merejune17-blog

[merejune17-blog]

This blog shifts the moving body into a philosopher.

As I sit still lifted by the earth and hanging from the sky, my spine is erect. The breath (life-giving energy) circulates endlessly in and around my body. With consciously unconscious effort, I begin to move. Investigating the nature of my being, the weight of my pelvis, the extension of my perceived mind, the interpretation of my reality. I slowly engage my abdominal muscles and reach further into space. What am I doing? Is this a dance or a study of existence?

[merejune17-blog]

Furthermore, I would like to suggest that by examining further the ways in which philosophical enquiry operates within or as choreography, we might be able to pin down the specifics of the relationship between philosophizing and choreographing, which could certainly be diverse and multiple across different types of works. In this way, we could re-think new ways in which choreography thinks and demands us to think, as expert writers and spectators, but also, potentially, re-imagine philosophical thought, the creation of concepts, as choreography.

Efrosini Protopapa ‘Thinking Through Dance’ 2013 p.289

[merejune17-blog]

Chandralekha

‘The act of dance, a manifestation of our philosophies’

[merejune17-blog]

1

Writing as a living-body, situated in the context of today’s contemporary dance field; I would like to raise the notion that acts of dance movement in one form or another are indeed philosophical acts. The term philosophy in western perspectives is defined as, “The study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline” (Oxford Dictionaries, 2018). However, what happens when we shift our understanding of this term? The origin of the term in ancient Greek,philosophia,‘love of wisdom’, offers us a broader conception. In relation to current dance studies, it has been noted that embodiment and the act of creative movement can inherently cultivate bodily-knowledge and or some form of physicalized wisdom. The subjectivity of embodied knowledge makes it difficult to establish what form of acquisition or wisdom is taking place in dance. Yet, in the act of dancing one might say they are also philosophizing. Philosopher and writer, Alan Watts, explores the arts from eastern Zen Buddhism philosophy expressing, “Human intelligence is not an imprisoned spirit from afar but an aspect of the whole intricately balanced organism of the natural world” (Watts,1957: 175). The entirety of an organism is present in the act of studying the natural world, and therefore the body plays an integral role. In the Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, Amanda Williamson quotes L. Todres claiming, ‘Bodily mediated intricacy is greater than conceptualization’ (Todres, 2007:35). Dancing (being in motion) offers us a multiplicity of knowledges that may even be more complex or abundant than mind driven thought processes alone. What is interesting is once we acknowledge the possibility of dance as philosophy, we may manifest new forms of wisdom through action. However, our understandings of and relationships to our bodies are complex and quite possibly culturally contingent. Therefore, the social, economic, and political elements of our environment play a role in how we think through or with the body. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu points to the ‘differences in gesture, posture, and behavior which express a whole relationship to the social world’ (Bourdieu 1979, p.192).

[merejune17-blog]

2

Drawing from the insights of Chandralekha, one of India’s most controversial dance artists, comes forward this notion of dancing as philosophy. Central to her dance practice is the principle and bodily posture described as ‘mandala’. In the book, Chandralekha: Woman, Dance, Resistance, author Rustom Bharucha states, ‘More than a movement, mandala is a principle in which the body is realised as the very center of the cosmos itself’(Bharucha, 1995:59) In the act of performing the posture of mandala, the dancing body is at the heart of all experience. Therefore, in Chandralekha’s practice, dance is the mobilization of knowledge where the dancer moves, studies, theorizes, investigates the natural world and its possibilities. As a choreographer, Chandralekha has emphasized the political implications of Bharatanatyam   as well as the social agency or lack of agency given to constructions of the female body (Bharucha 1995). Choreographic inquiries such as this can offer new perspectives or ways of looking at our already established relationships to knowledge and environment. In a current movement exploration of my own, I am studying the various energy centres of the body in relation to the body-mind and spirit complex. When I am dancing in this context, I am philosophizing how energetic knowledges are present in meditative movement. My dancing body is in a relationship with the world, acquiring constructions of existential/transcendental phenomenology.

[merejune17-blog]

3

When one is doing philosophy, what does that look like? Is the philosopher scratching his/her head? Are they gliding their hand over a piece of paper and twisting in their chair? Are their eyes shifting and eyebrows lifting? As Williamson states, ‘Language is thus not held at a distance from body experience, but rather unfolds and expresses with flesh and through movement’ (Williamson, 2017). The body absorbs ideas, theories, senses, and emotions. And the body also generates, ideas, theories, senses and emotions. Therefore, I would argue that dancing is one of the most encompassing approaches to ‘doing philosophy’. It combines the inputs and outputs of all experiences and draws meaning from them. Different forms of dancing eluded to different forms of philosophical processes. In particular, contemporary choreographers such as Jérôme Bel are highlighting the explicit references between philosophy and choreography. (Protopapa, 2013:273). Not only utilizing philosophy concepts for inspiration but allowing the work itself to emerge into a philosophical process. Both the choreographic and ‘felt’ experiences of dance rest within philosophical, cultural, and historical dimensions. Dance as philosophy is an arising debate that can offer new perspectives and developmental practices. As Efrosini Protopapa argues, ‘not only does dance exercise the philosophical, but it is allowed to start discovering and generating original modes of thought from within its own complex economy of practice’ (Protopapa 2013:279).

[merejune17-blog]

‘For me, art . . . is personal. The question of art, the question of why it matters, what it is, how it figures in our lives, is in some ways my very first problem in philosophy. . . . I admit that this book’s central claim—that art is a philosophical practice and philosophy an artistic one—serves me rather well. It can be understood, finally, as my defense of philosophy and its value, a defense of my work, in the setting of my family’s engagement with art. If art is the most important thing, and philosophy is art, then it turns out I’m an artist after all. Look, Dad!’(p. 208).

Alva Noë, philosopher and scholar

[merejune17-blog]

Chandralekha. 

‘The act of dance, a manifestation of our philosophies’

[merejune17-blog]

For when you climb it is the mountain as much as your own legs which lifts you upwards, and when you paint it is the brush, ink and paper which determine the results as much as your own hand.

Alan Watts, The Way of Zen(1957) 

[merejune17-blog]

‘(T)he peculiarly human capacity to imagine, which liberates us from the material world and which Sartre might be well said to think of as the origin of our freedom, our capacity to project possibilities beyond the actual and thus ‘nihilate’ it’ (Lewis and Staehler 2010: 127).