The dimming of the house lights focuses attention on the still darkened stage, although awareness of the others in the auditorium and its quieted bustle does not entirely fade. From the stage, the sound of several people taking five or six measured footsteps in unison, then stopping, momentarily precedes the lights (stage and house) fading quickly up to reveal nine performers. They stand, facing out, dressed in ordinary clothes (shirt and jacket, jumper and skirt, different colors), steady gaze directed at the audience. They stand in the gaps between a series of reflective slabs, each of the same regular dimensions, slightly wider and taller than the performers themselves. Behind the performers is a further line of panels cut from the same material. After a brief pause, the space darkens.

When the stage lights come up again, the world has changed: a strong wind now blows across the stage, and a roar of noise fills the theater. The performers emerge in twos, threes, or fours to walk slowly in an arc before disappearing once more behind the reflective panels, which are now bending and distorting in the stage wind. The walking forms a seamless flow, with one pair or group emerging and relaying another as it vanishes. Each time they appear, the performers sport a new item of clothing (a dressing gown, a feathered headdress, a white doctor's coat) or carry a different object (a torch, a sandwich, a crown, a doll), and perform a different action (shining light on the floor, eating, carrying a pot plant, shaking the baby). Sometimes, the action involves another performer rather than an inanimate object (a fist fight, a passionate kiss). Some actions are ordinary (reading a newspaper, donning sunglasses, putting on a coat), some extreme (shooting a gun, dragging a dead pheasant along the ground with one's teeth, kicking the baby across the floor). There is no apparent connection between actions in terms of their sense, though objects and items of clothing periodically reappear forging a formal link between the instances of their use. Some are thrown away, to form a gradually mounting pile of debris downstage. But the reiteration of certain objects, as well as the pacing and relayed groupings of the movement also create a sense of structure, and a formal coherence, if not narrative or thematic cohesion.

After a time, attention wanders and alights on a cable stretched across the front of the stage, between two spools, one at each side of the space. The cable is (automatically) being gradually unwound from one spool on to the other, in the process dragging across strategically placed strings. This is the source of the roar of noise, which both dominates and forms a constant backdrop to the stage action. When the whole cable has unwound, the noise (perhaps also the action and the howling wind) will stop. In the meantime, it continues, uninterrupted though punctuated by the occasional drama (a violent slap, a flash of nudity, a contemptuous discarding of one of the objects) amid the unfolding sequence of everyday images.

This description of Maguy Marin's (Reference Marin2004) Umwelt identifies salient features from the stream of experiences and activities that comprise its performance. As any detailed account of a dance might reasonably be expected to do, it highlights the presence and actions of performers, the stage props, elements of scenography, the accompanying sound, and the source of that sound, picking them out as objects of conscious attention. In the process, the things that give the dance and its experience their distinctiveness are brought to reflective awareness. But the description also shows, perhaps, how the experienced elements, the performance, even the dance work itself, are constituted in the process of being seen, noted, reflected upon, and described. It is a creative account in forming one image of the dance out of the available range of perceptual materials, sense data, and linguistic resources at the writer's disposal. The dance appears as something that the process of engaging with it partly creates. In other words, an active engagement produces the experienced phenomenon. It is not a case of the already given objects of the dance (in themselves complete) imprinting themselves on a passive consciousness that merely receives their impression. Nor does transparent language simply make visible the already given reality of the dance. Rather, the dance appears as it does by virtue of how it is apprehended and described.

This is evident from the fact that very different descriptions of the same performance could be given, articulating its phenomenal parameters from other perspectives. The above paragraphs constitute the dance as seen by one audience member, in one particular profile. Other profiles are available—to this person on other occasions, and to other people at the same and other performances of the same dance. The performers, for example, experience Umwelt differently, required as they are to move behind the reflective panels that block the audience's view. The dancers grasp more fully the complexity of how this work's actions are organized by participating in both the on- and offstage choreography of objects and people. The audience, meanwhile, does not necessarily think of what happens behind the scenes: how the props must be ordered, their sequence marked or memorized; how the presence of particular dancers in certain locations at specific moments is ensured so that they are ready to move into view at the appropriate time. Similarly, the performers do not perceive in the same way as the audience the stage image that their action creates; they may remain engrossed in that action as a series of unfolding tasks. The experience of this performance, as of any object with material existence, is inevitably perspectival: what we see or otherwise experience is one aspect of the dance. But it is nonetheless an aspect of the dance, one of the ways in which this dance is present.

Typically, perhaps, we are not reflectively aware of how the performance, or particular elements of it, appear to us. We are aware of the performance and its features, seeing the performers, what they are doing, what they are carrying, and so on. But the manner of appearance could always be reflected upon, or thematized, maybe consequent on a shift in attention, like the one which suddenly reveals the source of the roar of background noise in Umwelt. This work, also, itself heightens awareness of the nature and significance of the images that unfold: the ways they are combined paradoxically isolates individual elements of the dance—a particular prop, posture, way of walking, or item of clothing—their reiteration drawing attention to what they are, what they might mean, and the manner and significance of their combination with other elements. But this attitude of reflexive awareness in relation to how objects and actions appear could, in principle, be adopted in the face of any performance, once the fact that we see what we see (or otherwise experience what we experience) ceases to be taken for granted.

