ABSTRACT
As staged within Western theatre dance, dance, the art of the moving body, is made to be seen. The contradiction here lies in the fact that dance is created through the experiences of moving bodies while primarily accessed visually by its spectators. In the above quotation from Peter Boenisch, writing about decreation (2003) by the William Forsythe company, a bodily experience is described that is not just for the dancers, but for the spectators; not just for the eyes, but for the entire body. How do spectators gain information about movements done by other people, and how does this information give rise to kinaesthetic experience? Kinaesthesia, introduced by Bastian in 1888 (from kinesis, Greek for motion and aisthesis, for sensation), is defined as the ability to feel movements of the limbs and body (Longstaff 1996: 34). Choreography has specialised both in training dancers to develop kinaesthetic expertise and in creating formats for spectators to access particular fields of movement experience. In this chapter, I analyse the work of three late twentieth-century choreographers, namely Boris Charmatz, Meg Stuart and William Forsythe, whose preoccupation with kinaesthetics has altered ways of seeing dance.
