perceiving allows). His explanation to the dancer is useful here as he indicates that what he tells another dancer is similar to what he explores and feels when he does the phrase.

Following Ravn (Reference Ravn2009, Reference Ravn2010), I also find Dorothee Legrand's (Reference Legrand2007) “performative pre-reflective body” concept useful to further investigate this specialized way of focusing kinesthetic attention indicated by the contemporary dancers, but specifically utilizing the concepts of reflective and pre-reflective consciousness from phenomenology. Indeed, Legrand states that, with this concept, she tries to clarify, in part, the experiential perspective around a broader phenomenological question, which is: “What are the different kinds of experience of one's own body as one's own?” (Reference Legrand2007, 493). A kinesthetic mode of attention is likewise interested in this question, but specifically for the case of dancers in dance contexts. In sum, Legrand's descriptions about self-consciousness are useful to further substantiate the kinesthetic intelligence that is unique to dancers’ perspective and practice, even though Legrand is concerned with broader philosophical questions. Legrand's discussion is subtly different to philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's (Reference Sheets-Johnstone1966) seminal text, one of the first studies on the phenomenological experience of dance, primarily because Legrand re-interprets and complicates the relationship between the pre-reflective and reflective for the case of dancers, in contrast to polarizing the pre-reflective with the reflective, which endorses an ideology of wholeness.

Legrand (Reference Legrand2007) describes, in part of her essay, “one form of bodily pre-reflective consciousness,” which is the “performative body” or the pre-reflective experience of the body (in contrast to the pre-reflective experience of the world in which our body consciousness might be invisible), and uses body-expert dancers as being most concretely concerned with this type of consciousness (500).Footnote ⁸ Legrand (Reference Legrand2007) does not specify that she is writing about contemporary dance, but her concept resonates most with contemporary dancer descriptions in my research:

Legrand argues that expert dancers, in particular (i.e., in contrast to beginning dancers), focus attention on those experiences of the body to which most non-dancers do not attend. For example, consider the case of walking. Dancers, especially in a contemporary dance context (i.e., technique class), I would argue, focus attention on the felt mechanics of walking and do not let the mechanics fall to the background of consciousness. In other words, contemporary dancers interrogate, in this instance of an exploration of walking (which has become very familiar movement to them since childhood), how the foot touches the floor; they sense detailed nuances of hip movements, notice the rhythmic pattern of the arm sway as they walk, and then respond to this sensing in their movement. They precisely interrogate those bodily experiences, sensations, perceptions, and habits that usually go “unnoticed” among non-dancers, and they simultaneously imagine and anticipate other ways of walking as they walk. (For examples of walking in contemporary dance contexts more specifically, see also Ehrenberg Reference Ehrenberg2012a; H'Doubler Reference H'Doubler1921; Reynolds Reference Reynolds2007.)

On this issue of interrogating bodily experience, sensations, and habits, one of the dancers’ discussions of “crash to create” is poignant. “Crash to create” is a concept that Jiles introduces, in his interview, to help describe his experience with improvisation in his contemporary dance practice. He states outright that, for him, this concept implies a broader value in contemporary dance for being self-reflective of movement “habits” and for utilizing kinesthetic awareness to find “new” ways of moving. In the excerpt below, Jiles talks about how, for him, “crash to create” supports the overarching value in the practice of mistakes versus perfection of form. In addition, his discussion of “crash to create” further supports the argument, as part of Legrand's (Reference Legrand2007) “performative pre-reflective body” discussed above, that dancers consciously reflect on bodily habits that might otherwise go unnoticed in the case of non-dancers.

Jiles’ discussion of crash to create not only indicates the values of challenging habits and mistakes as part of contemporary dance practice, but also, that to challenge habits and mistakes a dancer needs to be kinesthetically aware, be open, and must “listen,” through feeling, to “hear” those surprising moments. Jiles thus supports the argument for another way that pursuit of a particular kinesthetic sensitivity and intelligence—a kinesthetic mode of attention—is considered virtuosic in contemporary dance because this ability to listen and be open to the mistakes and surprises of the body while dancing (improvising in this case) is “heralded” as a way to find unexpected ways of moving in contemporary dance, versus attending to the mastery of a particular set vocabulary or, as he states, “perfection of form.”