The constitutive activity of consciousness is the focus of Edmund Husserl's philosophy and, more generally, of phenomenology, the philosophical movement he inspired. Husserl's phenomenology is interested in what we experience, but also how experiential phenomena—and the world they comprise—are shaped by the structures of consciousness. These structures include embodiment and temporality as well as the directedness toward a content (intentionality) characteristic of certain kinds of thinking (perceiving, remembering, and imagining, for example). Husserl's work offers a route whereby our involvement in creating the dances we witness and perform can be probed. It can help us to explore the conditions of experiencing performances and works, what structures must be in place to enable them to appear as such at all, and to allow us to come to know what they are. Husserl's phenomenology does not directly address the phenomena of dance and performance, and indeed barely touches at all on art and aesthetics, but its insights with respect to other phenomena and experiences bear on the endeavor of dance studies at a number of levels. This begins to be highlighted in reflection on the description of Umwelt and is developed in more detail in what follows.Footnote ¹ That discussion implies also a critical reflection on some existing adaptations of phenomenology to dance, and raises broader questions about the “use” and value of philosophy for the investigation of dance practices, addressed in the Conclusion.

Husserl and the Phenomenology of Dance

Within existing adaptations of phenomenology to dance, there is often a nod in Husserl's direction. Sheets-Johnstone (Reference Sheets-Johnstone, Nadel and Miller1978, Reference Sheets-Johnstone1979, Reference Sheets-Johnstone1981, Reference Sheets-Johnstone and Sheets-Johnstone1984), Fraleigh (Reference Fraleigh1987, Reference Fraleigh and Carter1998), Parviainen (Reference Parviainen1998), and Kozel (Reference Kozel2007) all outline the principles of phenomenological method in terms derived from Husserl's work: A phenomenological approach encourages a fresh look at dance phenomena; it proposes a first person account, descriptive rather than constructively theoretical; and it focuses on those phenomena as they appear or are directly apprehended, once preconceptions and prejudgments about the dance have been suspended. Phenomenological dance writers make evident their methodological debt, even as they emphasize the greater relevance of subsequent thinkers to their projects: Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty used Husserl's writings as a springboard, while subjecting them to trenchant critique; the interest of these later philosophers in corporeality—or at least in the questions of real existence and the nature of being—seems to mark their work as more relevant to the discussion of dance. Thus Sheets-Johnstone draws on Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Fraleigh looks to Heidegger and Sartre. And Parviainen and Kozel seek in Merleau-Ponty's work “an embodied approach to the construction of meaning” in dance and, in Kozel's case latterly, the interactions between dance and technology (2007, 2)Footnote ².

But rather than simply asserting the greater relevance of later phenomenology, dance scholars often also explicitly distance their endeavors from Husserl's project. Fraleigh, for example, draws a distinction between poetic and “technical” phenomenologists (1987, 6) and emphasizes that she employs aspects of Husserl's method “not in the strict scientific sense that is the aim of some phenomenology” (1987, 6–7). She asserts that existential phenomenology is more significant for her project in maintaining “an attitude of being in the world,” in contrast to Husserl's work which “culminates in a transcendent principle” (7). Husserl is said to have viewed phenomenology's task as “describing the lived world from the viewpoint of a detached observer” (8), an idea that is reiterated in Parviainen (Reference Parviainen1998, 30).Footnote ³ Kozel (Reference Kozel2007, 13), similarly, makes clear that her book proposes a “highly existential phenomenology” through “reflections on the lived experience of performing in responsive technological systems.” She too uses a phenomenological method in which “bias, expectations, or prior knowledge” as well as “existing conceptions of the world” are said to be “bracketed” or “suspended,” albeit necessarily imperfectly (Kozel Reference Kozel2007, 18; see also Sheets-Johnstone Reference Sheets-Johnstone and Sheets-Johnstone1984, 131). But, Kozel makes clear, this is not “a transcendental phenomenology after Husserl” (2007, 13). So even while dance phenomenology outlines its methods in Husserlian terms, there is a resistance to the general character of his approach, particularly its emphasis on “transcendental” inquiry.

