Back to the Dance Itself: Phenomenologies of the Body in Performance, edited by Sondra Fraleigh, details how different phenomenological investigations are activated by dancing bodies. From unsteady tumbles, to finite descriptions of somatic knowledge, the compiled essays veer from theoretical analysis of codified dance forms, to instead examine movement as a portal for transforming “lifeworlds” (2017, 12). Working with this concept from Husserl's Ideas II, each essayist illuminates how dance can materialize methods for expanding and examining lifeworlds in relation to lived bodies. Fraleigh explains this charge in the exemplary first chapter as one of reparation, maintenance, and creation (13). She writes, “It connects the sensed world of substance and form with the formless mysteries of life, the seen with the unseen experience” (13). Whereas the editor asserts that “Phenomenology can be life-changing” (12), each contributor's corporeal uptake of this statement is the connective tissue binding the volume.

Organized in four thematic parts, “World as Body,” “Performing Life and Language,” “Body and Place,” and “Questions of Self-Knowing,” the majority of essays are focused on first-person embodied knowledge generated by an author/dancer. Crisscrossing vectors of phenomenology, including philosophical, transcendental, performative, and ecological, each essay provokes its reader to move in concert with the practices inked on the page. Admittedly, the different texts can leave a reader feeling suspended between the critical questions asked by each essayist and the lucid movements that convey how each dance (whether initiated by the author or approached as a case study) brings new insight to the initial questions. Yet, we are reminded with such a sensation that phenomenological investigation often swerves from a stable point of arrival. It is a practice to be lived and felt. It asks us to listen and sway, inhale and expand.

Throughout the book, one finds a pivot to decenter the human in relation to nonhuman phenomena. Several essays recount embodied, yet difficult, dialogues with nature and ecology, or the “ecokinetic” (123) as constructed by Kimerer L. Lamothe's captivating essay “As the Earth Dances: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming.” Following Fraleigh's generous opening chapters, which outline Husserl's work and the evolving vectors of phenomenology, we become audience as Fraleigh and Robert Bingham traverse the “cool pink sand” (44) of a desert canyon in Utah to investigate how dance attuned to “eco-phenomenology” (31) might foreground a relationship with the earth. Turning to quantum physics, and Japanese philosopher Nagatomo's theory of “attunement” (51), Bingham asks, “What meanings emerge when dance is framed in the context of environmental crisis” (42). Without answering this question overtly, Bingham suggests that to discover body and environment differently requires persistence: “try laying down the mantle of human exceptionalism and allowing oneself to be a living thing among things” (56). But “things,” too, are shattered elements for discovery, as Fraleigh suggests in her description of matter in her chapter titled “Living Phenomenology,” a chapter that, were the book a body, reads as the volume's consciously open heart. In it Fraleigh offers several techniques for performing “on purpose” (100). This is crucial during a political moment when many bodies feel stagnant, and movement toward something else (like refuge) is literally being arrested. Fraleigh writes, “We make choices daily that have effects on those around us and ripple out into the world. It isn't always easy to see the extent of our performances, but when we are aware of our chosen actions, sometimes we can see with distance, and in seeing recognize ourselves, even in transition” (100). If graceful transition is one element of dance that traditionally defines its masters, the gift of this volume in 2019 appears through a commitment to changes, flows, and/or transitions that prioritize effort, labor, and intention.

In a similar vein, multiple authors explore how somatic practice is registered and communicated beyond what appears as movement. Amanda Williamson asks how felt-sense can materialize in ways that include language as an embodied tool that “unfolds” from “sensory feeling” (78). Guiding her reader through several somatic techniques that “tune into words” (85), Williamson confronts how a split between language and movement may reify the Cartesian philosophies Edmund Husserl's lifework sought to upend. Karen Bond's writing on her work to “explain dance and dancing to adults through children's captioned drawings” (206) equally places value on language and image working in tandem with movement. Bond's essay includes drawings that show arms as wings, joints that bend in unimaginable directions, and blob-like forms that balance on toes, ears, and tails. Frenzy and inertia become visible as scribbles and swerves, or as a whooshing spiral that fades into a faint dot. Alongside this backdrop, Bond reminds us of Virginia Wolf's “dancing moth” (216) and Feldstein's “enduring invariant structures” (217) to underline “the concept of ferment” (216) as a productive approach for nurturing “aesthetic autonomy” (216). Reading across these strategies, one finds a vibratile festering that enjoins dance to world-making agency.

