Some Fleshy Thinking: Improvisation, Experience, Perception

This chapter reveals the tacit ways of knowing inherent in somatically based dance improvisation practices and considers how such embodied knowings might become present, be recognized and understood, by both dancer and viewer. Written as a playful dialogue between “Dancer” and her “Practice,” concepts are drawn from phenomenology to elaborate and reveal the ways that deeply internalized experiential movement practices may enter and expand perceptual fields. This is approached in two interconnected stages asking first, How, as an improviser, is it possible to know “something” of the dancing body while “in-action”? and second, How is improvisation, as a mode of embodied research and knowing, developed with, and made “sense” of, by an audience? This entails a consideration of the relationships between body, experience, perception, and knowledge.