The implication is that transcendental phenomenology is not an appropriate or helpful mode of inquiry when it comes to dance. Why is this? Certainly, to confront Husserl's writings is to encounter something that seems radically alien to what is known in dance as phenomenology. Husserl's texts include statements about the methodical principles applied by phenomenological dance writers: claims about the need to suspend preconceptions and beliefs to clear the investigative ground, for example; the idea of eidetic inquiry seeking to define essences rather than empirically establish facts; the call for a return to “lived experience” from the barren ground of speculative philosophical theorizing. But despite the familiarity of such notions, they do not seem incarnated, in the ways one might expect, in the substantive discussion. There are no lengthy first-person descriptions, reconstructing the agent's lived experience of reality. Instead, there is talk of phenomenology as a rigorous science, of the importance of pure logic over a psychologistic interpretation, of analyzing intentional acts into noetic and noematic components, and of the focus on transcendental rather than empirical subjectivity. With its barrage of technical terminology and conceptual complexity, Husserl makes for slow and difficult reading, requiring concentrated reasoned attention, and not the sort of intuitive responsiveness demanded by many phenomenological descriptions of dance. As Kozel suggests, drawing on David Gelernter, this is high-focus, “wide awake thought,” not its low-focus, affective, creative, and embodied counterpart (2007, 52).

Indeed, within dance studies, phenomenology is often considered valuable precisely insofar as it responds to a need “to describe concrete lived human life, without forcing it through a methodological framework, or reducing it to a series of inner psychic experiences or conceptual abstractions” (Kozel Reference Kozel2007, 5). As such, it seems a way to avoid both scientistically objectifying the interpretative phenomenon of dance and also imposing a theoretical frame that ignores or excludes bodily experience and the sensuous immediacy of performance; yet it does still provide a sympathetic philosophical context for, and a method of inquiry to guide, reflection.Footnote ⁴ Kozel suggests that phenomenology has also been an important approach to dance students “struggling with how to integrate their own experiences in their academic work” (Kozel Reference Kozel2007, 5), primarily because of its twin emphasis on lived experience and on the first-person perspective. Adopted as a way to orient description, phenomenology thus enables movers to articulate what they felt and continue to feel when dancing. There is an important sense in which the value of dance experience for these performers consists not in seeing their dancing as a means to the end of presentation to an audience, but rather in the richness of the sensations, and indeed the pleasure, experienced in the act of moving. Because it appears to be more concerned with the nature of thinking, and less with the experience of embodiment, the transcendental approach developed by Husserl is a less obvious point of reference than, say, Merleau-Ponty's poetic reflections on corporeal facticity.

The view of Husserl's philosophy that has been handed down by dance studies in many ways accords with what Donn Welton (Reference Welton2000, 1, 393–404; 2003, xi) calls the “standard picture” in philosophy, emerging as result of a convergence of deconstructive, analytic, critical theoretical, and postmodern analyses of his work. The standard picture of Husserl takes the first book of Ideas (Husserl Reference Husserl and Kersten1982) as the definitive statement of transcendental phenomenology, and transcendental idealism as the defining characterization of Husserl's opus. The standard view notes how transcendental phenomenology was challenged, as Husserl recognized, by his later reflections on the body, intersubjectivity, and the life-world, but also how it was not (or could not be) fully reworked to take adequate account of these issues. Hence, the existential phenomenologists figure as those who took up the reins of this inquiry, properly probing the phenomena of corporeality and intersubjectivity. The standard picture is also influenced by Jacques Derrida's critique of Husserl's writings as mired in a metaphysics of the subject and of presence to which deconstruction offers a radical challenge (Derrida Reference Derrida and Allison1973, Reference Derrida and Leavey1978, Reference Derrida2003). In this picture, Husserl becomes “a foil for developmental and genealogical accounts that attempt to overturn the very possibility of transcendental philosophy” (Welton Reference Welton2003, xi).

But what does it mean to develop a “transcendental phenomenology”? And is transcendental inquiry as inimical to the discussion of dance as phenomenological dance writing implies? The term “transcendental” is complex and polysemic. The sense it makes within the context of the philosophical problems with which Husserl was engaged seems at odds with the way it tends to be interpreted in the dance context. Here, the assumption is often that a transcendental investigation is one that steps away from actual embodied experience to make pronouncements in the abstract about what is, or ought to be, going on. This view derives both from the standard picture through the inheritance of Heidegger and Derrida, and from an acute sense of the specificity of dance as an embodied practice, which it is important to recognize in its philosophical examination. However, re-reading Husserl's own writings alongside recent interpretations of his work (Carr Reference Carr and Welton2003, Welton Reference Welton2000, and Zahavi Reference Zahavi2003b, for example, all based on close attention to unpublished manuscripts as well as the published opus), suggests the standard picture to be flawed,Footnote ⁵ and this in turn challenges that picture's dominance within the phenomenology of dance. A different perspective on phenomenology's relevance to the dance field emerges when Husserl's focus on the transcendent and the transcendental are re-examined.

