Bundling Meaningfulness in a Felt-Bodily Manner

Structured Movement as Aisthetic Labor¹

Birgit Abels

Introduction

Neo-phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz (1928-2021) considers any and all creative processes as intrinsically dancing movements, owing to the nature of what he terms “suggestions of motion” (Bewegungssuggestionen):

The felt body, not the artist’s mind, receives the inspiration: in the felt body’s perception, a mentally or emotionally conceived motif grows from suggestions of motion to the Gestalt in which it can then, as it transitions into a visible, audible, or tactile medium, literally or metaphorically see the light of the day. Thus, an artwork is an objectified gesture inspired by felt-bodily sensing, a dance solidified into fixed form.²

Where artistic creativity transforms from inspirational spark into manifestation, Schmitz argues, the felt body draws on its ability to sense its motion-laden environment. As the felt body—perhaps it is more instructive to refer to it as the feeling body³ in this context—parses the complex stream of para-reflective sensory information, it finds itself incited by a motional motive which grows into a Gestalt. This Gestalt literally takes form as it transitions from abstract inspiration into a visible, audible, or palpable medium. The process by which a creative impetus becomes manifest—as a gesture, a music performance, or a piece of art—is, therefore, a motor practice at heart. As such, it is intimately tied to the felt body.⁴ This is why, for Schmitz, a piece of art in essence consists of suggestions of motion which, sensed by the felt body, have manifested into an objectified Gestalt. This process, in which “human felt-bodilyness translates into the objective Gestalten of the fine arts,” hinges on the unfolding of Gestalten (Gestaltverlauf⁵). Importantly, specific Gestalten tend to merge with specific types of suggestions of motion; otherwise a Gestaltverlauf would be arbitrary.

Bearing this in mind, Schmitz suggests that dancing is a motional phenomenon located in primary proximity to any aisthetic comprehension of the world in which we live. It is felt-bodily interaction with the temporo-spaciousness surrounding us and the holistic meaningfulness present in our felt-bodily surroundings. Schmitz’s suggestions of motion are a type of kinetic atmospheric energy that feeds into the rhythm of a person’s vital drive, thus impacting them in their entire being. Schmitz positions these suggestions of motion as the heartbeat of vitality in a general sense; therefore, his philosophy should be intuitive to choreomusicologists and others exploring dance as a felt-bodily practice,⁶ as it already has been to dance therapists in particular.⁷ It resonates well with key ideas in the philosophy of dance around the turn of the twentieth century, ranging from Nietzsche⁸ to von Laban.⁹ And yet, like felt-bodily holisms, Schmitz’s suggestions of motion fail to address an analytical category that is fundamental to any structured movement activity: the cultural distinctiveness of performance conventions, without which, paradoxically, a specific dance movement’s meaningfulness will forever remain out of reach. Contemporary global dance studies, by contrast, tend to wrestle with the opposite problem: with much of its theoretical and conceptual underpinnings derived from postmodern and poststructuralist approaches to the body, here the moving body tends to be “seen as a technical tool with intentionality that enumerates political agendas, or a text on which various politics are inscribed or negotiated.”¹⁰ Contemporary global dance studies tend to fail to address the specifically motional affordances the felt-bodily negotiation of Chakravorty’s “various politics”—via structured movement practices—draws on. To me, this somewhat paradoxical situation urges inquiry into the relationship between felt-bodily sensing and cultural qualification. In this chapter, I follow this invitation by making a foray into dance as a threshold practice that strategically links felt-bodily sensing with specific structured movement conventions, diffuse meaningfulness with cultural qualification, and allows us to conceptualize atmospheres together with the cultural frameworks within which they unfold their efficacy. I am not so much interested here in a choreomusical analysis of structured movement activity that seeks to analyze choreographic structure alongside connotative semantic content.¹¹ Instead, following up on Schmitz’s notion of the motor quality of all creative movement, I will inquire into structured movement systems as a distinctly kinesthetic type of aisthetic labor, in Schmitz’s fellow neo-phenomenologist Gernot Böhme’s sense.