Also examining questions of agency, Hillel D. Braude and Ami Shulman's co-written essay, “‘What if…’ A Question of Transcendence,” suggests that phenomenology can invite chaos to bodies predisposed for autonomous movement. Dance is positioned in their essay to express beyond “the limitations of language” (183) where a desire to free the self surfaces specifically by pushing “transitional moments” (183) to the brink of performance. Their work seeks to dissolve the self, “‘As if’ movement was thought, and thought was movement” (204). To this end, the authors outline Husserl's “Free Fantasy Variations” (184) methodology as a unique tool for readers to experience, test out, and weave into pedagogy. Here it is important to distinguish between the highly trained dancing body in pursuit of freeing the self from conditioned movement patterns and those bodies that also perform as trained movers in daily life, without dislocating any body from place, identity, economy, and socio-political-cultural historicity. Many bodies never experience a sense of agency or autonomy, and may in fact be constantly sidestepping with an earth that is ever shaking under our feet. Our specific relation to ground and groundedness seems to be a potent question in LaMothe's essay on bodily becoming in relation to place. LaMothe underlines that humans are always participating in some sort of dance but emphasizes, “The question is how” (133). To this question, LaMothe suggests that looking at every body as a dancing body does not threaten dance tradition or technique but rather “serves to illuminate and mobilize the vast knowledge embedded in dance traditions across cultures and throughout history as theoretical, practical resources for how to create life-enabling relationships that remain faithful to the earth” (134). Karen Barbour's essay, focused on feminist phenomenology, tiptoes slightly further to make clear that as “the natural world and our bodies continue in a taken-for granted sense as objects” (234), our point of entry and access to knowledge matters. Lived experiences are “not without assumptions and prejudices” (234), Barbour writes, quoting the pioneering work of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone. Feminist phenomenology does not overlook ways that bodies are culturally and historically situated even when working to shift discourse from considerations of “what we know” to “how we know” (234). This may be why the volume feels most generous as a transfer of movement methodologies.

Translated poetically and mapped out with scientific precision, each essay contains useful methods for trusting the body to dance its knowledge and create new knowledge in dancing. Only a handful of essays in part three of the volume turn to a more case study-based model of analyzing dance (beyond first-person participatory experience) in order to foreground questions about place, transition, and liminal experience. Joanna McNamara explores hermeneutic phenomenology, or “the perspective that experience structures the way we understand and make meaning of the world” (143), to examine her process creating the screendance Jitdance: Detroit Redux. Traversing different sites with her collaborator Detroit Jit dancer and choreographer Haleem “Stringz” Rasul, McNamara relays how screendance becomes a medium that enables her to “lessen the remoteness of Detroit” (145). The work highlights the kinetic creativity of “homegrown” (143) artists who navigate an urban landscape McNamara describes as “ever-changing,” (160) while also writing and preserving the specific history of Detroit Jitdance in their bodies. Shifting from linear history to explore energy as a noteworthy “space-time concept” (162), Christine Bellerose's intertwining of continental phenomenology and Shintō Zen philosophies speculates on “ma” by analyzing Martine Viale's durational performances alongside butoh. In a subsection of her essay titled “The Body Portal” (164), Bellarose unpacks ma in relation to Japanese cosmology and offers concrete links for understanding ma’s meaning alongside different fine arts practices. Describing “hashi” or “interval” as a key concept of ma, Bellarose shifts to the work of artist Martine Viale, who was trained in butoh and has more recently been creating durational performances in public spaces. Viale's conveyed interest in “the interval” through a series of performances called Ma Intervalle, make her work ripe for Bellarose's study, yet the gloss of durational performance (as the only instance of a performance art medium included in the volume) would benefit from more concrete movement analysis and attention to artistic medium. Bellarose's slow unpacking of ma and her expert readings of butoh only serve to underline that, just as the different kinds of dance we encounter in the volume (from improvisation to Jitdance to butoh) all have specific histories, lineages, and vocabularies adequately attended to by the essayists, durational performance also has historical, cultural, and political underpinnings. The labor of its scholars and practitioners should not be overlooked when drawing out the value of studying the medium alongside and as dance.

At the intersection of dance studies, philosophy, and performance studies, the book offers a pedagogical map for taking the time to suspend what we know, how we believe we've come to know it, and question what might happen, if we turn, spiral, slip, fall, slither, and sense our way “back to the dance itself.” This requires a worldview “in which matter is real and movement is what matter does” (LaMothe, 127). Going back is not a return, it is a search for the embodied parts we cannot see and a willingness to take a rear seat (maybe quite literally), letting movement and our felt senses lead us toward a more dynamic sense of self and world.