Performances, Works and Other Transcendent Objects

One sense in which Husserl's work is focused on the transcendent is through its concern with objects (immaterial as well as material) irreducible to conscious experiences. As Moran (Reference Moran2000, 60) recognizes, Husserl shares an interest in the perceptual flux of consciousness with numerous other late nineteenth century thinkers, such as William James and Henri Bergson. But throughout Husserl's work, the focus is not the nature of that flux per se, so much as how consciousness engages with things outside of itself. In the constantly shifting stream of experience, we engage in numerous kinds of thought processes—perceiving, imagining, remembering, and so on—processes related to the different kinds of things encountered. These things include material objects such as our living room furniture and animate beings such as other people, but also intangible objects such as ideas—the notion of democracy, for example, or the logical principle of non-contradiction.Footnote ⁶ Husserl's philosophical interest is in how such objectivities emerge in relation to the flux of experience. Psychic processes elapse through time, but the objects intended and known through these processes endure and so must be distinguishable from the psychic processes themselves. This is clear from the fact that we can all perceive the same coffee table, think about the same concepts, or remember the same event (assuming we were there to experience it in the first place, and accepting that it might be remembered from different perspectives). Equally, we can perceive, think about, imagine, and remember the same thing on different occasions. This would be impossible if the objects were immanent in our psychic processes, but is possible insofar as they transcend particular acts of perceiving, thinking, and remembering.

Husserl's initial focus in this regard was logic, the principles of which, he argues (at length, in the Prolegomena to the Logical Investigations), are not reducible to empirically discoverable facts about thought processes; rather, they are “ideal truths and ideal laws” (Moran Reference Moran2000, 102), and logic is a “purely theoretical science, the all-important foundation for any technology of scientific knowledge, […] itself having the character of an a priori, purely demonstrative science” (Husserl Reference Husserl and Flindlay1970a, Vol. 1, 14). This analysis prefigures the more general exploration of how the things we perceive, think about, and remember transcend the acts of perceiving, thinking, and remembering directed at them (Husserl Reference Husserl and Flindlay1970a, Investigations V and VI; 1982, 211–243, 307–318). Included among these objects of consciousness would be dance performances and dance works, which also transcend the processes of thinking about or experiencing them. Although unlike the physical objects of spatial actuality apprehended in ordinary perception, performances and works are objects of consciousness in that they can be the focus of intentional acts, and are not merely constructs of those thought processes by which they are apprehended.Footnote ⁷ I can see the performance of Marin's Umwelt in Cork. You can remember watching it in Paris. Someone else can read a review or my description and imagine what it was like. The quality of these conscious experiences is different from one case to another, and the conception under which the object is experienced may also vary. But the experiences are focused on the same thing: Umwelt, which is not reducible to any individual's idea, image, or encounter with it. Similarly, of the audience present at a London performance of Marin's work, each member witnesses the same event, though they might interpret it in different ways. The event can also be given in other ways than (as it is in perception) in its bodily presence: “signitively” through a bare verbal designation, for example, or via the processes of memory. But, however it is given, it is not simply a part or moment of a psychological experience.

What is crucial to Husserl's phenomenological perspective is the recognition that, despite their transcendence, such objects are only accessible through the activity of consciousness. As Klaus Held suggests, “Phenomena are ‘in themselves’ in the world, but only in such a way as they show themselves in their respective situatedness and as subjectively ‘for me’” (2003, 9). The existence of ordinary material reality tends to be taken so much for granted that the constitutive role of consciousness may be difficult to grasp,Footnote ⁸ but the idea has clear resonance in the context of art and dance. If dance is a form of intentional action that depends on the conscious engagement of the agents involved (Carr Reference Carr1987; McFee Reference McFee1992), dance is actively constituted as it is experienced; without interpreting what we are doing or seeing as dance, it remains “just” movement or random activity.Footnote ⁹ But the fact that dance depends on consciousness in this way does not mean that a dance performance is reducible to the way each subject experiences it, that each person perceives a different dance. The performance is not the process of kinesthetically experiencing, seeing, or aesthetically appreciating, but something we share with others. Husserl comments in the Crisis on the breakthrough of Logical Investigations: “Philosophers were confined by what was taken for granted, i.e., that each thing appeared differently in each case to each person” (1970b, 165; see also Held Reference Held, Rodemeyer and Rodemeyer2003, 9), but phenomenology focuses on the neglected correlation “between world (the world of which we always speak) and its subjective manners of givenness” (Husserl Reference Husserl and Carr1970b, 165), opening exploration of precisely what varies and what remains the same across distinct apprehensions of a given object.

This emphasis is a corrective to an extreme relativism, which would claim that everyone sees something different when they watch a dance. If this were true, there would be no possibility of discussing, researching, or writing about particular dances, since they would be nothing beyond the individual subject's experience—no shared dance world in which to participate. Dances would be locked in to the private world of an individual's consciousness. Although dance performances and works are transcendent in this sense, they do of course shape shift—as experienced phenomena—depending on the perspective from, or profile, in which they appear. As the earlier discussion of Umwelt suggested, the profiles of this dance include (but are not exhausted by) those available to performers as well as audience members, and, within those broad categories, to different performers depending on role and to various audience members depending on spatial location. Rather than privileging the perspective of the detached observer, Husserl's early work proposes a sophisticated model for distinguishing between qualitatively different experiences via the analysis of the nature of intentional acts, the perception of a dance performance being an intentional act in Husserl's sense.Footnote ¹⁰

