Improvisation as Paradigm for Phenomenologies

“When phenomenology is true to its intent, it never knows where it is going.” These words open Sondra Fraleigh’s seminal essay, “A Vulnerable Glance: Seeing Dance through Phenomenology” (1991), in reference to Maurice Merleau- Ponty (1962, xxi). Fraleigh goes on to describe how phenomenology “develops unpredictably according to the contents of consciousness” (1991, 11). She notes how the present-centered approach and descriptive aims of phenomenology means that it is open to temporal change and shifts in focus for it has no inherently appropriate, or inappropriate, topics.