Dance: Forms of Feelings, Vitality, and Presence
Having established that the dancing experience serves a person’s self-awareness which is one of the fundamental tenets in probably all psychotherapeutic schools, we shall introduce elements of this experience as they are identified by some dancers and philosophers in a phenomenological perspective: forms of feeling, vitality, and presence. These characteristics stem from two indissoluble traits: dance’s ephemerality and the fact that it is executed through the body’s movement. These elements are cardinal for the use of dance in therapy and as therapy.
Cunningham wrote that dance is simultaneously movement and stillness in space and time. This constant fluidity, this permanent impermanence (or the transitory character of dance in which each movement vanishes the very moment it has been performed) furnishes the attraction that it exerts on dancers, choreographers, teachers, and spectators. Dance “is its own necessity, not so much as a representation of the moving world, rather as a part of it, with inherent springs” (Cunningham, 2015, p. ix). Dance movement therapists connected to their dancing selves feel this necessity. Permanent impermanence, stability in instability— can we find better images for life? However, is dance as evanescent as described and usually conceptualized? Visually dance is fleeting, but certainly its kinesthetic and emotional impact in the mover and in the witness stay for longer.
Dancing as well as watching dance connect to vitality, as mentioned by performer and scholar Johannes Birringer (2005) and psychoanalyst Daniel Stern (2010). Birringer wrote that we go to see dance because we love movement and relish dancing “as it is a vital part of our physical and sexual culture, and perhaps the oldest sense we have of feeling alive in our bodies" (Birringer, 2005, p. 10). On a similar thread of thought, Stern (2010) stated that dance moves us by the experience of vitality, which then reverberates in us. Trudi Schoop (in Dieste, 2008) said: “When you dance you are alive.” We shall see that vitality when dancing is a felt experience, as reported by DMT students and professionals.
Philosopher Susanne Langer wrote about dance from the standpoint of a viewer; several of her texts have been very influential on the study of the arts, especially music and dance. In this section, her analysis that enriches a dmt’s understanding of dance is brought in. She integrated the aspects of vitality and forms of feelings; they are an intricate connection, not easily pulled apart. For Langer, dance is a virtual realm of power, a magic magnetism between dancers and/or between them and the onlooker, a subjective experience of will and volition, of vital power (Langer, 1953). Studying Langer’s work, Weber asserted that dance is “a means of intersubjectivity, a genuine path of interbeing” (Weber, 2002, p. 195). Probably many of this book’s readers have felt this mentioned magnetism, the realm of power while dancing in a group or with another person. In other text, Langer alluded to dance as an apparition of active powers, an effect that is something more than what dancers do. What the viewer sees is a display of intermingling forces “by which the dance seems to be lifted, driven, drawn, closed or attenuated . . . whirling like the end of a dervish dance, or slow, centered, and single in its motion” (Langer, 1976, p. 78). Being lifted, attenuated, and so on, are the forms of vitality that Stern coined after Langer’s (1953) “forms of feelings” as shall be discussed in the next section. The powers perceived are not physical forces embodied by the muscles. These powers seem to correspond to the flow of human experience or “life as it feels to the living” (Langer, 1976, p. 79), not always being articulated as narrative or anecdote (Stern, 2010, p. 75). In a DMT session, the therapist might see power in the gaze of a patient, or in a group interaction; on the other hand, they might see lack of powers in a weakened/bound form or a missed grounding.
A very important contribution of Langer for DMT is her referring to forms offeelings', to her, everything that can be felt—arousal and rest, pleasurable physical sensations or pain, complex emotions and intellectual strains—is the subjective aspect of experience (Reese, 1977). Dance expresses experiences that are difficult to scrutinize because they may be ambiguous or complex, varying and transforming. Descriptive words do not always help to get the intensity and specificity of the subjective experience. There are endless ways to feel joyful, sad, and so on. Emotional life is complex and fluid, multilayered and polyphonic; dance is very suitable to approach this complexity. Dance, Langer asserted, is a form that conveys feeling: the rhythms and relations, crises and disruptions, the complexity and richness of what is sometimes called man’s “inner life,” the stream of experience, life as it feels to human beings. In a dance, she said, there is a display of
the way feelings, emotions, and all other subjective experiences conic and go—their rise and growth, their intricate synthesis that gives our inner life unity and personal identity. What we call a person’s “inner life” is the inside story of his own history; the way living in the world feels to him.
(Langer, 1976, p. 79)
Other testimonies present a more radical stance in the discussion about the experience of the dancing person and are even closer to some tenets of DMT. For instance, Fraleigh (1987) wrote,
I am the twisting, the stretching. My body is me. Thinking, feeling, moving. Body is myself in my lived concreteness. It is who I am and the way in which I am. The lived body refers to my personal way of existing and the meanings attached to this manner of existing in a world in which I experience presence.
(p.32)
Fraleigh’s ideas are somehow echoed by Caldwell (2018), who asserted: “The body is not something we have, rather an experience we are [emphasis added]’’ (p. xix). This experience is not always verbalized, “because most of its components are nameless, and no matter how keen . . . [it] may be, it is hard to form an idea of anything that has no name” (Langer, 1976, p. 79). Langer argued these feelings are nameless because there is no handle for them in the mind (Ibid., p. 80).