Husserl's analysis (1970a, Investigations V and VI) posits that each act involves a psychical process (it is an actual episode of perceiving, remembering, imagining, and so on, experienced by a concrete subject), known as its immanent content. It also has an intentional content, characterized in the two dimensions of intentional quality and matter (1970a, 119–139). The quality delineates the type of experience the act is, for example, remembering the opening section of Umwelt as opposed to perceiving it. The matter, meanwhile, is what the experience is about: the intentional object, but under a certain conception. In the case of Umwelt, for example, the dance might be experienced as a series of tasks to be accomplished, as an elaborately orchestrated choreography of ordinary actions, or as a meditation on humanity's existential predicament (and so on). The same “dance” is intended in each case, but under different conceptions. The nature of a particular act is also bound up with the object's givenness—how and how fully it appears to consciousness. An “intuitively” given object is given directly, in its bodily presence—as is the performance of Umwelt as I sit in the theater watching.Footnote ¹¹ If I read the words “last night's performance of Umwelt,” then the object is given only “signitively” rather than intuitively; it still appears to me, but in an empty way compared to the fullness of intuitive perception (Husserl Reference Husserl and Flindlay1970a, 738–749). If I read a detailed and vivid description of the work, or maybe see a series of evocative still images, the performance would be given imaginatively: It is not bodily present as it is when I actually sit watching in the theater, but nor does it appear in the empty way it does through the bare verbal description. Similarly, Umwelt is given differently to the performer—who perceives some elements proprioceptively, some visually—than to the audience member, for whom it may conversely be easier to perceive the choreographic whole.

It may be tempting here, in deconstructive fashion, to critique the way “full” perception seems privileged at the expense of “empty” representation. But the terminology does not necessarily imply a denigration of signitive appearance: It is recognized as a different mode of givenness with in a spectrum (rather than a binary) of such modes. Reflexivity within dance research requires that the modes of givenness of dances and performances be recognized, making clear how claims to knowledge are grounded, and giving credence by opening them to revision, falsification, and correction. This connects with Husserl's examination (1970a, 773–795; 1982, 326–348) of the nature of evidence, in which knowledge is characterized as “an identification or synthesis between that which is intended and that which is given” (Zahavi Reference Zahavi2003b, 32). Evidence is the fulfillment of the mere intention and transforms it into knowledge. True judgments about dances would normally be based not merely on signitive intentions (the bare facts I might read about it in a brief summary) but on these intentions being fulfilled by perceptions of the performance in its bodily presence—or at least, on more detailed descriptions that are in turn based on adequate evidence.Footnote ¹²

Physical objects (including performances) are perspectival—only one of the profile (Abschattungen; see Moran Reference Moran2000, 115–116) or certain aspects of them appear at any given viewing. As Husserl comments, although the object is given through its perspectival perception, “It is not given wholly and entirely as that which itself is” (Husserl Reference Husserl and Flindlay1970a, 712). Instead, some properties are “illustrated in the nuclear content of the percept,” while others are not, and “[o]n this hinges the possibility of indefinitely many percepts of the same object, all different in content” (Husserl Reference Husserl and Flindlay1970a, 713). This means that intuitive perception can never entirely fulfill the intention and that judgments are subject to revision; the intuitive perception can be fulfilled differently on different occasions, and there can be more or less adequate evidence depending on how good a look one gets at the object. But evidence is not equivalent to the subject's feeling of certainty about what s/he intends. Instead, it depends on the fulfillment of intentions by the adequate givenness of objects. And this implies the importance of knowledge being recognized as intersubjectively valid, of intentions’ openness to fulfillment or denial by the object's givenness to others as well as me (Zahavi Reference Zahavi2003b, 32; see also Zahavi Reference Zahavi and Welton2003a). The focus on the shared nature of the objects of experience—which would include dance works and performances—may be surprising in a dance context where phenomenology has become known as a first-person method—a way of describing individuals’ lived experience of dance. But according to Dan Zahavi, phenomenology is “not at all interested in establishing what a given individual might be thinking about. The phenomenological field of research does not concern private thoughts but intersubjectively accessible modes of appearance” (2003b, 54).