To scholars studying Pacific Island performing arts, the insight that the movement dimension of activities or activity systems (often referred to as “dance” in a Northern Atlantic context) works systematically across several distinct layers—thus bringing each into conversation with one another on divergent levels of meaningfulness—is not new at all.¹² In her work on Hawaiian hula, Adrienne L. Kaeppler has emphasized the importance of the processuality behind the emergence of such complex meaningfulness in performance, underlining how “often, the process of performing is as important as the cultural form produced.”¹³ Scholars working in other areas of Oceania second this appraisal.¹⁴ In keeping with Oceanic notions of deep meaning versus surface meaning—also relevant across the entire region¹⁵—she describes how movement motifs may depict specific animate beings (such as flowers or animals) or inanimate things (such as objects) but, at the same time, also refer to “veiled or hidden meanings, making reference to genealogical lines, chiefs, and their deeds, and thus enhancing the texts.”¹⁶ This leads her to distinguish between the “visible” (i.e., an actual performance), and the “invisible” (i.e., the “aesthetic system”) by which specific movements are engendered with meaningfulness:

Only if one knows the social and cultural background will the visible and the invisible emerge in all their dimensions to reveal the political acumen of the creator or […] the reinterpreter. The resulting products were passed from generation to generation to become chronicles of history and social relationships objectified in verbal and visual forms.¹⁷

A key to understanding hula is kaona, a deeply Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiian) concept embracing the idea of the “hidden meaning” and significatory stratification inherent in both language and cultural practices. Only with a deep understanding of kaona, Kaeppler argues, does a performance’s meaningfulness “become […] visible as a product of human action and interaction in the context of a socially constructed movement system. The system itself is invisible, existing in the minds of people as movement motifs, specific choreographies, and meaningful imagery.”¹⁸ Kaeppler’s interpretation is reminiscent of Schmitz’s distinction between suggestions of motion as an invisible kinetic impetus and motional sensory energy bursting with meaningfulness, on the one hand, and their manifestation as physical movement or a piece of art as “dance having taken shape,” on the other. In several ways, however, Kaeppler and Schmitz are coming from opposite directions. Kaeppler’s interest is in the culturally specific manifestations in the structured movement of the “invisible system”; Schmitz’s is in the holistic experientiality through which felt-bodily sensing affects human being-in-the-world.

My own interest is piqued by what one could refer to as the missing link between the two perspectives. By taking a step back and looking at the upstream qualities of aisthetic labor,¹⁹ I extend the well-established viewpoint that the human body is a “moving agent in a spatially organized world of meanings,”²⁰ suggesting that to engage in structured movement activity is to go beyond dimensionally anchored meaning. I argue that to partake in structured movement is to take a plunge into the chaotic and messy intensity of what Schmitz calls surfaceless space—to navigate surfaceless space’s complexity in order to then dwell on the threshold between the surfaceless space from which creative energy emerges, the directional space in which felt bodies incorporate creative energy along culturally qualified conventions, and the dimensional space in which the now-transduced energetic flow takes shape as kinetic movement. This is what I mean when I refer to structured movement activity as a threshold practice: a process that guides the felt body from surfaceless to directional to dimensional space, not in a linear fashion but as an energetic impetus fulfilling itself as body movement as it explores the fringes of the moving felt body’s experiential spatialities. Framing structured movement activity as a threshold practice, I will explore it in the following as a specific type of aisthetic labor. The actual “labor” is for the felt body to manifest meaningfulness into visible structured movement. Regardless of its (in)visibility, however, the holistic meaningfulness energized by the flux of suggestions of motion intervenes into felt-bodily temporospatial economies and, as such, is engendered with cultural qualification. Cultural qualification enters the energetic flow of suggestions of motion in directional space, strategically oscillating in the directions of both surfaceless and dimensional space at all times. It is, thus, no less a phenomenon of dimensional space than of surfaceless space, but it also goes beyond both. I will briefly turn to the mythological framing of the ruk, the traditional men’s dance in Palau, Western Micronesia, exploring the oral history of its origin to take a closer look at structured movement activity at the interfaces of surfaceless and dimensional space. In closing, I will reflect on the conceptual implications for this contribution’s central question: what is the aisthetic labor of structured movement?