Legrand (Reference Legrand2007) notes that it is not that dancers interrogate pre-reflective experience and movement habits all the time; dancers also have the capacity to “experience the world in a bodily way,” as she states, and to let bodily actions “fall to the background.” For instance, a dancer can walk down a street and not have to think about how to walk as well. Also, a dancer can learn choreography so well that attention to the movement becomes less necessary. For instance, a dancer can perform complex choreography and think about a grocery list at the same time. Legrand points out that the dancers’ attention to pre-reflective experience is not completely alien to the non-dancer experience, but is a specialized skill that grows out of dance experience. What is most relevant to my discussion of a kinesthetic mode of attention is Legrand's suggestion that, in dancing contexts (although possibly at other sporadic times in “everyday” life too), dancers often experience their body pre-reflectively, which means the bodily, kinesthetic experience is foregrounded to the dancers’ consciousness in the way the dancers and authors cited above express.

Another important aspect of Legrand's (Reference Legrand2007) analysis related to a kinesthetic mode of attention in contemporary dance is her point that, following Merleau-Ponty's (Reference Merleau-Ponty and Smith1945) discussion of two hands touching, is that the touching hand is conceived as representing pre-reflective consciousness and, as such, is not about the “objective” hand being touched, but the “subjective” hand that is experiencing touching the other hand. Thus, directing consciousness to pre-reflectively conscious bodily experiences directs attention more toward the subjective end of the consciousness spectrum. She writes, “At [the pre-reflective] level, the body is not an object of experience, it is the subject of experience and it is experienced as such” (Legrand Reference Legrand2007, 499). This argument for directing attention toward the subjective end of the consciousness spectrum, related to a kinesthetic mode of attention, is problematized in performing situations where the dancer is aware of being the object of an audience's gaze (Bleeker Reference Bleeker2008; Ehrenberg Reference Ehrenberg2012a, Reference Ehrenberg, Ravn and Rouhiainen2012b). Nevertheless, for the purposes here, it is important to emphasize that Legrand's point supports the potential underlying purpose of directing attention to the pre-reflective for contemporary dancers, which would be to reinforce subjectivity and thus agency for dancers in their experiences in contemporary dance practice.

As stated, a kinesthetic mode of attention is important to help propose, and further consider, the various modes of conscious awareness that are employed in dance experience. However, how might a kinesthetic mode of attention vary among different contemporary styles, such as release or Graham, or across dance styles such as ballet and be conceived as a continuum across dance forms? Although speculative, I want to address this question briefly below.

I find Legrand's (Reference Legrand2007) concept of the “transparent body” (504) useful to explore the idea of a kinesthetic mode of attention on a continuum. Legrand theorizes the transparent body as a bodily state of being between sensing and acting in the world. It is bodily consciousness that is between the body being invisible (e.g., I attend to picking up my cup and do not have to think about every move to do so) and the body being opaque, or the object of conscious attention (e.g., I try to attend to every movement I make as I pick up the cup):

For example, the transparent body might refer to those times when dancers have gained a certain capacity to consciously reflect on pre-reflective experience of very complex choreographic movement and thus be able to attend to something in addition to simply doing the movement and/or perceiving what the body is doing. It is to clarify a spectrum of experiencing and acting, related to a kinesthetic mode of attention, that refers to times when dancers are in a “sharp and physical state” (Hermans 2003, as cited in Legrand Reference Legrand2007, 501).