In highlighting both the transcendence of objects and the constitutive activity of consciousness, Husserl's work has potentially radical implications for metaphysics. It rejects realism, on the one hand, which holds that reality must exist in itself, mind-independently. But it also eschews traditional idealism, or the position that the world is a construct of conscious experience. A number of commentators (not least some of Husserl's own students, such as Roman Ingarden) see the move from the position of Logical Investigations (Husserl Reference Husserl and Flindlay1970a) to that of Ideas (Husserl Reference Husserl and Kersten1982) as a problematic shift towards idealism, but revisionist interpreters emphasize the methodological character of the epochē (see the discussion in “Transcendental phenomenology, subjectivity and foundationalism” below) and the distinction between transcendental and traditional idealism. For Zahavi, Husserl does not “deny or question the existence of the real world” but rather rejects “an objectivistic interpretation of its ontological status” (2003b, 70); reality depends on subjectivity in the sense that it “is not simply a brute fact detached from every context of experience and from every conceptual framework, but is a system of validity and meaning that needs subjectivity […] to manifest and articulate itself” (Zahavi Reference Zahavi2003b, 69). However one generally interprets the idealism of Husserl's mature phenomenology, this rejection of metaphysical realism should be less contentious in the domain of the arts than in general terms. Many philosophers of art have maintained that artworks are not reducible to their material embodiment but depend on the interaction of consciousness in order to exist. Joseph Margolis (Reference Margolis1974), for example, claims that art (in the broad sense, including dance) is a culturally emergent phenomenon. Artworks have to have an embodied, spatio-temporal dimension, but are also essentially made up of properties—meanings, and representational and expressive properties—that transcend this embodiment: “These properties […] emerge through the work's situation and role in a matrix of cultural practice” (Shusterman in Cooper ed. 1992, 274). Arthur Danto argues along similar lines that, “Art is the kind of thing that depends for its existence upon theories; without theories of art, black paint is just black paint and nothing more” (1981, 135). If art (including dance) has this kind of intentional as well as material existence, then it becomes relevant to open to examination the complex of conscious activity and experience that enables and structures its being.

Regarding the being of dances, the puzzle of dance ontology has yet to receive extended philosophical discussion.Footnote ¹³ Scrutiny of the relationship between dance works and performances has tended to fix on the type/token distinction as a way of explaining that relationship and unpacking the criteria of identity of a given work. In this view, the dance work Umwelt is a type—an abstract object—of which there can be many possible instances—or concrete tokens—such as the performances in Cork, Paris, and London mentioned earlier. But conceptualizing the existence of dance works in terms of types does not go very far toward answering the full range of ontological questions one might ask: How do dances come into existence? How do they persist? What is the nature of their dependence on other things, such as dancers, performances, scores, or film records? Within the phenomenological tradition, Roman Ingarden's (Reference Ingarden and Grabowicz1973, Reference Ingarden and Meyer1989) detailed analyses of the ontology of literary works, musical works, architecture, pictures, and film are suggestive of the value of in-depth investigation of what dance works are. But a precondition of such inquiry would be the kind of approach that refuses to be drawn in to the terms of a metaphysical debate polarized between realist and traditional idealist views.Footnote ¹⁴ Husserl's phenomenology, with its twin emphasis on objects’ transcendence and dependence on consciousness, provides such an approach.

Transcendental Phenomenology, Subjectivity, and Foundationalism

The thrust and mode of Husserl's writings is also “transcendental” in its epistemological concern with the conditions of knowledge—with how it is possible to know, and with what must be the case if knowledge, indeed experience, is to be possible. This concern too bears directly on dance research. It is relevant to the question of how particular dance performances or works such as Umwelt can appear to us, and how understanding of them as such is possible. But it also impinges on the structures and frameworks that ground the various experiences of and within dance, conceived as a set of practices or processes rather than products. Phenomenology is an essentially descriptive philosophy, trying to uncover such grounds and structures rather than construct a world view. In this, Husserl's approach is continuous with the critical philosophy of other modern Western thinkers such as René Descartes and Immanuel Kant, although it also takes issue with their philosophy in certain respects. Carr (Reference Carr and Welton2003) draws a parallel between Kant's and Husserl's projects: both present neither “a metaphysical doctrine or theory, but a critique of metaphysics” that is “not a theory but a research program or method, a way of looking at and interrogating experience so as to bring to the surface its deepest-lying, uncritically accepted assumptions” (2003, 181).

It is in this sense that Husserl's work is a search for true or “radically unprejudiced knowledge” (Held Reference Held, Rodemeyer and Rodemeyer2003, 7), that is, one that has set aside or suspended the assumptions on which our ordinary ways of viewing the world—including dance—are based. A key feature of phenomenological method—at least from Husserl's Ideas onward—is the epochē, or suspension of the “natural attitude.” This methodological principle is adapted and applied also in phenomenological writing about dance. For example, Sheets-Johnstone is concerned to “bracket” preconceptions and prejudgments so that “they do not color the descriptive account” (1984, 131); this procedure enables “an attitude of being present to the phenomenon, fully and wholly to intuit it as it appears without preshaping it in any way by prior intentions and beliefs” (1978, 34). Fraleigh, meanwhile, writes of “removing commonly held beliefs that obscure our understanding and which may in fact misdirect our attention away from core definitions” (1987, 7).

