Re-generative Habit

Abstract

‘Re-generative Habit: Dancing the mimetic faculty’ examines the role of habit in choreographic practice through a comparison with Walter Benjamin's concept of the 'mimetic faculty'. This article considers the intersection of habit, dance and language as being distinct yet interconnected expressions of an innate mimetic ability. Drawing on Benjamin's theories of the ‘mimetic faculty’ and ‘non-sensuous similarity’ from his philosophy of language, I examine how these concepts intersect in my choreographic practice, using my recent screendance project 'Mimeisthai' as a case study. This project presents a specific example of a 'performance-generating systems' approach to dance-making, inspired by Danish Canadian dance theorist Pil Hansen, and highlights the inherent tension between established habit and the desire for creative innovation. By emphasizing the relational, performative and dynamic aspects of habit within creative practice, this article challenges familiar views of habit as being simply automatic behaviour. Instead, habit is depicted as a flexible, versatile element that not only offers stability but also opens up possibilities for new forms of expression to emerge.

Film still from Mimeisthai I (2022), Melbourne/Naarm, Australia. L–R: Oonagh Slater, Luke Fryer. Director Phoebe Robinson. Photo Phoebe Robinson

This article considers the function of habit within creative practice via a comparison with German philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin’s (1892–1940) concept of the ‘mimetic faculty’². More specifically, it articulates the role of habit and a certain interpretation of the mimetic faculty within the context of my choreographic practice, which is focused on how bodily gesture may be shared and circulated within a collaborative approach to dance making. A recent outcome of this practice is a folio of two short films collectively titled Mimeisthai.³ Some aspects of making this work are briefly described in this article to illustrate an understanding of the mimetic faculty of habit within dance. Although habit and the mimetic faculty are distinct concepts, they do overlap, and, in the specific context of the enactment and circulation of bodily gesture within dance, I suggest that habit can be further understood in terms of the mimetic faculty. More specifically, I propose that habit is just one aspect (though possibly an important one) of a broader notion of the mimetic faculty.

The mimetic faculty is Benjamin’s term for a general ability to reproduce and/or perceive similarity, which, therefore, implicitly, includes the ability to perceive and produce difference. This generic skill is possessed by all living things and finds expression on various levels, from the biological to the behavioural, such as in reproduction or camouflage, to the myriad ways that creatures communicate. In humans, specifically, Benjamin suggests that the mimetic faculty is responsible for the formation of language (1999c [1933]: 720–2). Habit may also be understood as a particular aspect of the mimetic faculty, given that a core feature of both is repeatability.

But what is habit? It is not just an ability to repeat, but also a tendency to repeat, and with repetition to incrementally lose the need for deliberation (Ravaisson 2008 [1838]: 49). As a tendency for developing tendencies, habit is frequently reduced and negatively understood to be automatic behaviour, but it is also essential to the development of skills and practices (Camilleri 2018). More than simple repetition, habit is both an ‘adaptive capacity’ and a stabilizing force (Dewsbury 2012: 75); and, according to philosopher Clare Carlisle (2014: 146), is difficult to define since it mostly appears as a ‘blind spot’:

A habit is not an easily identifiable physical object. Indeed, it is not at all clear what kind of thing a habit is. We may certainly infer the presence of a habit when we observe repeated actions or patterns of behaviour. But can we tell the difference, as onlookers, between actions that are habitual, and those that are occasional and context-dependent? Can we actually see another’s habit? (Carlisle 2014: 9)

If habit evades clear definition, the mimetic faculty is similarly undefined in Benjamin’s writing. Instead, it is observed as a general capacity that Benjamin applies to his earlier philosophy of language in ‘On language as such and on the language of man’ (1996 [1916]: 62–74). Importantly, even ‘language as such’ is a broader category in Benjamin’s thought than it is typically taken to be, as he claimed ‘all communication of the contents of the mind is language, communication in words being only a particular case of human language’ (62). Benjamin’s claim is that the mimetic faculty facilitates ‘language as such’ but is also active both through and beyond ‘the language of man [sic]’, as will be explained further.