Structured Movement as Aisthetic Labor

Gernot Böhme, the second pivotal figure in neo-phenomenology next to Schmitz and one generation the latter’s junior, contends that aisthetic labor is implicitly or explicitly central to any post-Benjaminian aesthetics. It is

generally conceived of as the production of atmospheres and, as such, ranges from cosmetics to advertisement, from interior and stage design to art in a more specific sense. Autonomous art, in this context, is simply one specific form of aisthetic labor, and even where it is autonomous, it has a social function: to impart, in situations that relieve their participants of their agentivity (such as in museums and exhibitions), familiarity with and exposure to atmospheres.²¹

To labor aisthetically, then, is to invest skill, time, and energy in the emergence of atmosphere as collective feelings poured out in space. Böhme strategically distinguishes between the production and the reception side of aisthetic labor; he identifies aisthetic theory as, on the one hand, a general theory of the production of atmospheres, and on the other, as a theory of perception in an encompassing sense from the recipient’s perspective. In the context of the latter, “perception is understood as the experience of the presence of people, things, and surroundings.”²² Böhme’s categorical distinction between the dynamics governing the production and reception of atmospheres, respectively, has been useful in application-oriented contexts, such as architectural design; in connection with structured movement, however, it is of little analytical value because the “producing” movement artist is always already a “receiving” participant as well. Movement artists do not create an objectifiable atmosphere, they are enveloped by the atmosphere their aisthetic labor creates throughout the process. The atmospheres created by structured movement—through their performative processuality—are characterized by a heightened immediacy of Böhme’s “presence of people, things, and surroundings.” This is where I locate structured movement’s ability to intensify—Kaeppler, in connection with hula, uses the word “enhance”²³—the meaningfulness inherent in the complex and ongoing stream of suggestions of motion by transducing them into and manifesting them as culturally qualified bodily structured movement. This intensification occurs through a bundling of diverging spatial and temporal modalities of experience.²⁴ Any type of bodily movement can experientially bundle such divergent experientialities and, by doing so, produce atmospheric energy. Through structural self-referentiality (Kaeppler’s “invisible system”), however, the culturally qualified nature of structured movement atmospheres can open dance situations up to their own historicity, thus dynamically positioning a structured movement performance vis-à-vis the situation’s temporospatial positionality. This positionality emerges atmospherically from the aisthetic stream of meaningfulness through the aisthetic labor of structured movement for the brief duration of the performance or just a moment thereof. Through this process, a performance movement becomes meaningful. It takes cultural conventions of structured movement for Kaeppler’s “deep meaning” to manifest, and it takes deep meaning for cultural conventions of structured movement to self-referentially bundle divergent experiential frames into atmospheric intensity.²⁵

Thinking of Böhme’s aisthetic labor regarding Schmitz, a key moment of the transductive work that occurs as a Gestalt unfolds and manifests—as musical motif, structured object, or physical object—is the transition of a felt-bodily sensed suggestion of motion in surfaceless space to, in one way or another, physical motion in dimensional space. Space for Schmitz “is not originally encountered as the measurable, locational space assumed in physics and geography, but rather as a predimensional surfaceless realm manifest to each of us in undistorted corporeal experience, for example, in hearing voluminous sounds or sensing atmospheres.”²⁶ Schmitz gives the example of the resounding of large church bells, the sonic immediacy of which envelop those within hearing range. Another example would be the weather, which

presents surfaceless spaces that are felt immediately in our bodily responsiveness to the atmosphere surrounding us. Crucially, the felt body itself is a surfaceless space, or more precisely an assemblage of many such spaces: corporeal ‘islands’ such as the stomach region or the soles of feet are felt as diffuse but still separately identifiable spatial realms.²⁷

Surfaceless space is primary in Schmitz’s neo-phenomenology; dimensional space, to him, is an abstract construction and a secondary spatial experience. Structured movement activity impacts surfaceless space in a way that introduces directionality to surfacelessness:²⁸ in the now directional space of structured movement activity, suggestions of motion, for instance, as exuded by chants and music, can be incorporated in a felt-bodily manner, and in this way feed into one’s own movement practice.²⁹ Similar to structured movement activities, a suggestion of motion enters directional-spatial experience; its motional energy transduces from energetic flow into palpable structured movement. Such transduction intensifies the synesthetic quality of structured movement: that which we know in directional space and that which we sense in a felt-bodily manner in surfaceless space enter into correspondence. “Body-spaces of sound and sound-spaces of the body enter into conversation with one another to give rise to new body-sound-spaces,” writes Stephanie Schroedter.³⁰ Such new body-sound spaces are always transitory and ephemeral, and I suggest we conceive of them as the threshold between surfaceless, directional, and dimensional space. To dance, then, is to experientially explore and savor a spatial threshold experience, and to actively engage with the spatial properties of one’s environment. This accounts for the experiential intensity of structured movement.

