Farleigh, Sondra

Farleigh, Sondra. “A Vulnerable Glance: Seeing Dance through Phenomenology.” Dance Research Journal, 23, 1, (1991): 11-16.


This article, is Farleigh’s proposal for using phenomenological analysis to theorize and understand dance and meanings in it. She supports the validity of both dancer and spectator’s subjective accounts of dance that, in the spirit of phenomenology, strive to reach objectivity from their subjective points of view. In this analysis, “the essence of dance is not identical with its motion. It arises in consciousness as the motion reveals the intent of the whole and its parts.” (12)

Farleigh claims that a dance has an identity that can be revealed through the phenomenological stance in which form and content are not separate. She uses her own observations of Cunningham pieces (as spectator and critic) and her writing on her own dance experience to demonstrate these points. Thus, she shows how the body’s intentionality in dance differs from the everyday intentionality in that it takes on “aesthetic” spatiality and motility. This is particularly significant in the subject’s attention to his/her own body as an aesthetic phenomenon. Although Farleigh does not develop this, the implications of this attention of dancers to their own body can be further explored within the question of self objectification and subjection.

Farleigh’s last point, concerning imagination, connects her inner life and identity to a kind of freedom in front of the gaze of others through her moving body. Her final, and very pertinent, remark: “As I step back from my own processes to better understand them, I confess to giving myself up to a quest and questioning with the kind of blind faith that some thing in me already knows the answer, if I can somehow get out of my own way (remove my conditioning) long enough to glance them.” (14)