Sense of Motion, Senses of Self: Becoming a Dancer

Abstract

In spite of growing interest in the anthropology of the senses, the majority of literature has focused on the Euro-American ‘classic five’ senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch at the expense of other equally viable senses such as heat, pain, and kinaesthesia. Through ethnographic description of a professional dance training programme in which I actively participated, I argue that developing a heightened sense of kinaesthesia (felt bodily movement) is a means of becoming socialized into the professional dance community. Far from an isolated sense with discreet biological pathways, kinaesthesia requires parallelperception through multiple sensory modesincluding heat and touch. A focus on kinaesthesia therefore contributes to an understanding of the senses as a cohesive phenomenological complex that engenders an interconnected, bodily-grounded sense of cultural identity.

Keywords:

• Dance
• kinaesthesia
• heat
• touch
• body
• training
• senses

Acknowledgments

I am heavily indebted to the many talented and inspirational people that I met at my host institution, London Contemporary Dance School. I am grateful to its director and administrative staff for enabling the opportunity for such unique research. The teachers who were there from September 2003 to July 2005 have my continued respect and gratitude. Most of all, I offer my thanks to the students, who danced through the daily demands of training with amazing energy and dedication. I wish them the very best for personal and professional success. I thank my former supervisor, Dr Elisabeth Hsu, for her continuous feedback on drafts of this article and on the doctoral research that informed it. I am also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their detailed and constructive comments. This material is based upon work generously supported by a United States National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a Rhodes Scholarship. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of either the National Science Foundation or the Rhodes Trust.

Notes

Although the School is considered British, students stem from a wide range of nationalities, mostly European. Among thirty one-year students with whom I had the closest contact, British students (all English) were the most numerous, but at nine but did not constitute a majority. The rest of the group consisted of five Italians, five Spanish, two Germans, one Turkish/German, two French, two Taiwanese, one American, one Czech, one Japanese, and one South African.

I began ballet classes at age four and jazz dance at age twelve, performing in both styles throughout school and university. For two years starting at the age of twenty-one, I danced for a semi-professional West African drumming and dance ensemble that specialized in dances taught by local residents of Conakry, Guinea, to interna tional musicians and dancers. Within the UK, I undertook three years of intensive study in ballroom dance, Latin American dance, and classical ballet, performing lead roles such as Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty. Prior to fieldwork, I had not undertaken any full-time professional dance training.

With its associations of mechanical reflex actions, the term ‘proprioception’ is rarely used in the studio; during fieldwork I heard it just once, in an anatomy lecture about stretching. In this context ‘proprioceptors’ (i.e. stretch receptors embedded in muscular tissue and Golgi tendon apparatuses near to where muscle connects to bone) were described as part of a biological feedback system of information exchange between peripheral muscles and the central neurological organs that governed their movement (Blakey 1994).

This definition of proprioception was used in the bbc series ‘The Dancer's Body’, which was hosted and later transcribed by former Royal Ballet member Deborah Bull.

Sherrington hints at this understanding of a sense of motion when he writes, ‘Evidently the greater part of the skeletal musculature is all the time steadily active, antagonizing gravity in maintaining the head raised, the trunk semi-erect, and the hind-legs tautly flexed.’ (1947 1906:339).

Although both men and women trained at the School, women were in the majority, and among the thirty one-year students with whom I worked most closely only two were men. I have therefore opted to use the feminine pronoun when referring generally to a student at the School.