If language is a product of the mimetic faculty, as Benjamin suggests, it is also, as Carlisle notes, ‘deeply habitual’ given that language is ‘learned by imitation and repetition, and entrenched by common usage’ (2014: 143). Furthermore, Carlisle indicates that language, like habit itself, ‘often becomes a transparent, inconspicuous medium that simultaneously carries and conceals meaning’ (ibid.). This view is aligned with Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, wherein both ‘bodily acts’ and ‘speech acts’ are seen to be inscribed through a concealed form of repetition, in ways that philosopher Maren Wehrle interprets as the materialization of a ‘habitual identity’ (Butler 2014; Wehrle 2021: 366). As Butler says:

Performativity is … not a singular ‘act’, for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition. (Butler 2014: 12)

Following Butler and Wehrle, I suggest that both language and dance may be understood as discrete but related materializations of the mimetic performativity of habit. Much has already been said ‘on the tensions and complicities between dance and writing’ (Lepecki 2004: 2). As André Lepecki asked in 2004: ‘Where lie the limits between body and text, movement and language?’ (124). Dance and language may be thought of as two sides of the same coin, or as two separate coins, each having two sides. Ultimately though, the language-of-dance and the dance-of-language do not amount to the same thing. My focus in this article is directed at dance as an expanded form of language, which like ‘language proper’ stems from the body and circulates through inter-corporeal exchange as a form of collective habit and mimetic play.

I begin by explaining the mimetic faculty in more detail along with a related term, ‘non-sensuous similarity’, as concepts within Benjamin’s philosophy of language, before articulating the relevance of these terms to an understanding of habit in dance performance and practice. I do this via philosopher Brian Massumi’s (2011) articulation of movement perception and transfer as ‘species of movement feeling’, which he also aligns with Benjamin’s notion of non-sensuous similarity, as will be explained.

THE MIMETIC FACULTY AND NON-SENSUOUS SIMILARITY

In simple terms, the mimetic faculty may be described as a general ability to recognize and/or produce similarity. Recognizing things as chairs, tables or birds is a type of mimetic recognition, as is the perception of family resemblances, or a constellation in the stars. Language relies on the ability to recognize things that belong to the same category, and to know the name given to that category, despite the many variations and differences found within each category. This indicates how the mimetic faculty is part of Benjamin’s philosophy of language. Whereas actual chairs, tables and birds are mimetic products (arising from manual, technological or biological labour), the words ‘chair’, ‘table’ and ‘bird’ are considered by Benjamin to be mimetic representations of their referents. The relationality between words and objects, sign and signified, is explained by Benjamin as being carried out by the mimetic faculty, particularly through a related concept that he calls ‘nonsensuous similarity’:

It is non-sensuous similarity that establishes the ties not only between what is said and what is meant, but also between what is written and what is meant, and equally between the spoken and the written. (Benjamin 1999c [1933]: 722)

Here Benjamin separates similarity into two categories, the ‘sensuous’ and the ‘nonsensuous’. The first being clearly perceivable by the senses, and the second being abstracted from direct perception and often only subconsciously perceived, if at all.

According to Benjamin, the relation of a word to its object, and of a spoken word to its written equivalent, is ‘non-sensuous’ because the resemblances between the spoken, the written and the signified are agreed upon but not directly perceived. To explain this further, Benjamin calls upon but also complicates the ‘onomatopoeic mode of explanation’ of language development, in which language is thought to have evolved from the imitation of natural sounds, and that he says remains ‘tied to the commonplace (sensuous) area of similarity’ (Benjamin 1999a: 696). Benjamin argues, however, that onomatopoeic words such as ‘bang’ do not actually sound like a real bang in a direct or sensuous way. Instead, the similarity is non-sensuous because the resemblance is not obvious, although we are conditioned to feel that it is. As he says:

If words meaning the same thing in different languages are arranged about that thing as their centre, we have to inquire how they all – while often possessing not the slightest similarity to one another – are similar to what they signify at their centre. (Benjamin 1999c [1933]: 721)

For Benjamin, language is not simply an ‘agreed system of signs’, nor is it only onomatopoeic in a ‘sensuous’ way, instead it is an ‘archive of non-sensuous similarity’ that carries forward the remains of resemblances once perceived ‘in former times’ that are no longer recognizable or perceivable in the present (1999c [1933]: 721–2). As he says:

It is not enough to think of what we understand today by the concept of similarity … It must be borne in mind that neither mimetic powers nor mimetic objects remain the same in the course of thousands of years. Rather, we must suppose that the gift for producing similarities (for example, in dances, whose oldest function this is), and therefore also the gift of recognizing them, have changed in the course of history. (1999c [1933]: 720)

