Abstract

This essay aims to answer a simple question: why dance matters to us. I will argue that of all the philosophical approaches to aesthetics, it is phenomenology that is best equipped to answer this question satisfactorily. Other approaches, which derive from poststructuralism, critical theory, semiotics or historicist hermeneutics tend to assimilate meaning in dance to the specific sociocultural and historical contexts in which dance works were produced, and hence to methodologies aligned with the linguistic or literary turns in intellectual history and the human sciences. These approaches neglect the foundational nature of dance as movement, the distinctive way in which it reveals and epitomizes our animate nature. Whilst other theories attempt to explain what a dance means or could mean, a phenomenological approach shows how it comes to be meaning-bearing at all, why it is that it seems to us that dance has something to say to us, without our being able to necessarily put this into words. Above all, the phenomenological approach taken here aims to explicate the intrinsic, intuitive and aesthetic significance of dance by showing how it, in common with other artforms, “aesthetically exemplifies factors which are basic to our cognitive and metaphysical inherence in the world”. I will aim to explain why dance engages our attention at all, prior to any semiological (or other) abstractions of its content. This will involve explicating how some of the basic factors at work in our movement, perception and spatial positioning are exemplified and transformed through dance, seen as both a visual and kinesthetic medium.