One of the dancers, Willow, supports the argument for how the kinesthetic mode of attention might sit on a continuum, and relates to Legrand's (Reference Legrand2007) transparent body in her discussion of “inhabiting movement,” “filling movement out,” and “really living movement”:

The point Willow brings out with her description is that there are varying aspects in which a kinesthetic mode of attention can be employed and felt as working optimally for Willow “as a subject perceiving and acting, that is, as in-the-world” (Legrand Reference Legrand2007, 504). In the above description, Willow indicates that she first needs to feel a certain competency with a style of moving before feeling more exploratory in her mode of kinesthetic attention, which then allows her to feel like she can “inhabit” and “really live” movements. In other words, Willow indicates that there is a need for a certain level of feeling of mastery, with the particular kinematic competency of the movement, environment, and/or choreography, for example, which impacts on her employing a kinesthetic mode of attention to varying degrees. This anecdote from Willow further supports the argument, related also to Jiles’ interview above, which is that the central pursuit of virtuosity for contemporary dancers is not so much a perfection of form; rather there is a kind of feeling of virtuosity that comes with a certain level of movement familiarity, that is, a certain level of movement competency that can allow a feeling of kinesthetic explorative attention when dancing.Footnote ¹⁰

My use of the term virtuosity is in relation to the dancers’ feeling of competence, since a kinesthetic mode of attention cannot be conceived in the same way as other types of technical virtuosity seen from the audience perspective (e.g., spectacular flips and jumps). The dancers’ accounts above indicate a repeated use of a kinesthetic mode of attention that helps them feel virtuosic in the technique of contemporary dance (for instance, Willow's description above about her experience of “really living” the movement). There is another kind of feeling of virtuosity a dancer might experience when she executes a difficult technical move or step. However, this is not the same kind of feeling of virtuosity I am suggesting here, though there might be similarities in the feeling of self-competency and feeling a kind of “mastery” with a certain way of moving. This is not to suggest this mode of attention is a technique on its own either. As mentioned in the introduction, this article aims to elaborate on one important part of dancing intelligence, which is the particular way that dancers describe attending kinesthetically in the practice of contemporary dance. I am trying to establish how the research for this article suggests a kinesthetic mode of attention as crucial to the dancers’ experience of this technique, and thus, examining it more explicitly to help better understand what it is like in order to more concretely value and critique this aspect of contemporary dancer knowledge and experience in the practice. However, more work is warranted to unpack whether a mode of attending constitutes a form of knowledge in itself. At the least, it is important to distinguish that the dancers indicate a kinesthetic mode of attention that has a variety of applications in practice, but that is not to then mistake a kinesthetic mode of attention as a fixed, graspable form of knowing, as might be the case for memorizing text or, indeed, memorizing choreography.

Practices and Values That Develop and Nurture This Mode

What about the broader social context, or thinking about dancer perception as it is impacted on by the social? What aspects of contemporary dance practice develop and nurture a kinesthetic mode of attention, and how might we address the argument one might raise, which is whether it is simply that the choreography in contemporary dance makes this way of attending possible, and even inevitable? How might the social context, as much as the movement itself, impact on the dancer and kinesthetic experiences? These questions address the broader function to this way of attending in contemporary dance, which relates to a particular valuing of the kinesthetic as an incorporated sociality of the culture of contemporary dance. It is beyond the scope of this article to fully address contemporary dance practice and values, and why dancers develop and nurture this way of attending. However I would like to touch on this issue briefly in the hope of taking it up in more detail in future work.

Delineating the shared practices, values, and ideas of contemporary dance, as it relates to a kinesthetic mode of attention, is thinking about contemporary dance as a type of culture in the way Novack (Reference Novack1990) argues for ballet and contact improvisation. One of her main premises is that there are shared practices, language, and behaviors in ballet and contact improvisation, which distinguish them and affect the people practicing them. Novak's argument in part follows Marcel Mauss's (1932) ideas of techniques of the body, but also follows a premise of Pierre Bourdieu's (Reference Bourdieu and Nice1980) concept of habitus, which is based on the idea that social contexts have “[systems] of cognitive and motivating structures” and “procedures to follow” that impact on persons’ behavior (53). As sociologist Nick Crossley (Reference Crossley2001a) interprets, “… dispositions and forms of competence are acquired in structured social contexts whose pattern, purpose, and underlying principles they incorporate as both an inclination and a modus operandi” (83). The premise is that people incorporate dispositions, or ways of behaving, from their social context to the extent that they can go unnoticed, even if these dispositions become fundamental to who they are, what they do, and indeed, how they move. However, as Cynthia Jean Cohen BullFootnote ¹¹ (Reference Bull, Dils and Albright1988) writes, conceiving of dancers’ incorporation of a dance style (as a type of culture) “is not to say that dancers conspicuously plan these changes; like all participants in a culture (to paraphrase Marx), they make their own dances, but within a set of rules they do not always personally create” (412).