Benjamin indicates that the similarities perceived by people living in different times may not be perceivable to us now and, furthermore, the similarities that we consciously perceive are merely the ‘tip of the iceberg’ by comparison to those that are ‘perceived unconsciously or not at all’ (Benjamin 1999a: 695). This for Benjamin demonstrates a transformation in the human mimetic faculty, which he sees as having ‘passed without residue’ into language, while having ‘liquidated those [mimetic powers] of magic’ (1999c [1933]: 722). Here, Benjamin is referring to what he perceives as an ontogenetic development of the mimetic faculty, in which he diagnoses an increasing disenchantment within his own time. This articulation of the transformation and disenchantment of the mimetic faculty throughout history also appears to mirror the process of habit formation in daily practice, since established habit is also often not fully felt or consciously carried out. I will return to this point.

It is unclear if Benjamin read Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (2013 [1916]), but according to film scholar Miriam Hansen, he seems to ‘diametrically oppose’ it (1987: 197). Whereas for Saussure language is arbitrary and meaning is constantly deferred, Benjamin provides an alternative view that ‘in the leap between the word and the motivating deed’ there is a direct physiognomic perception that becomes ‘liquidated’ in modern language and only appears arbitrary (Benjamin et al. 1994: 80; Benjamin 1999c [1933]). Benjamin’s claim suggests that Saussure’s theory points only to a ‘postlapsarian’ or modern phase in the history of language, which becomes increasingly abstract and slippery as an ‘archive of non-sensuous similarity’ (Benjamin 1999c [1933]: 722). For Benjamin, arbitrariness does not fully account for the way meaning is attributed to words – it may appear arbitrary in hindsight, but that is only because we can no longer perceive the mimetic connection that preceded the act of naming.

SPECIES OF MOVEMENT FEELING

According to Benjamin the ultimate example of non-sensuous similarity occurs in language, but it is also outside of language or, as Brian Massumi observes, ‘it is in the ins-and-outs of language’ (2011: 105). The ability of nonsensuous similarity to pass through things, to be both embodied and disembodied, forms part of Massumi’s explanation of movement perception. As Massumi says, the ‘perception of the simplest movement responds in many ways to Benjamin’s criteria for non-sensuous similarity’ (106). For example, when one billiard ball hits another, the movement ‘detaches itself from one object and transfers to another’ (ibid.). Massumi takes this example of movement transfer from experimental phenomenologist Albert Michotte’s The Perception of Causality (1963). In Michotte’s words, the movement of the first ball ‘survives the removal of its object’ as the momentum transfers to the next ball (138). Massumi calls this phenomenon a ‘continuing across’ or ‘non-local linkage’, and also indicates that this type of transference is not limited to billiard balls (106):

Now say you walk out of the pool hall and instead of billiard balls you see a car approaching another stopped at a traffic light and then collides into it, launching it a few feet forward … The linkage that is perceptually felt movement has ‘detached itself’ not only from the balls in the first combination, but from that combination altogether. It has migrated from one objective combination to another, neither of which it resembles in any observable way. (Massumi 2011: 107–8)

The ‘perceptually felt movement’ that continues across colliding cars and billiard balls is not in reality a continuation. From the perspective of the first billiard ball, the movement does not continue but comes to an abrupt stop as the other ball launches off, as both Massumi and Michotte acknowledge. However, the object of study here is not pure physics; it is the ‘perceptual feeling’ of movement.

The ‘perceptually felt movement’, Massumi says, becomes a ‘species of movement feeling’ (2011: 108). He continues:

Jumping across the gap from one event to the next, it echoes itself in repetition … It is now a selfexemplifying quality of movement beholden to neither car nor ball, as indifferent to the cue-stick as to the traffic light. (Massumi 2011: 107–8)

Slide, bounce, lift or drop are more examples of ‘movement species’ that can be recognized across time in relation to various objects or living bodies as non-sensuous similarity, but more often than not pass unnoticed within the over-arching context, such as that of a billiard game or a car accident. Habit may also be thought of as a form of non-sensuous similarity, in the sense that habit repeatedly ‘echoes itself’, but is often not fully felt or consciously recognized.