The generality of the suspension advocated by both Sheets-Johnstone and Fraleigh raises questions—about how far it is possible to suspend familiar frameworks for understanding, but also about whether the effort not to prejudge phenomena is distinctive of a phenomenological, as opposed to any other, research approach. The general way in which it is characterized in dance phenomenology also moves away from the specifically metaphysical inflection of the epochē in Husserl.Footnote ¹⁵ That inflection relates to the challenge to both realism and idealism via the analysis of consciousness in its constitutive role. For Husserl, the epochē “brackets” the natural attitude and its realist assumptions—the assumption that the world is “out there,” existing independently of our conscious engagement with it. In suggesting that this attitude be suspended, Husserl is not denying that the world exists: “I am not negating this ‘world’ as though I were a sophist; I am not doubting its factual being as though I were a skeptic; rather I am exercising the ‘phenomenological’ epochē” (Husserl Reference Husserl and Kersten1982, 61). In other words, he is using the suspension as a methodological device that enables him to focus on how the world is given in conscious experience (Zahavi Reference Zahavi2003b, 69–70). Only by effecting the epochē can the role of consciousness in constituting the world be revealed. To see the world as simply a set of mind-independent objects is to offer no route for interaction between this reality and conscious beings, and to stop phenomenological investigation dead in its tracks.

One aspect of what this might mean for dance concerns the body. Under the natural attitude, we assume our bodies exist as physical facts, as part of the spatial and temporal physical world, interacting causally with other objects within that world.Footnote ¹⁶ While we may be able to objectify our bodies in this way, they are not given to us simply as physical objects, as just other pieces of the mind-independent reality that makes up the fabric of the physical universe. Pre-reflectively, the body is a lived body: It is the subjective locus of worldly experience rather than an objective fact, a complex of subjectively felt sensations or embodied thoughtfulness, not something separable from consciousness. By suspending the objectivist assumption that our bodies are physical facts, the constitutive role of the body as the “medium of all perception,” “of significance for the construction of the spatial world,” can be uncovered (Husserl Reference Husserl, Rojcewicz and Schuwer1989, 61–62). As Zahavi interprets Husserl's analysis (2003b, 98–109), perception of spatial objects is premised on kinesthetic experience—on the mobility of particular parts of the body (in the sense of eyes moving, head turning, for example) and on the potential for the body to move around the object to approach it from a different perspective. Normally, this kinesthetic experience accompanies perception, although it is not typically thematized. (It might, of course, be more frequently thematized in the experience of the dance performer, whose mode of embodiment suggests a particular attunement to kinesthetic sensation.) But even unthematized kinesthetic experience is indispensable to the constitution of perceptual objects. When I watch a dancer performing Umwelt, walking in an arc between two reflective panels, my eyes move, my head may turn, I can in principle if not in fact shift my position to take in a different profile of the dancer and the object she carries. The possible profiles of the dancer correlate with the kinesthetic system of my body and its movement. That system makes available the sense of the object as having a number of absent, alongside its present, profiles. It makes it appear perspectivally, as something spatial and distinct from the experience of its perception. Phenomenologically speaking, then, the embodiment of consciousness appears as a condition of possibility of experience rather than a physical fact.Footnote ¹⁷

These sorts of insights become available through an analysis that begins from the perspective of subjective experience, which is a radically different starting point from that of the natural sciences. To recall, extending the Husserlian project to dance implies uncovering how (embodied) consciousness is structured to make dance knowledge and experience possible. It might be claimed that only by understanding the brain processes going on in choreographers, dancers, and audiences will we properly be able to say what the grounds or conditions of dance are.Footnote ¹⁸ But Husserlian phenomenology is not interested in reducing conscious experience to its physical or biological substrate, as is clear, for example, in the way he distinguishes between the intentional and real relationships between consciousness and object (Husserl Reference Husserl, Rojcewicz and Schuwer1989, 227–228).Footnote ¹⁹ Phenomenological inquiry is focused rather on conscious experience “from the inside,” a dimension that the objectifying methods of natural science have tended to ignore.Footnote ²⁰ To paraphrase Thomas Nagel's famous insight (Reference Nagel1974), there is something it is like to perform or watch dance, to have that experience, which measuring electrical current and blood flow in the brain cannot elucidate, although the observable neurological processes—accessible through an objectification of the mind/body as physical fact, and the application of objective methods—may invariably accompany the experience. But, “[t]he Object stimulates me in virtue of its experienced properties and not its physicalistic ones, of which I need know nothing” (Husserl Reference Husserl, Rojcewicz and Schuwer1989, 228). As Zahavi comments, “Husserl wants to describe our experiences as they are given from a first-person perspective, and it is no part of my experience of, say, a withering oak tree, that something is occurring in my brain” (2003b, 13). Similarly, a phenomenology of dance viewing might reasonably claim that the firing (or otherwise) of mirror neurons is irrelevant to my experience of a dancer's movement on stage; phenomenology's own analysis centers on the experience in its subjective dimension, focusing on its structure and meaning for consciousness. Phenomenology's first-person perspective, then, is not a question of always speaking from the point of view of an individual “I,” but of elucidating the “what it is like” of experience.Footnote ²¹