There are particular practices and values in contemporary dance that can be distinguished for how they develop and nurture a kinesthetic mode of attention and contribute to the motivations and knowledge acquisition of the intelligence explored above. Below I will discuss briefly the inclusion of somatics in dance training, the predominant educational contexts of contemporary dance, and the value of versatility to begin to suggest particular aspects of the practice that develop and nurture a kinesthetic mode of attention.

Somatics

Thomas Hanna (1988) describes somatics as “a way of perceiving oneself ‘from the inside out, where one is aware of feelings, movements and intentions, rather than looking objectively from the outside in’” (as cited in Spohn and Prettyman Reference Spohn and Prettyman2012, 49). Although it can be argued that somatic practices and modern dance have a connection that goes back much further—both practices developed around the early 1900s in line with changing conceptions of body, attention, and movement—it is only within the last thirty to forty years that somatics and dance have become so intertwined (Eddy Reference Eddy2009). In turn, a kinesthetic mode of attention, as it is framed by the above descriptions, bears much resemblance to how kinesthetic experience in somatic practices are described, such as Hanna's descriptions above of perceiving predominantly from the “inside out” (Järvinen Reference Järvinen2006). Eddy (Reference Eddy2009) likewise defines somatics generally as: “Discovery through internalized and conscious exploration of a physical or emotional challenge … diving inward” (16). And Shusterman (Reference Shusterman2008) argues that the “third principal movement quality,” central to all somatic methods, is an attention focused on the self, or awareness, that “permits us to address the nonconscious or automatic aspects of ongoing movements, in order to change their organization” (as cited in Ginot Reference Ginot2010, 20). Fortin, Long, and Lord (Reference Fortin, Long and Lord2002) advocate the use of somatics in dance education because it helps dancers “… [learn] to direct attention to movement on an incrementally fine level,” implicitly supporting a value for kinaesthetic attention in contemporary dance similar to the way Eddy describes (166). A study by dance practitioner Louisa Figuerola (Reference Figuerola2009) similarly reports on two release-based and two somatics teachers interviewed who had analogous teaching strategies, particularly in their use of language, physical demonstration, and types of feedback, as well as teaching principles regarding space, imagery, sensation, breath, and process. Sensation, Figuerola writes, was emphasized by both, and expressed as the importance “to move from within, i.e., through an internal intention,” or “the ability to move from the inside out” and self-discovery, via this internalized mode of attending, was posed as “an important learning process” (Reference Figuerola2009, 53). Process, and the idea that the self is always in a mode of discovery during internally directed movement exploration(s), were deemed important by both the release-based and somatics teachers that Figuerola encountered (56). Ravn (Reference Ravn2009) similarly picks up on the impact that somatics has had on the kinesthetic approach in dance education in contrast to more codified dance styles, “… in general [aiming] at initiating a process of movement re-education of the dancer…. [Somatics] tend to emphasize constant exploration by avoiding repetition of specific exercises as is characteristic for training in ballet, Graham, and Limon techniques” (102). Nevertheless, the kinesthetic mode of attention, described at length above, particularly related to internally directed sensing, does not seem to be the same as attention in somatic practices; the motivations by the practitioners in each are different, for instance. In addition, despite the variety and number of sources cited above, Ginot (Reference Ginot2010) argues that more can still be established about the study of dance and emphasis on the integration with somatics and a “more active and exploratory” attention for dancers versus emphasis on mirroring and reproduction of forms (12).