Massumi’s concept of ‘species of movement feeling’ as ‘non-sensuous similarity’ also resonates in a later discussion by him on habituated gesture, in which he observes that the felt sense of gesturing is often ‘unremarked at the global level, outshone by the over-act that occupies center stage’ (Massumi cited in Sünter 2022: 273). As Massumi explains, the ‘thinkingfeeling’ of habituated gesture is imbued with embodied memory that is ‘barely felt, or underfelt’, but that nonetheless makes it possible to live and respond to events as they unfold. Like Benjamin’s ‘archive of non-sensuous similarity’, physical gesturing is affected by and responds to each un-anticipatable event in our lives with a ‘weighting of reflex, habit, propensity, suggestion: a force of tendency’ (ibid.):

The weighting of these thinking-feelings with memory surrounds every act with a penumbra of the many ways things have been in the act in the past. But they recall the past only to suggest possibilities for the future. They are proposing themselves for repetition, betokening alternative paths for the present. (Massumi cited in Sünter 2022: 273)

Following Massumi, I suggest that the inter-corporeal transfer of movement within dance practice can be understood in terms of the mimetic faculty, and that a dancer’s ability to perceive and incorporate ‘species of movement feeling’ indicates an embodied apprehension, though not always a conscious one, of both ‘sensuous’ and ‘non-sensuous’ similarity. Massumi’s description of ‘species of movement feeling’ explains how movement can appear to pass from one body to another, across a cinematic cut, or through choreographic repertoire. This understanding of movement’s potential to ‘continue across’ various bodies has informed my Mimeisthai project, which explored the dynamic of shared movement within performance through a collaborative and improvisational approach to dance making.

MIMEISTHAI AND PERFORMANCE GENERATING SYSTEMS

My interest in the choreographic potential of collectively generated movement in Mimeisthai was sparked by a personal observation during a rehearsal for a previous work I directed in 2014 with a large group of dancers. To start the creative process, I had asked the dancers to each develop three gestures and to share those gestures with one other person. I then asked each pair to teach their movements to another pair, and to decide between themselves how to sequence those movements. I structured this process so it would culminate in a long sequence of juxtaposed movements that was shared by the entire group. Watching this process was fascinating. The room came alive, the dancers seemed present and alert while still in the process of teaching and learning the material, but later this engaged quality dissipated once they had fully learned the material. The dancers’ gestures, which at first appeared specific and idiosyncratic, later morphed into more conventional patterns and rhythms as their ingrained habits and patterns of training began to dominate. Though this was something we worked to overcome throughout the performance season, the energy and spontaneity I observed in the first rehearsal never fully returned. This experience sparked my interest in shared movement, not just as a tool for performance making but as a performance in itself.

In Mimeisthai, I used a ‘performance generating system’ approach, as defined by Danish Canadian performance theorist Pil Hansen (2014), to explore shared movement within dance performance. More specifically, I adapted what is commonly known as the ‘mirror game’ in theatre training into a performance generating system, which was then performed for camera and edited into a folio of short films, as will be explained. I chose to use the mirror game in this work because I anticipated it would foster the kind of interaction and live presence I had observed in the abovementioned rehearsal, which had sparked my interest in shared movement. I have since come to understand my interest in shared movement within dance as being directed at a collective embodiment of generative habit, in contrast to a rehearsed repetition of pre-selected, ingrained or conventional habits.

According to Pil Hansen, performance generating systems are task-based, semiimprovisational approaches to devising and performing dance that ‘systematically set in motion a self-organising process of dance generation’ (2014: 256). Unlike ‘pre-set’ choreography, where dancers learn material and perfect it before it is performed live, a performance generating system approaches movement generation as performance:

Performance generating systems add precise rules, parameters and sources to task-based creation that focus the dancers’ attention on specific aspects of the work and limit their possible responses. The resulting coordinates are not typically used to create material that then is set as choreography, but they and the movements they attract become the very dramaturgy of a composition. (Hansen 2014: 256)

Hansen argues that performance generating systems challenge performers to confront problems within performance in ways that ‘cannot be addressed through habitual and skilful responses alone, but demand examination and choice-making’ (2014: 256). The stated aim is to maintain a perpetual state of alertness in the dancer’s attention, through their engagement in a flexible composition.

I would argue, however, that performance generating systems do not prevent habits from forming or surfacing, but instead combine and re-generate habits in ways that have potential to work through and beyond established habits, as a form of mimetic play. This suggests a distinction between the type of habit that Pil Hansen describes above (and that is also related to the kind of ‘ingrained’ habit I observed in my own rehearsal, and considered detrimental to performance), with another aspect of habit, which Dewsbury describes after Ravaisson and Deleuze as the ‘performative spontaneity of habit’, that is ‘achieved in situated milieus’ to ‘stimulate bodily responses without thinking’ (Dewsbury 2015: 38–9). I suggest that performance generating systems can disrupt the former type, which may be described as stale or sedimented habit; and simultaneously stimulate the latter spontaneous, performative type, since the system provokes tacitly embodied memories to be called upon, recombined and unsettled as the performers meet the changing demands of the score.