In DMT we can associate the nameless components of the experience in different ways. One is that the nameless has never been symbolized because it pertains to a pre-symbolic normal developmental stage or to an early developmental trauma that continues to impact the person’s life. In DMT there is another kind of situation as well: after an exploratory/ introspective improvisation, the mover does not find words to communicate their experience or chooses to stay silent, keeping the embodied state of mind. There is a sense that to put into words what has been an inner experience might take away its power. In verbal communication we use signs, specifically words, which aspire to get to the highest level of generalization and therefore establish a distance from the original experience (Noy, 1999). Psychoanalyst Noy wrote that arts fill the need of expression of these experiences that words cannot provide. Both Noy (1999) and Stern (2010) stated that although achieving verbal communication implies an advancement in development, it entails the loss of the richness of the nonverbal, the analogic mode of communication (Wengrower, 2016), referred to by Noy as the primary mode of communication. Simply put, not everything can/has to be verbalized, as Isadora Duncan said: “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it” (qtd. in Duncan & Rosemont, 1981). Some of the nameless experiences can be transmitted and represented through the systems of movement analysis or the feelings of vitality (Laban, 1963; Loman & Sossin, 2016; Stern, 2010; Tortora, 2016)
Important contributions to the study of dance were made by Maxine Sheets Johnstone and Sondra Fraleigh, who integrate in their lives a dance career with scholarship in philosophy. In her phenomenological description of dance, Sheets Johnstone (2015) asserted that it is a kinetic form that is seen; it appears to the viewer but is nonetheless foremost a lived, unreflective, and embodied experience (p. 22-23). It is a total phenomenon in which the mover/dancer is “one with the dance, pre-reflectively aware of their body as a form in the making” (p. 31). It is only when the dancer is completely one with the dance that they exists in the dance, and then they experiences vitality and force. Sheets Johnstone exhorted onlookers to be in the same experiential position.
Sondra Fraleigh (1998) wrote:
When I dance, I am subtly attuned to my body and my motion in a totally different way than I ordinarily am in my everyday actions. That is, I seldom take notice of my ordinary comings and goings. . . . But, when I dance, I am acutely aware of my movement. I study it, try out new moves, study and perfect them, until I eventually turn my attention to their subtleties of feeling and meaning. Finally, I feel free in them. In other words, I embody the motion.... And in this, I experience what I would like to call “pure presence, ” a radiant power of feeling completely present to myself and connected to the world [emphasis added].
(p. 140-141)
These descriptions present one of the therapeutic objectives dmts aspire to help their patients achieve, namely, being embodied, being present in the moment with one’s vitality.
Forms of Vitality
Psychoanalyst and researcher Stern (2010) was influenced by Langer’s concept of forms of feelings and coined the term “forms of vitality” based on it. Langer conceived the notion “forms of feeling” to relate to feelings evoked by music and dance or expressed through these arts, which are not related to the distinct emotions (Ekman, 1999) and are not a specific action: fading, exulting, easiness, and so on. During his observations of infants and their caretakers, Stern noticed these forms and along different of his publications created diverse designations until he arrived at “forms of vitality.” He introduced vitality as the sensation of being alive3 and the modes people have of feeling it. It takes on different forms in the same individual and across persons; it is felt by oneself consciously and non-consciously and is perceived by others. Vitality can be understood as the way to feel/express emotions: somebody laughs inward, producing a soft sound, while another or the same person in a different situation produces a strong cascade of laughter (Stern, 2010, pp. 27-28). So forms of vitality are the colors of life, especially but not only in intersubjective relations, or as Stern put it, without them life would lack much of its interest; it would be digital and dispossessed of its analogical characteristics.1 Many persons experience vitality while moving, through kinesthesia and proprioceptivity, i.e., the inner experience of movement of one’s self and others, or as Birringer cited earlier, while watching dance. Stern noted these are main indicators of feeling alive and animate. Movement brings with it the perception/sensation of force within it, which is strongly connected to experiencing vitality. When mentioning movement, dance comes to mind. As previously stated, one of the main changes produced in dance during the second half of the 20th century was the shift from performed stories to the exploration of movement’s dynamics, including daily actions and objects, non-linear forms, and non-narrative forms. Laban’s movement observation and notation system, as well as improvisation, contributed greatly to this search (White, 2016).
The dynamic forms of vitality are related to the quality, the “how” of the lived experience. They are different from the discrete emotions, cognition, and sensations, and the last ones are modality-specific (related to the specific senses). This concept is also connected to identification and empathy; forms of vitality are mainly nonverbal processes by which individuals share/exchange experience by means of body-mind interactivity. In therapy they constitute part of somatic resonance or countertransference. Forms of vitality are also a cardinal element in implicit relational knowing; they have constituent elements as seen in the time-based arts (dance, music, theater, cinema): movement, tempo, intention, force, and space, thus making dance a “royal road” to take to approach this experience.5 Therapist and patient bring them to the therapeutic encounter (Seligman & Harrison, 2012).
Dynamic forms of vitality are part of episodic memories; they are their zest. In psychotherapy they afford an access to non-conscious experiences, be they past, dissociated, or implicit relational knowledge never verbalized nor psychologically represented, as the nameless stated by Langer. Stern held that they allow for verbalization when evoking the past. However, in my own practice his concept of forms of vitality and Langer’s notion of forms of feelings have gone in a different direction: instead of aiming to verbalize an unknowable feeling/ experience, patients and the therapist learn to accept the inability (temporary or not) to name it, for example, during/after a movement experience. Besides the need of some patients and their therapists to find words for their feelings, one has to accept that there are also nameless experiences for the time being and/or forever. They can be worked through nonverbally; one can empathize, showing understanding by reflecting or attuning to the movement. The therapist can suggest describing the experience through a body part gesture, movement, or vocalization, allowing patients to understand that not everything needs to be verbalized or uttered.
