Dance, Mimesis, consciousness and the Imagination

One of the primary assumptions of dance studies is that dance as an art only exists in the moment of movement and as a result it is transmitted, in a form of mimesis, directly from the body of the teacher to that of the student. Historically, prior to the advent of mirrored studios, television, video and the internet, this was true. However dancers throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century have moved to studying dance via different mediated environments: first the mirror . . . then the screen. This essay asks a series of questions concerning the kinesthetic experience of the dancer whose training is increasingly influenced by technology. What is the impact of these spatial and technological developments on a dancers’ conscious awareness or their kinesthetic interpretation of self? Has the experience of the dancing self moved from the cultural to the virtual? If so, how has Marleau-Ponty’s version of the ‘lived’ body been transformed by the body/mind’s engagement with technology? Are dance cultures being defined by their locality or by their evolution over the internet?The conference was sponsored by A.D.S.A., the Department of Performance Studies, the School of Letters, Arts and Media, and the Faculty of Arts of the University of Sydney