Weaving Together Temporospatial Complexity beyond Time and Space: Palauan ruk

If all creative processes are essentially motional in nature, then it makes sense, against this backdrop, that Pacific Indigenous communities have not traditionally categorized motion in a way that compares to the notion of “dance.” “Dance,” in its academic usage, is a distinctly North Atlantic category and sets a specific type of kinesthetic repertoire apart (from daily life activities but also from other types of cultural practices), assigning a bounded category to it. In most of Oceania, kinesthesia is deeply entangled with daily practices and to think in terms of dance as a distinct category would conflict with lived experience. Kaeppler has suggested the term “structured movement systems” instead.³¹ Structured movement systems, by definition, include some that are integrally related to music. They are “systems of knowledge, the products of action and interaction, and processes through which action and interaction occur.”³² Structured movement systems

denote specially marked or elaborated systems of movement […] that result from creative processes that manipulate human bodies in time and space in such a way that movement is formalized and intensified in much the same manner as poetry intensifies and formalizes language. […] These specially marked movement systems may be considered art, work, ritual, ceremony, entertainment, or any combination of these […] A person may perform the same or a similar sequence of movements (consisting of grammatically structured motifs) as a ritual supplicant, as a political act, as an entertainer, or as a marker of identity. Thus, the same movement sequence may be meant to be decoded differently if performed for gods, […] for a human audience, or […] as a participant for fun; and it may be decoded differently depending on an individual’s background and understanding of a particular performance and the individual’s mental and emotional state at the time.³³

The Austronesian language spoken in Palau, a small island nation in the westernmost part of Micronesia, has the neologism dangs, adopted from the English word dance. Generally, however, Palauans will discuss specific dance forms by the name of their dance genre (e.g., ngloik, ruk) rather than a generic category. The actual movements and motion-based gestures are inherited from either the Gods or the ancestors. Similar to elsewhere in Oceania, therefore, they “may be perpetuated as cultural artifacts and aesthetic performances, even if their meanings have been changed or forgotten.”³⁴ Importantly, such underlying systems of structured movement are invisible themselves, “existing in the minds of people as movement motifs, specific choreographies, and meaningful imagery;”³⁵ but, as the performers move their bodies through time-space, the dance takes shape as visible form. This is, in a tangible manner, reminiscent of Schmitz’s archetypical creative process, which transduces motional energy into a visible medium and impacts the performers’ spatial surroundings.

Schmitz’s notion of space(s) radically complicates notions of space as established in the North Atlantic philosophical traditions. At the same time, however, it remains indebted to European conceptualizations of space, which make a basic distinction between the spatial and the temporal. Many Oceanic languages, by contrast, know the word “space-time” in one form or another,³⁶ which reflects a conceptualization based on the sense that time, place, and space cannot categorically be distinguished from one another: “The vā [i.e., space-time in Samoan and Tongan³⁷] is necessarily relational, implying not a static point of observation but a movement, or possible movement between.”³⁸ More specifically, vā perceives of space as points and their interrelationships rather than a bounded area.³⁹ Tevita O. Ka’ili conceives of the Tongan practice of tauhi vā as a nurturing cultural practice of establishing and strengthening beautiful sociospatial relationships. She emphasizes how it is impossible to think of vā, space, without tā, time, both in Tonga and Hawai’i. In Hawaiian culture, “the past is the time in front and the future is the time that comes behind.”⁴⁰ Ka’ili’s thinking is closely related to Tongan historical anthropologist ’Ōkusitino Māhina’s tā-vā theory of art.⁴¹ Māhina sees tā and vā as the common medium of all things natural, mental, and social that exist. Accordingly, all things unfold in time and space, with nothing whatsoever existing above or beyond this realm. All things in nature, mind, and society have four dimensions: three spatial dimensions (height/depth, width/breadth, length) and one temporal dimension, which is form.⁴² Ka’ili explains how tā-vā is “collective and communal but […] also arranged in a circular fashion”; and, “the purpose of ontologically organizing these concepts in a cyclical fashion is to bring multiple entities into harmonious relations with one another.”⁴³ This is made visible in the practice of tauhi vā, especially among closely related people in a ‘aiga or kin group.”⁴⁴ At the same time, tauhi vā underlines the social importance of tā and vā, which literally mean “beating space:” Tauhi vā, as a cultural practice, regulates and maintains social relationships between groups by performing reciprocity. The symmetry or asymmetry of such exchange-based relationships leads to either a harmonious relationship or a conflict.⁴⁵ This illustrates the deep entanglement of notions of time-space and sociality in Tonga.