The brief summary above of some of Husserl's reflections on the body point to some interesting avenues for further exploration, for example, examining the alternation between unreflective and thematized bodily awareness as constitutive of the dancing experience; or investigating how that alteration links, in dance as in Husserl's work, to the relation between self and other, and to the experiences of empathy and alterity as preconditions of worldly perception. The summary of Husserl also begins to challenge the view, sometimes implied if not asserted in dance writing, that a “transcendental” approach entails a focus on consciousness to the exclusion of the body—a focus on the rational thinking subject as origin and determinant of experience, which ignores how embodiment shapes our encounters with the world. It is easy to conflate the notion of transcendental subjectivity with the Cartesian idea of the subject as essentially a thinking thing, and to assume that this means subjectivity reduced to its rationally reflective dimension.Footnote ²² Equally, associating the transcendental ego with “the viewpoint of the detached observer” and an objectifying Cartesian gaze paints Husserlian phenomenology as incapable of understanding dance in terms other than the visual. It also removes the sense, very clear in the revisionist interpretation of Husserl, that transcendental subjectivity is not some mystical entity, or a “view from nowhere,” hovering above real world interaction, but a dimension of any human consciousness that becomes accessible through the phenomenological approach. As suggested by Husserl's analysis of perception and the implication of embodiment therein, “There is no pure point of view and there is no view from nowhere, there is only an embodied point of view” (Zahavi Reference Zahavi2003b, 98).

Particularly in Husserl's later work, embodiment, the relationship with other subjects, and the context of the wider “lifeworld” are explored as dimensions of transcendental subjectivity, challenging the received view that his philosophy is solipsistic in its concern with the individual consciousness (see particularly Husserl Reference Husserl and Carr1970b, 121–189). Zahavi also notes how Husserl's emphasis on the embodied nature of the subject distinguishes his concept of transcendental subjectivity from that of Kant: In the latter's writings, the transcendental subject is a “transpersonal abstractly deduced principle of justification” rather than a concrete subject (2003b, 108). Within dance studies, one of the concerns about the relevance of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology has been centered on its apparent abstraction from human facticity, especially corporeality, which misrepresents the extent of Husserl's interest in embodiment, relations with others, and the lifeworld in general. Also questionable is the understanding of Husserl's enterprise as a quasi-Cartesian endeavor to establish first principles—as “an attempt to disclose a number of certain and indubitable truths that could serve as the systematic foundation and point of departure for all other types of knowledge” (Zahavi Reference Zahavi2003b, 66). If the idea of a descriptive philosophy is taken seriously, then the result is something very different from the findings of a deductive approach modeled on mathematics. Phenomenology is an effort to characterize the structures that make knowledge possible, but does not purport to establish absolutely certain truths, since descriptions are always corrigible and open to revision in the light of new evidence. Thus “the full and conclusive truth about the transcendental dimension is a regulative ideal” and something that “can only be realized in an infinite historical process” (Zahavi Reference Zahavi2003b, 67).

This may go some way toward addressing the concern raised by, for example, Philipa Rothfield (Reference Rothfield, Carter and O'Shea2010) about the universalizing tendencies of phenomenology.Footnote ²³ Part of this concern centers on phenomenology as a philosophy of the subject, which is a contentious notion for poststructuralism and its inheritors. As Rothfield articulates it: “The realm of subjectivity is no longer taken to furnish a ground of knowledge adequate in itself,” because “the subject is a false universal” (Rothfield Reference Rothfield, Carter and O'Shea2010, 303). But Husserl's phenomenology, in the revisionist reading, does not claim that knowledge is grounded purely in the subject's self-givenness and self-presence. As the discussion of transcendent objects above suggests, the otherness of the perceptual, as well as social and cultural, worlds is something that structures the experiential capacities of consciousness. If Zahavi, Carr, and Welton are correct in interpreting his idealism as methodological rather than metaphysical, Husserl does not—as Heidegger argues—posit the subject as the primary substance. He does not reduce the world to representations belonging to this subject. Nor does the idea of subjectivity, as a perspective on experience from the inside, equate with the humanist notion of the self: Self-givenness is not a question of “self-knowledge in the substantial sense of ‘who am I?’” (Zahavi Reference Zahavi2003b, 94), but of how experience is given differently to the experiencing subject. And Husserl's phenomenology of time consciousness (Husserl Reference Husserl and Brough1990) suggests that knowledge is not confined within the horizon of present: “Our intuitive consciousness of the present profile of the object is always accompanied by an intentional consciousness of the object's horizon of absent profiles” (Zahavi Reference Zahavi2003b, 96). The same corrigibility applies to dance knowledge as to the experience of perceptual objects: “To speak of transcendent objects is to speak of objects that are not part of my consciousness and that cannot be reduced to my experience of them. It is to speak of objects that might always surprise us, that is, objects showing themselves differently than expected” (Zahavi Reference Zahavi2003b, 70). The otherness of dance phenomena always has the potential to challenge, when we look again, more closely, or from a different perspective.