ABSTRACT
Exploring the senses is an important part of dance as a movement research in modern, postmodern, and contemporary dance. Which senses are addressed in doing and in watching movement? Movement research, as well the theory of movement and dance, has shifted from a perspective that concentrated primarily on the visual to a perspective that is concerned with kinesthetic awareness. Kinesthesia is now understood as a basic sense — the sense of sensing (“spüren”), or sometimes even the sixth sense — and is associated with modes of synesthesia: a cross-modal process of perception which interweaves the sensual and the aesthetic aspects of experience. Kinesthesia has been a much discussed issue in phenomenological and psychological theory since the early 20th century. The relation of the bodily sense of positioning in space and the sensing of movement are linked with questions of empathy: these issues have also found significant place in recent debates on the role of the movements of the body as underlying aesthetic experience ( Gallagher 2005, Gibson 1966).
