ABSTRACT
A few years ago, I was speaking to my friend and colleague Keith Hennessy after he had attended a dance concert at the University of California at Davis, where we were both teaching. I asked him how the work had been and he replied, “It was like they were all choreographing for a fictional body that none of them had.” This phrase struck me as a thoughtful analysis of a problem that runs throughout many aspects of society, and one that can be particularly strong in the practice of dance. Many of us are making choices about our bodies on the basis of an imagination of a body that we want to have or think we should have and not in relation to the bodies that we actually do have. At the same time many of us feel alienated from the bodies that we do have (the bodies that we are) because they do not meet certain societal ideals of what a body should be or do.
