The title “Back to the Dance Itself,” edited by Sondra Fraleigh, directly relates to phenomenologist Edmund Husserl’s exhortation to followers and practitioners, “back to the things themselves,” where things as different phenomena of consciousness encompass “feelings, observations, performances, happenings and possibilities” (1). Not surprisingly, this book is strongly oriented toward dance scholarship, but it is relevant to the study of folklore for different reasons, the inclusion of “performances” in this list being one of them. Folklore study aligns with phenomenology in its examination of lived experience and perception of the myriad changes and flux within what philosophers call “lifeworlds.” Lifeworld is where the sensory “lived” body seeks to know and understand the world through experience, sensation, and environment. Since there is no dominant phenomenological method, the inclusivity of this kind of open-ended inquiry is appealing to folklorists in theory and praxis.
Dance is a nonverbal artform where the artist merges with the artistic creation. The process and the product become one. Dance simultaneously reveals relations between and among bodies as well as between bodies and the environment. For these reasons, it is a medium which ideally illustrates and illuminates key concepts of phenomenological theory, such as Merleau-Ponty’s integrative notion of intersubjectivity (co-mingling subjectivities) extended to intercorporeality (enmeshed bodies). Folklorists have effectively utilized the non-dualistic concept of intersubjectivity to analyze performance and context, to understand co-presence in personal narrative interviews, to inform ethnographic writing, and to engage in and interpret artistic communication. In Back to the Dance Itself, Fraleigh and her co-authors demonstrate how dance’s power as nonverbal communication grounds intersubjectivity, an abstract idea, in the concrete, in this case, in the dynamics of bodies in space. The authors, while writing about dance and phenomenology, offer us different modes of verbalizing and conceptualizing kinesthetic and creative action in order to orient our response to performance “as a doing” (30). With regard to relaying the essence of an event, Fraleigh writes, “As phenomenological verification, descriptive examples serve as tests of theory, and they come in a variety of voices, both participatory and observational” (16).
“A variety of voices” is an apt description for the different cross-disciplinary contributions to Back to the Dance Itself. The intention of this book is to attract an inclusive audience interested in the arts and philosophies of the body. It is divided into sections comprised of three chapters each, running the gamut from Sondra Fraleigh’s more expository selections pertaining to the application of various phenomenological typologies to dance and performance to Christine Bellerose’s spiritual musings on the nature of ma derived from Japanese cosmology, relative to Shint? and Zen Buddhist philosophies. Due to this breadth, folklorists can find something of value throughout the book, ranging from methodological guidance to different ways to apprehend and apply the concept of embodiment. Specifically of interest to folklore and anthropology, Fraleigh states, “I write in the belief that ethical praxis lies in the art of paying attention with aims toward listening and reciprocity. Differences make the world fascinating and violent; they require respectful engagement. Phenomenology offers a pragmatic, experiential path toward cultural inquiry” (116).
The contributions to this volume of essays reveal the broad applicability of different phenomenological modes. Taken as a whole, each chapter complements the others by revealing different facets of art and body within a phenomenological framework. The writing is fairly consistent in style, quality, and insight, but this remains one of the basic challenges in editing and compiling an anthology organized around a central theme.
The first voice that we encounter aside from Fraleigh’s, is Robert Bingham’s. His ecologically-themed piece is based on his experience extensively interviewing Sondra Fraleigh for a month while conversing, photographing, theorizing, and dancing together in Snow Canyon, a site in Utah near Fraleigh’s home. Bingham’s piece is centered within the matrix of body, mind, and environment. It conjures up a sense of place, “dance place,” experiencing nature through atmosphere, texture, and singularity in the spirit of Edward Casey’s “place worlds.” Bingham writes lyrically, and his is probably the most poetically written of all the essays in the book, as indicated by the following; “the fragile contingency of our dancing bodies held by the dizzyingly vast landscape” (47); “as I continue falling into the thrum of land, body, and sky” (52); and, describing nearby mountains as “These cousins of my bones” (53).
The second part, Part II, Performing Life and Language, features Vida Midgelow’s deft exploration of the interrelationship of improvisation and phenomenology, where she demonstrates the potential of their interchangeability. Amanda Williamson investigates the flow of somatic movement in language creation, kinesthesia, and sensory awareness. Fraleigh’s final contribution, “Living Phenomenology,” in which she discusses life as performance and phenomenology as performance, may be of interest to folklorists.
In Part III, Body and Place, nature is central to Kimerer LaMothe’s quest to develop an “ecokinetic” phenomenological orientation toward a historical and cross-cultural study of dance, inclusive of relationships between ourselves and non-human others. In contrast, Joanna McNamara revels in the urban landscape of Detroit as stage space for generating socio-cultural revitalization through performance. Her reliance on hermeneutic phenomenology yields a rich aesthetic and culture-interpretive description.
The first chapter in the final section, Part IV, is a collaborative application and interpretation of Husserl’s less well-known phenomenological method, Free Phantasy Variations (FFV), by Hillel Braude, philosopher, and Ami Shulman, dancer and choreographer. This chapter is followed by Karen Bond’s visually interesting discussion of children’s drawings spontaneously created after sessions of improvisational dance, entitled, “Me, a Tree.” The last contribution in this collection, “Dancing Epistemology, Situating Feminist Analysis” by Karen Barbour, addresses embodied ways of knowing through dance with parallels in phenomenological methodologies. Her critique of the male-dominated history of phenomenological thought, as well as its predominant Western orientation, speaks to the agitation of our time of “questioning the canon” in academe and on the streets. Many of the book’s themes culminate in Barbour’s final piece. Paramount to her writing and “sense of place” is the way she captures the essence of Aotearoa/New Zealand in her attunement to the earth that goes deeper than the surface when she describes seismic movement underfoot in a land of frequent earthquakes.
Back to the Dance Itself offers a primer of phenomenological categories and their application in varying contexts. Folklorists will find these examples valuable with respect to their relevancy for experiential studies of society and culture. The primary readership for this book, however, is in the fields of dance history, theory, education, and practice. Due its emphasis on the intellectual and pragmatic aspects of phenomenology, this book is really not for a general audience. Although it is global in scope, many of its authors connect in some way to editor-author Sondra Fraleigh’s influence as teacher, dancer, and writer. For this reason, Back to the Dance Itself feels like a tribute, an unplanned Festschrift, celebrating Fraleigh’s contribution to the dynamic entwining of dance and phenomenology.
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[Review length: 1147 words • Review posted on November 5, 2020]