Oceanic temporalities, thus, tend to place emphasis on the interlacing of the cultural, the relational, and the spatial with the temporal. While this differs significantly from Schmitz’s understanding of space, it does resonate with his acknowledgment that music-making and structured movement are spatial practices of the felt body and, simultaneously, ingrained with a fundamental historicity: “[In sound], sound’s history often lives on,” contends Schmitz.⁴⁶ To engage with music through kinesthetic listening, then, can also be understood as a temporalizing act of the felt body as engaged with its temporo-spatial environment.⁴⁷

This is certainly the case for chelitakl rechuodel, the traditional repertoire of the performing arts in Palau, Micronesia, and a closer look at the traditional conceptualization of structured movement activity in Palau will reveal the central role structured movement and kinesthetic listening hold vis-à-vis lived Palauan temporality (see Abels 2022⁴⁸). In traditional Palauan thinking, motion is ingrained in the concept of space-time to begin with:

[Traditional Palauan] culture unites [the two categories of space and time] through the notion of a journey (omerael, from the verb merael, “to walk, to travel,” itself derived from the noun rael, “path, road, way” [PAN *dalan]). The journey of a god, person, group, or mythological creature provides a basic space-time continuum for conceptualization and discourse.⁴⁹

Chelitakl rechuodl are not the result of the specifics of Palauan temporospatiality; in fact, they are a set of cultural conventions in the practice of Indigenous time-space that render them experiential in their “deep” sense. “Deep,” here, refers to what Kaeppler has referred to as the “invisible system,” the complex entanglement of cultural, social, and aesthetic values interlacing with Oceanic spatio-temporality (note here that while surfaceless space is primary to Schmitz, he also refers to it as the “deeper layers” of spatiality⁵⁰). Importantly, the spiritual world is a fundamental component of Palauan deep time, and Palauan structured movement activities were originally created by chelids, the Palauan Gods. During the Hamburg South Seas Expedition of 1908-1910, Augustin Krämer recorded the following oral history describing the invention of the Palauan ruk, a men’s dance:

[Uchelchelid] is considered the inventor of the ruk. It is said that once when he sat on the shore of a Ugél pelú, he saw a gorovídĕl [caranx] jumping after a tebér sardine. The jumps inspired him so much that he decided to adopt the caranx as a symbol of the dance. In a Ira͡i, especially, this is observed, because their god Medege͡i is a descendent of Ugél‛lëgalíd [= Uchelchelid]. In a Ira͡i, during the period of seclusion, the dancers have in the bai [men’s house], in addition to their tet hand baskets, another little basket called gomsangĕl. This basket contains the betel quid for the god and is hung on the bai wall behind the back of its owner. In a Ira͡i, where several other unusual things occur, the klemea͡i [‘locked in’, i.e. secluded for the purpose of the ruk preparation] people engage in something special. Everyone from [a specific house] makes thread (ker‛rël) and weaves a net with a particular mesh size; even the uriúl members [i.e., the ones of lower rank in the social hierarchy] take part. All of the nets are then tied together, resulting in a long net, which is spread out over the water on the Megórei stone wharf […], as a soul-catching net for the protective deities, the 7 Galid [‘Gods’], the Tekíĕl maláp [‘man-eating devils’] […]. These special practices apply only to a Ira͡i and Ngátpang, however, which are the villages of Medege͡i pélau [= a specific chelid] […]. after all of these activities, the day of coming out begins in earnest.
In the morning, the village women go to the village bai and rub turmeric on the klemea͡i. Each of them puts on a women’s skirt. In this state, the men now advance in a festive procession towards the ocean, holding the wooden gorovídĕl in their raised right hands. At the edge of the path, at some distance, lies a tridacna clam shell filled with water. The leader dips the head of his dance rod figure into this, an act known as omárĕg ra gorovídĕl “the dipping of the caranx.” After this, the group returns to the bai in silence, where the women perform their dances on the stage. Now has come the time for the dancers to show what they have learned while being sequestered. First, they do klemea͡i, a little dance and then return to their bai. It is not until the afternoon that the great dance gorovídĕl is performed; it is followed by the kotebádĕl, the other clubs.⁵¹

