What Is Dead and What Is Alive in Dance Phenomenology?

Whether one critiques, advocates for, or merely nods to phenomenological methodology, it is with the awareness of a long, seamless analytic fit with Western theatrical dance, as the above quote of Jacques Derrida from his 1967 discussion of Edmund Husserl-the founder of phenomenologyindicates (Derrida 1973). The very operations of reduction and bracketing could be those of the proscenium stage itself. Concert dance is in this sense always already " phenomenal" in its very apparition. And dance phenomenology assumes that the analysis of what happens when dancing occurs is inseparable from the possibility of the adequate description of that dancing. " It is only through an analysis of the visible in dance," wrote Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, " that one might begin to fathom and describe the essential nature of that experience" (1984, 132). Sheets-Johnstone raised not only the primacy of description but, most provocatively, the notion of re-languaging in the phenomenological analysis of movement, thus underlining that, in the words of Anna Pakes in this issue, " Phenomenology is an essentially descriptive philosophy". 1 Dance phenomenology is the encounter of " this original, pristine body, the preobjective or preobjectivized body" (Sheets-Johnstone 1984, 133) with language.