The dancing body-subject: Merleau-Ponty's mirror stage in the dance studio

This article illuminates the non-dualist concept of pre-reflective body-subjectivity by exploring the continued development of the corporeal schema in adult life through bringing Merleau-Ponty's philosophy into conversation with interview accounts from professional dancers. The analysis of dancers’ accounts of their embodied practice allows an exploration of the role of both actual mirrors in the dance studio and intersubjective mirroring between dancers in the process of incorporating new movements into the corporeal schema. It is argued that body-subjectivity is far more than an awareness of the body's position in space as it has both dynamic and affective dimensions as well as being a fundamentally intersubjective phenomenon.