The ruk’s choreography is predetermined by the ancestors.⁵² The actual dance is of divine origin and the actual performance of a ruk calls upon the deities and ancestor spirits to an extent that determines the structure of the months-long seclusion period prior to the performance of a grand ruk. Ritual objects manifest and further consolidate this link into the spiritual realm, rendering the presence of spirits felt. To perform the ruk following the ritual observance of the traditional klemea͡i, then, is not only to dwell on the threshold between surfaceless, directional, and dimensional space. It is also to commune with spiritual beings in the here and now, and to dissolve the boundary between the past and the present while performing—in the present—along linear time structures. The ruk makes this possible by creating a performance space in which the performers can listen kinesthetically,⁵³ and in Schmitzian terms, act upon suggestions of motion. Through its genre conventions, it also provides a set of cultural strategies for both the performers and the audience to navigate the wealth of suggestions of motion it creates space for. These strategies are based on structured movement’s ability to guide the felt body in bundling suggestions of motion and transduce them into an encompassing sensation of meaningfulness.

Conclusion

The dancing felt body’s aisthetic labor is based on its kinesthetic awareness.⁵⁴ Kinesthetic listening emerges as a participatory multimodal practice of attunement to motional energy. Attuned in this way to motional energy, structured movement activity in Palau can be cast as a cultural strategy to intensify—via the felt-body’s sensibilities—the sensation of human interconnectedness with everything and everyone around—not only in an ontological and epistemological, but also in a social, cultural, historical, and temporospatial sense. As the dancing felt body bundles and condenses atmospheric suggestions of motion via bodily movement, these suggestions of motion connect the ruk performers both with the aisthetic stream of sensory perception, and with those beings and things that share the same space.

Expanding on Schmitz, cultural techniques of the felt-body such as structured movement are strategies to interact with and intensify the holistic meaningfulness present in our felt-bodily surroundings. In doing so, they significantly alter surrounding spatial economies, giving rise to the emergence of new suggestions of motion and changing extant ones. It is of central importance to note here that structured movement activities do not change space as a dimension external to the felt body; the space of structured movement is, by nature, a space-as-felt-bodily-connection. Seen against this background, then, it is no coincidence that Schmitz’s conception of dance figures almost literally in the reflections of one of the seminal figures of expressionist dance, Mary Wigman (1886-1973), who in 1922 described the ballet dancer’s sensation as she does a piqué tour as one of becoming one with “all the oscillating celestial bodies” and of “communion with space;”⁵⁵ or, in Japanese butoh performer Min Tanaka’s statement that “when I dance, I don’t dance in the place, but I am the place.”⁵⁶ Böhme, in recourse to Baumgarten, seeks to emphasize the ultimately epistemological nature of sensory perception and, as such, of aisthetic labor.⁵⁷ Following Schmitz, such knowing emerges as the unfolding of Gestalten, which manifest in one palpable form or another. Importantly, they also exude suggestions of motion themselves, thus re-investing themselves in the feedback loop between suggestions of motions, their unfolding as Gestalten and the dimensional sonic event.

For Schmitz, Wigman’s “communion with space” would be a natural effect of dance ecstasy: “Ecstatic dance completes itself as an intoxication in which the present and the self […] are surrendered to an unmeasurable expanse.”⁵⁸ In her own words, Wigman describes quite vividly the unfolding of Gestalten in this process:

A [sense of] knowing flashes up in her. The wide, invisible, transparent space extends in formless waves, a lifting of the arm will change it. Ornaments emerge, massive, big, disappear again; delicate arabesques dance past, subside; a jump, right in; forms burst, with an evil fizzle; a fast spin; the walls give way. She drops her arms, standing still again, looks into the empty room: the dancer’s realm.⁵⁹

Structured movement activity, then, is intense aisthetic labor. The multimodal dynamics of structured movement allow for the “sensation of dropping through space;”⁶⁰ space, in turn, is filled with suggestions of motion and shared feelings. To drop through space with structured movement, thus, is to surrender to the temporospaciousness surrounding oneself; and, to feel out for the otherwise ineffable holisms of lived experience is the aisthetic labor of kinesthesia.

The neo-phenomenological-inspired terminology and conceptual apparatus I have drawn on in this contribution offer to the study of dance both a language and an analytic for the experiential intensity described by dancers from very diverging backgrounds such as Wigman and Tanaka. Importantly, it is a conceptual framework that adds an analytical understanding—finely attuned to the felt body—to the metaphorical description of kinesthetic intensity.