THE MIRRORGAME

As mentioned previously, in Mimeisthai I used and adapted the ‘mirror game’ into a performance generating system.⁴ In my experience, the mirror game typically involves two people facing each other, with one person leading while the other copies their movements, gestures or facial expressions. Leader and follower then periodically change roles, until ultimately both players’ movements become synchronous or co-initiated.

In Mimeisthai, however, I was equally interested in asynchrony and non-sensuous similarity within shared movement. To explore these aspects, I introduced various strategies that we called ‘breaking the mirror’ that were selectively used by the dancers within performance. These strategies included: turning the gaze away to temporarily drop out of the mirroring relationship; transposing the perceived movement to another body part; attempting to do the ‘opposite’ movement to the other dancer; and/or producing any type of non-sensuous equivalent that may be conceived, however vaguely, in the moment of performance. These strategies, guided generally by the concept of non-sensuous similarity, allowed for fluid and spontaneous responses from the dancers as they reinterpreted their partner’s movements. The element of spontaneous decision-making by the dancers within performance is also what makes this approach a ‘performance generating system’, in my understanding of Pil Hansen’s definition of this approach.

In Mimeisthai, gestural movements are shared, copied, transformed and repeated between performers, both on- and off-screen. More specifically, during the filming, the camera was placed between the performers to capture only one side of the mirror game. That is, one dancer performed to the camera while another stood behind the camera, out of frame, thus concealing the process that produced the performance on screen. To my mind, the creative process of making Mimeisthai (more than is apparent in the final product) superficially re-enacts the performativity of gesturing in everyday life.

Film still from Mimeisthai II (2022), Melbourne/Naarm, Australia. Oonagh Slater. Director Phoebe Robinson. Photo Phoebe Robinson

Instead of developing ‘new’ movement or an individual choreographic voice, the mirror game in our experience tended to produce collectively embodied habits, or familiar pedestrian gestures, that were easier to predict while synchronizing with another dancer. In Diana Taylor’s words, these gestures may be described as ‘the ghosts, the tropes, the scenarios that structure our individual and collective life’ and are archived in collectively embodied memory (2003: 164). Importantly, this collective embodiment is not fixed, but operates in a perpetual state of transformation via performative repetition with difference. In Mimeisthai, this process of transformation was further induced by our strategies of ‘breaking the mirror’, which disrupted the relatively straightforward tasks of leading, following and synchronizing within the original rules of the mirror game. As one of the performers in Mimeisthai, Oonagh Slater, observed:

It’s not just my movement, it’s definitely something that has come from this … there are some things that I do all the time, that is very ‘me’, then there are these other weird hybrid movements that we’ve created together.

Here, Oonagh senses a difference in feeling between her own signature moves (that is, habits) and ‘other weird hybrid movements’ that emerged through copying and altering the gestures presented by the other dancers. Underpinning this exploration in Mimeisthai is an understanding that the body is a dynamic repository of habitual tendencies, shaped by individual anatomies, personal histories and cultural influences. Through repetition with variation, these ingrained habits undergo transformation, resulting in an ever-evolving manifestation of collective movement.

My understanding of movement transfer in this context is not limited to body-to-body transfer, as it occurs in typical forms of dance training and practice, but extends also to cultural, historical and technological influences. In this regard, I have been informed by Belgian performance maker Myriam Van Imschoot, who follows the insight of performance theorist Rebecca Schneider (2001), to describe performers as ‘mobile body-archives’:

[O]ne could think of performers as mobile bodyarchives. They are not merely domiciled containers, but metabolic ecologies that compose the living traces of experience … this body is never ‘pure’ flesh, but is always already extending into an elaborate circuitry of technology of all sorts. The flesh is never a safe ‘home’ of departure or arrival, nor is it an interiorised history one ‘owns’; rather, it constantly functions in a loop with other modes of mediation. (Van Imschoot 2005: 7–9)

Van Imschoot’s observation resonates with Dewsbury’s articulation of ‘affective habit ecologies’, which describes habit not as a fixed constraint but as an ‘adaptive capacity’ through which ‘our bodies constantly improvise in situ with an archival skill housed in its very organicity’ (2012: 75). Such ‘archival skill’ of living bodies may also be understood in terms of habit and the mimetic faculty. If, as Benjamin claims, ‘language’ is an ‘archive of non-sensuous similarity’, the body itself may also be conceived as an unfixed archive of habitual tendencies.

