ABSTRACT

This chapter analyzes the experience and, in particular the conscious experience, of dancing in time from the perspective of the trained dancer while performing. The focus is thus on the experience and consciousness of a dancer who is moving her body in time rather than on the experience of a seated audience member or dance appreciator who is watching a dancer move. In short, the experience of dancing to be addressed here takes place in both the dancer's consciousness of it and in the temporal and spatial parameters that have been set for the dancing. To what extent temporal experience while dancing is inextricably bound up with, accompanies, depends on, supervenes on, or forms the base or floor of physical and spatial experience will be left to specialists in philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science to articulate. Dances made for performance are usually not quite the conventional in aligning movements to the temporal parameters of music.