Dance studies
Laura Fanouillet, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Litt&Arts, 38000 Grenoble, France
As a dancer and philosopher by training, my doctoral research examines the initiatory character of site-specific training, in the sense of an understanding of ourselves and of the world revealed on site through the performance of a danced gesture. Very early in my academic career in contemporary philosophy, I was struck by the words of my supervisor Professor Renaud Barbaras, a specialist in Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jan Patočka – all benchmark references in the field of phenomenology. Barbaras would go on to direct my master’s research and it is following this influence that the phenomenological approach wove its way into my own thinking, to the extent that it has become a manner of thinking and perceiving that has shed light upon my experience as a dancer and performer. Phenomenology, from the Greek φαινόμενον or ‘that which appears,’ is characterized by a gesture of the spirit, the suspension of the naturalist approach to the world or of belief in an external reality. This gesture, coined epoché by Husserl at the beginning of the 20th century has nothing to do with doubt; it is neither skeptical nor cartesian. It is a reductive operation by which we gain access to pure emergence. In dissolving the edges of things, we thus go back to the very beginning of the intentional relationship by which we experience: always aware of what is other than the self.
This perpetual break from otherness at the heart of our lived experience leads our existence to a state of presence, attentive to the slightest sudden emergence. It is this dimension that seems to me particularly relevant as we seek to describe or transmit the experiences of an actor, dancer, or spectator from an interior perspective of what they feel as well as what passes through them. It allows us to inscribe the expression of a gesture into an immediate correlation between subject and world, both affective and affected. Therefore, on the one hand, the phenomenological approach opens our access to the living spectacle that is our consciousness and, on the other, it plunges us into the movement of our own bodies by the continuous dialogue that it maintains with the bodies of others. These are the two aspects that I am currently focusing on in my PhD research in order to study how dance practices allows us to physically feel the environment and, at the same time, delve into our own nature.
By situating itself at the level of this original interweaving, chiasma, or entanglement, the inscription of sense in the lived body is immediately recognized. It makes it possible to listen to and hear what plays out at the sensory level of our consciousness to movement.
It allows space-time to reclaim the porous malleability of its dilation and restriction. The dancer’s kinesthetic experience can thus be described as a sensation of displacement, not only of their body in space but of their subjectivity in time. This fact allowed me to investigate the site specific as a phenomenon in which body and environment merge, while an image of ourselves is sent back to us by an element of the landscape. It has also led me to inquire into the daily practices of dancers – Imre Thormann and José Suarez el Torombo as part of my research – who have chosen to envision their own lives as a studio – the site where we learn to learn.
More from this author:
Guillaume Allardi, Laura Fanouillet, Le Corps ou le fruit de l’expérience, Paris, Larousse, coll. Philosopher, 2010
Cite this item: Laura Fanouillet, “Phenomenological approaches”, translated by Lauren Fabrizio, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177589
