International Journal of Education & the Arts

Citation: Leroy, C. (2024). Performance and bodily anchoring of care: Dance’s power to care. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 25(si1.23). http://doi.org/10.26209/ijea25si1.23

My contribution focuses on the roots of an ethos of care, which I call a kinaesthethos: I locate in the lived and neurological body the origin of empathy. More specifically, through movement practices, I explore the ways in which the distinction between lived bodies conditions the concern and disposition to care for others. Edith Stein was the first phenomenologist to emphasize how access to the kinaesthetic experience of others depends on the ability to distinguish between others and oneself – me. Recent discoveries in neuroscience confirm this idea: I can only empathize with others if I perceive them as other than myself. But what is the limit in a subject, what allows one to distinguish between ego and non-ego, if not the bodily envelope? This hypothesis is not sufficient, and my proposal aims to demonstrate what contributes to the delimitation of this lived envelope. In particular, I emphasize the extent to which movement practices, such as contact improvisation, which require on the one hand the experience of gravity and the reception/lifting through movement, and on the other hand the contact, increase the perception of the limits of one’s own body. In doing so, these practices sharpen the performer’s kinaesthetic sense and proprioception. Therefore, I argue that they contribute to the development of the ability to care by increasing the awareness of the rupture between the bodies. They also contribute to the refinement of the kinaesthetic empathy of the audience in perceiving the bodies on stage.