Empathic Kinesthetic Perception

“Empathic kinesthetic perception suggests a combination of mimesis and empathy. Paradoxically, it implies that one has to close one’s eyes to look at movement, ignoring its visual effects and concentrating instead on feeling oneself to be in the other’s body, moving.”

--Deidre Sklar, “Five Premises for a Culturally Sensitive Approach to Dance”

Paradoxical Body

"The dancer does not move in space; rather, the dancer secretes, creates space with his movement."

"The body must open itself to space, must become, in a certain way, space. And interior space must acquire a texture similar to the one of the body so that gestures may flow as easily as movement propagating through muscles. The space of the body--as exterior space--satisfies this demand. The body moves in it without facing the obstacles of foreign, objective space--with all its objects it density, its prefixed orientations, its own points of reference. In the space of the body, it is the body that creates its own referents to which all exterior directions must submit themselves."

-José Gil, “The Paradoxical Body”

Habitus

"Individual and group histories bear upon the cultural practices of a community, which in turn incorporates that history into itself so that it becomes forgotten, that is, perceived as natural rather than conditioned. Habitus is produced and it is second nature....I cite habitus as a set of bodily practices that can be studied in order to understand both the history that produces those practces and the ways in which a community responds to those objective conditions... But how do we study habitus? How do we perceive the collective movement practices of an entire community? When I describe movement in a certain city, can I rely on just my own somatic perception as information? In other words, is my body enough?"

-Sansan Kwan, "Jagged Presence in the Liquid City"

Leigh Kotsilidis

Before Meteorologists

With rain we gauge the split rail's give
and take, the shimmy-shake of a chair leg,
power lines that wheedle, break. We take
it to the limit, risk high points, follow birds paths,
circle just once before landing.

In the way robins seize mayflies passing
and gliders dissolve into flittering bees,
we are swollen crowd fraying, flyways faltering,
snow-struck and wind-strung. The only space
is the space collapsing space creates.

It comes down to this: final drop, a single flick
of finger lightning. At this elevation our last
comforting thought is a spontaneous generation:
a transubstantiation of horsehair to snake,
clump of mud to snail, hailstone to whooping crane.


--from Hypotheticals by Leigh Kotsilidis