CONCLUSION

This article considers the intersection of habit, dance and language as being distinct yet interconnected expressions of an innate mimetic ability. Drawing upon Benjamin’s theories of the ‘mimetic faculty’ and ‘non-sensuous similarity’ within his philosophy of language, I examine how these concepts intersect with my own choreographic practice and Mimeisthai project. This connection is forged via a consideration of Massumi’s phenomenological description of movement perception and transfer as a shared experience of ‘species of movement feeling’, which Massumi also aligns with Benjamin’s mimetic faculty, particularly his notion of nonsensuous similarity.

In Mimeisthai my interest in movement transfer as the non-sensuous perception of ‘species of movement feeling’ was not limited to direct body-to-body transference of movement, or even the mediated transfer of movement through film or video. It also incorporated the issue that movements that circulate within any choreographic practice are already shaped by the culture and technology that is contemporaneous to it. In this context, the body is seen as an ever-changing archive of habitual tendencies, constantly improvising. These habits, shaped by personal anatomy, history and culture, undergo transformation through repetition with variation.

Habits are essential to any practice, and all practices at different times either establish and refine certain pre-selected skills; or move through, disrupt and recombine habit in an ongoing way. As Camilleri suggests, ‘far from arresting creativity, the power of habit is located in its capacity for generative change in performer processes like training, composition (e.g. devising and adaptation), rehearsing, and performing’ (2018: 36), which includes improvisational and experimental approaches such as performance generating systems.

Perhaps habit is often considered negatively in creative practice because it rarely draws attention to itself until it ceases to function seamlessly. As Carlisle observes, ‘habits [only] show themselves when they are disrupted’ (2014: 10). Although certain habits may sometimes appear visibly, their vast majority occur unnoticed – consider, for example, the multiplicity of simultaneous habits needed just to stand and to speak. In this regard, consider also the myriad ways in which other habits support performance that frequently go unrecognized, or are ‘under-felt’. Importantly, the under-feeling of habit is a part of its strength (Massumi cited in Sünter 2022). As Dewsbury also observes, via Ravaisson and Deleuze, habit provides a ‘passive but enabling disposition to the world’ (2015: 37).

The disruption of habit in creative practice is frequently prioritized, and can indicate that something of intense creative interest is occurring, but this is also a process that is entirely reliant on previously established habits for that difference to be felt and to have meaning. Habits may be replaced with new or less familiar habits, but it is impossible to do away with habit entirely. As Carlisle observes, habit ‘can move, change shape and contract, but never disappears’ (2014: 146). Indeed, the tendency to want to disrupt habit in creative practice is a habit in itself. Just as a broken rule is often more productive than having no rules at all, habits anchor creative practice, providing both a foundation to build on and something to resist.

Notes

1 This article draws on my practice-led PhD titled Dancing the Mimetic Faculty: A peculiar phenomenology (Robinson 2022a).

2 The mimetic faculty is discussed in a series of unpublished essays and fragments written by Benjamin during 1932 and 1933 (1999a; 1999b; 1999c). Although Benjamin considered these texts to be ‘merely a gloss or addendum’ to his earlier essay ‘On language as such and on the language of man’ (1996 [1916]), recent scholarship suggests the mimetic faculty is central to Benjamin’s thought, providing insight into his better-known concepts such as ‘aura’ and ‘dialectical image’ (Eiland and Jennings 2014: 388–99).

3 Mimeisthai, filmed, directed and edited by Phoebe Robinson, featuring Melbourne/Naarm-based dancers Oonagh Slater, Rhys Ryan, Chloe Arnott and Luke Fryer, with music by Mathew Rolfe aka Secret Towns (Robinson 2022b).

4 The mirror game is a standard warm up and/or therapeutic exercise that is variously attributed to theatre practitioners Augusto Boal and Viola Spolin. While there are many variations in Boal and Spolin’s use of mirroring techniques, the mirror game is currently known as a relatively standard exercise frequently used in creative, pedagogical and therapeutic settings.