Educational Context

Related to the growing relationship between somatics and dance training is the issue that contemporary dance is often taught in a particular academic educational context, i.e., universities and conservatoires with undergraduate degree accreditation. This particular kind of educational context can be argued to also nurture and develop a kinesthetic mode of attention. That is to argue that being trained as a contemporary dancer in these particular academic contexts includes talking, writing, and reflecting on movement and dance practice in a particular way, which nurtures and develops an approach to movement that requires a “thinking through” kinesthetic awareness.Footnote ¹² Albright (Reference Albright2011) evidences the crossing of the academic and the physical in contemporary dance training I am referring to here, particularly her description of the pleasure of teaching in a dance department where, she states, “… for the first time in my academic life, I could teach intellectual analysis and physical training in the space of one class session. Engaging students across the traditional mind/body divides of dance studio and academic classroom …” (7–8).

A key part of educational contexts is the issue of description and language. The contemporary dancers above talk about kinesthetic experience in a richly descriptive way in practice contexts (e.g., training, rehearsal, choreography). Again, being in an educational context that values verbal discourse (i.e., university) can help to develop and nurture this description. However, there is also the need for contemporary dancers to describe movement in detail, because contemporary dance is not a codified technique with set movements and terms, and so language is heavily relied on to help convey what movement should be like. Thus, verbal description becomes linked with the experience of movement from the contemporary dancers’ perspectives in a particular way—in a different way than it does in other dance styles (e.g., ballet). In learning and mastering contemporary dance, dancers often associate movement with a variety of descriptions, and the descriptions can sometimes be focused around the kinesthetic sensation of the movement. It can be argued that contemporary dancers are taught and use a particular movement–language relationship because of the lack of codification.

Versatility

Another part of dance practice that affirms the argument for an acquisition of a kinesthetic mode of attention, again more relevant today than for modern dance before the 1960s, is that many contemporary dancers are expected to be able to adapt to many different choreographers and teachers, and thus be highly versatile in the different styles they can do and pick up quickly. Indeed, most contemporary dancers today train in several different dance styles (e.g., release, Graham, improvisation, Cunningham, ballet) to support this pursuit of versatility.Footnote ¹³ As Jasper said in his interview, for instance, contemporary dance is considered dance with the big “D”—any movement can fall under contemporary dance if framed in a particular way. Foster (Reference Foster and Desmond1997) describes this valuing of versatility under the term of the “multitalented dancer,” wherein a “new cadre of dance makers, called ‘independent choreographers’ has emerged,” and as such they “encourage dancers to train in several existing techniques without adopting the aesthetic vision of any. They require a new kind of body, competent at many styles. The new multitalented body …” (253). Contemporary dancers are often required to adapt quickly just by the nature of the huge variation of movement styles in the field (Roche Reference Roche2011). If the dancer can be keenly, kinesthetically aware and attentive, the dancer is more likely to be able to navigate new choreography quickly in practice, because the sensitivity enables greater skill in navigating and mastering different ways of moving. Instead of mastering a certain vocabulary, contemporary dancers’ skill with a kinesthetic mode of attention can facilitate being agile and open to adapting to a variety of different ways of moving. In turn, learning and mastering a number of different ways of moving expands the dancers’ physical capacity and thus expands their kinesthetic experience. That is to say that because contemporary dancers often explore a variety of different ways of moving, they are exposed to a variety of kinesthetic sensations and attentive possibilities, which likewise develops a varied kinesthetic capacity.

There is a lot more to unravel here to continue to understand the depth of kinesthetic intelligence in contemporary dance today and in dance practice more broadly. Nevertheless, at this point, I hope that a “kinesthetic mode of attention,” which the contemporary dancers in the fieldwork and the theorists in the literature indicate, has a descriptive shape, and a beginning consideration offered for how this mode might be nurtured and developed in the style.