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June 27, 2007, 7:00 PM

Dance, Movement, and Bodies: Forays into the Nonlinguistic and the Challenge of Languaging Experience: Evening II

Roundtable
Participants: Robert Fagen, Joanna Gewertz Harris, Steve Paxton, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (moderator), Daniel N. Stern
 
 
 

In the beginning, we are all nonlinguistic and remain so for a highly significant period of time. Play and affect—creative movement and feeling—are core experiential dimensions of our lives as infants. However marginalized or lessened in value as we mature, these experiential dimensions remain essential aspects of our humanity. How might we get at these nonlinguistic experiences and come to understandings of their nature?

The art of dance captures aspects of their qualitative character, not formally but dynamically. Like play, it is eloquent testimonial to the dynamic qualitative complexities and subtleties of movement as a kinetic and kinesthetic phenomenon. It is eloquent testimonial as well to the dynamic congruity of movement and affect. Topics surfacing within the domain of the nonlinguistic thus include both a qualitative kinetic dynamics and the natural dynamic harmony of movement and affect. They furthermore include the challenge of languaging experience—of putting into words what we experience, perceive, feel, and imagine—not just with respect to dance, but with respect to movement and bodies.

Put in an expanded framework, the following topics fall within the compass of this Roundtable: 1) infants are not pre-linguistic—on the contrary, language is post-kinetic; 2) thinking in movement is a natural mode of thinking for human as well as nonhuman animals; 3) a natural kinship exists between play and forms of dance improvisation; 4) the advent of bipedality opened enormous movement possibilities, especially the possibility of a new qualitative dynamic, i.e., ballistic movement, and thereby the possibility of exponentially variable kinetic dynamics; 5) the human range of movement and the communicative powers of the human body are open-ended in terms of play and artistic creation; 5) movement does not simply take place in space and in time, but creates its own space, time, and force, and thereby its own unique dynamics; 6) dance is a comparatively neglected art form, perhaps because it prominences in unadulterated ways our bare humanness and utterly vulnerable bodies—as T. S. Eliot wrote, albeit in an entirely different context, "human kind/Cannot bear very much reality."

Robert Fagen is retired Professor of Biometry at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and studies dance in Juneau, Alaska. He is the author of Animal Play Behavior, the novel The Pawless Papers, and poems recently published in Blue Unicorn, Common Ground Review, and Tidal Echoes. Having completed the first several volumes of a sequence of novels entitled Margot in Paradise, he is currently at work on the next.

Joanna Gewertz Harris is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, therapist, dance historian and dance critic. She was a contributor to and editor of IMPULSE, the San Francisco annual of contemporary dance, and the first editor of American Journal of Dance Therapy. She has taught at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, Cal State Hayward, Sonoma State, Lone Mountain and Antioch College. She is currently on the faculty of Diablo Valley College, Emeritus College, instructor at the Modern Dance Center, Berkeley, and a teacher of special classes for seniors at Contra Costa Senior Living Centers. Her forthcoming book is Beyond Isadora: Bay Area Dancing, 1915-65.

Steve Paxton is a dancer and choreographer whose work has been recognized with "Bessie" awards and grants from the NEA, the Rockefeller Foundation, Contemporary Performance Arts Foundation, and Change, Inc. His writing on dance has appeared in numerous publications, including the dance journal Contact Quarterly.

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone is an interdisciplinary scholar affiliated with the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. She was a dancer/choreographer and professor of dance for 20 years prior to her professorship in philosophy. Her books include The Phenomenology of Dance, The Roots of Thinking, The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies, and The Primacy of Movement. Forthcoming books include The Roots of Morality and The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader. She was recently awarded a Distinguished Fellowship for research on xenophobia by the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University (England) in conjunction with the Institute's inaugural program, "The Legacy of Charles Darwin."

Daniel N. Stern, M.D., is Professor of psychology at the University of Geneva and Adjunct Professor of psychiatry at Cornell University Medical Center's New York Hospital. An expert in the mother-infant relationship, he is the author of The Interpersonal World of the Infant and The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life.

 

Edited Transcript

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Discussion Board

This forum allows for an ongoing discussion of the above Philoctetes event. You may use this space to share your thoughts or to pose questions for panelists. An attempt will be made to address questions during the live event or as part of a continued online dialogue.
marian margulies says:
I am looking for a way to incorporate movement and dance in my work with mothers and their babies placed in foster care. I'm sure movement and dance is a virtual goldmine, containing rich nuggets that have yet to be fully extracted. My aim being, to strengthen the relationship between mothers and their babies at great risk. MM
maxine sheets-johnstone says:
I think both the workshop and the roundtable will provide beginning ideas and resources for incorporating movement and possibly even dance in your work.

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