Choreography for One, Two, and Three Legs (A phenomenological meditation in movements)

ABSTRACT

‘Choreography for One, Two, and Three Legs’ approaches the intentional formation and performance of bodily movement and expression from the various perspectives of individuals who are ‘differently abled’. Exploring what it is for a non-dancer to experience various rhythms, movements and spaces with crutches, prosthetic leg, and cane, the essay interweaves phenomenological description and interpretation of suddenly defamiliarized daily activities with discourse drawn from the experiences of professional dancers who are ‘differently abled’. The aim is to foreground the opacities, transparencies, and ambiguities of a more general sense of embodied and expressive movement that subtends the ‘abled’ and ‘differently abled’ and the non-dancer and dancer. It is also to emphasize the lived – and living – body as the common ground that enables all of our thoughts, movements, and modes of expression, however differentiated their myriad forms.

KEYWORDS:

• Choreography
• dance
• disability
• embodied movement
• phenomenology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Vivian Sobchack is Professor Emerita in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at UCLA and former Associate Dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. The first woman elected President of Society for Cinema and Media Studies, she also served for two decades as the only scholar on the Board of Directors of the American Film Institute. Her books include Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film; The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience; Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture; and two edited volumes, The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event and Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation in the Culture of Quick Change. Her essays have appeared in diverse journals, including Screen, Film Quarterly, Camera Obscura, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Art Forum International, Film Comment, History and Theory, Representations and Body and Society. In 2012, she was honored by SCMS for the impact her scholarly work has had on the field with their Distinguished Career Achievement Award. Her research interests and publications are far-ranging: existential phenomenology and the philosophy of moving image media; film and media theory and historiography; formal and cultural studies of American film genres. She is currently working on a collection of essays on animation and digital cinema.