Maxine Sheets, The Phenomenology of Dance

Philosophy 352
October 18, 2008
Chris Harris

Maxine Sheets’s book The Phenomenology of Dance explores the structure, movement, and frame in which dance appears as a phenomenon in our world. Utilizing the- phenomenological tradition Sheets sweeps through the elements of dance approaching them as a “lived experience” revealing dance’s forms in time and space while laying out her arguments for an aesthetic and academic appreciation of dance.
Sheets begins by framing a perspective of dance. She states when dance is present for us it is a lived experience, and recognized as a created phenomenon. From the created experience of a dancer or the experience regarded by a spectator dance forms a dynamic totality. This totality is built, respectively from forms that the dancers themselves are “implicitly” aware of. In this respect dancers have a: “Lived experience of the sheer dynamic flow of force…the dancers are reflexively aware neither of themselves, nor of the dance as a pre-existing form through which they move” (p.6). The overlaying reason Sheets gives for this phenomenon is that the dancers in this instance are not aware of the form because the dancers are not merely “agents” of the dance, but are rather the focal point and creators of the dance itself. Sheets further states that: “Only when we reflect upon the experience of the work as it is being created and presented, we remove ourselves from our immediate encounter with it, that we interrupt the flow and fragmentize its inherent totality” (p.6). By reflecting on the dance itself either as a spectator or as a dancer the presented totality ceases to be a lived experience and becomes a reflective past event. After giving a perspective of dance, Sheets then designates her intentions: to explore the “nature” of dance, its structures and the encounter of dance as “a formed and performed art”.
Through the lens that phenomenology provides Sheets begins to explore the structures of lived experiences though temporality. Sheets views the structure of temporality as two distinct substructures:”static and dynamic temporality. Static temporality each moment or experience is recognized as separate from the rest and as such becomes: past, present, future. Having rendered static temporality to parts, Sheets claims that the parts are only meaningful because they exist in relation to each other and are thus diasporatic; subsequently human consciousness exists in this way as a whole and in separate parts. The second sub-structure of dynamic temporality is a “pre-awareness” of time such that a person recognizes the passing, or passed time. This state of awareness is experienced in a backward manner, a person walking experiences walking at present toward a future, yet are creating a past as they move forward. It though this dynamic that “human consciousness attains a permanency” (Sheets, p.19), that it is a synthesis of the parts that create the whole or in this case the permanency of a person. The reflective state of either dynamic or static temporality reveals, what both Sartre and Sheets see as a unity of consciousness that does not conclude the self as an object because the awareness of the apparent other part such as the past is synthesized and altered as reflection occurs and is never the direct past or present of what was or is being analyzed. Sheets directly relates Sartre’s work here as she utilizes parts from Sartre’s examples of temporality in Being and Nothingness. Sartre states that this synthesis must occur because it will otherwise meet a paradox: “the past is no longer; the future is not yet; as for the instantaneous present everyone knows that this does not exist at all but is the limit of an infinite division, like a point without dimension” (Sartre, p.159), by utilizing an analysis of temporality as this whole Sheets can provide an overview of dance as a phenomenon in time and subsequently examine each part of dance in this way giving each part in relation to the whole of the experience.
From this examination of temporality Sheets begins to address the elements of force, rhythm and line in dance. Sheets begins by addressing what she refers to as “the illusion of force”. This illusion of force is created by the act of dance itself and is concluded as a virtual force in the world. The body, being corporeality is part of the physical structure in dance and provides a piece of the whole, but the illusion of force created by dance “transcends” its material aspect and becomes the source of the virtual force and the symbol of dance. Sheets concludes that this virtual force is the condition of dance, but dance like the structures of temporality are parts and thus are in perpetual motion. Sheets also notes that the: “amount of force refers not to a contained, static amount held by the body but to the manifest dynamic of the projection itself” (Sheets, p.52) which creates the symbol or abstraction in dance. Dance then is always in the making throughout time and space and is created though dimensions that exist when the dance itself exists. Rhythm in dance pertains to the composing form and is a dynamic fluidity of dance. “At any moment in composing the form, the dancer may either decide in advance where she wants to move, or the movement may be freely developed with no predetermined end point” (Sheets, p.102) in either case to Sheets the dance is controlled by temporality in the specific projection of force and affected by its range. The dance’s flow, its quality in the dynamic defines the movement. Sheets states here that “it is phenomenologically evident that each successive movement creates a qualitative change, and this, in turn, creates an accentual pattern, changing intensities, within the dynamic line. The dynamic line serves as a way for a virtual force to move as the dancer is creating the dance and is a pre-reflective awareness that guides the action through the temporality of the dance. This qualifies the parts of the dynamic that make up the spatial-temporal aspect and provides a comprehension of what dance is in the temporality of its state.
After laying out the respective aspects of dance Sheets elaborates on the abstraction in dance. “Abstraction is inherent in the creation of a symbolic form, through abstraction the symbolic form achieves a significance in and of itself; its meaning or import is intrinsic to it” (Sheets, p.59). These abstractions are the human feeling which is abstracted from an everyday context, and the abstraction of dance as an expressive mode. The human feeling is abstracted because it is separated from an everyday pattern and when set apart is “sheer dynamic form” a bridge which reveals a difference in common actions and actions in form. Sheets refers to everyday movements as movements that directly express feelings not separated by intended expressions but as a whole. Sartre relates this as such as possibilities in the world he concludes: “my body indicates my possibilities in the world, seeing my body or touching it is to transform these possibilities of mine into dead-possibilities” (Sartre, p.403). This parallel between possibilities in the world and possibilities that are “dead” to the world support Sheets’s claims about abstractions. The abstraction is altered from an everyday movement to a created form and thus transcends it creating the abstracted symbol. “The dancer abstracts movement…in order that it may become aesthetically plastic, in order that it may be freely developed according to the demands of a symbolic form” (Sheets, p.67). This abstraction eliminates possibilities in the world because the potential body has become a potential form; this form however is not set and is variable to the creator of the form and thus dance becomes a symbol in present to a performer or an audience viewing the symbol. Sheets sees this form as valid and valuable, as she proclaims that we have found “dance as art” and that the evaluation of dance through a phenomenological perspective expounds the greatest possibility in the analysis of what dance is.


Works Cited
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Philosophical Library, Inc. Washington Square Press, 1992.