Learning from the Arts: Dance as Emancipation of the Body

Although the process of education and learning is traditionally related to reason and its abilities, aesthetics has long played with the idea of emancipation of sensitivity and its enhancement through the aesthetic experience of the arts. In this paper, I will address one particular example of art experience being able to indicate an emancipatory process of learning—the case of dance. According to S. H. Fraleigh, the process of learning how to dance, with its disciplining of the body, is a testimony to the neglect and violence towards our bodily lived experience. On the other hand, the experience gained through dancing is exactly the opposite—the experience which reveals not only aesthetic phenomena per se, but also our very bodily nature. Fraleigh’s phenomenological aesthetics of dance also implies that such an emancipatory effect of the aesthetic experience of dance will be transmitted to the audience as well, that it is not restricted to the artists—dancers—only. The focus of my analysis will be exactly this receptive aesthetic experience of dance and its formative, educational, and emancipatory potentials. I will show that the kinaesthetic nature of the phenomenon of dance, according to the positions of phenomenological aestheticians, can in fact open up a particular possibility of questioning the idea of education in traditional terms. More precisely, I will argue that the phenomenological analysis of the dance phenomenon demands not only the questioning of traditional approaches to body, mind-body relationship, and finally the character of our very basic experience, which determines all our ideas and concepts, but that it also implies a change in the pre-reflective dimension of consciousness, which can be actualized exactly through the aesthetic experience of art. The fact that we are pre-reflectively aware of the relation between ourselves and the Other exactly through our bodily nature can bring forth different perspectives on education and, perhaps, help us to understand it better. In order to develop my argument, I will focus on the critique of the primacy of vision, in favour of the primacy of movement, as presented in the works of S. H. Fraleigh and M. Sheets-Johnstone.