Dance, the most ephemeral of art forms, is ripe for a philosophical exploration. Kimerer LaMothe’s Why We Dance: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming offers a reading of dance as a vital art central to our lives and as revelatory of core features of human embodiment. Grounded in phenomenology, her book presents a suggestive alternative account of what it means to be a mindful body.

In the first three of seven chapters of this book, LaMothe takes up the critique of what she calls “the materialist paradigm of modernity”, which she claims makes philosophical assumptions about mind and body that stand in the way of our appreciation of dance as a vital art. According to her, the materialist paradigm holds that human beings are immaterial minds that live and control material bodies. She critiques what she claims are three further theses of this kind of “materialism”: that the matter is real, that matter evolves, and that we can have objective knowledge of material substances. In the second part of her book, she presents her positive view of dance as consisting in the body in movement, which expresses the energy of life (21).  For her, bodily movement is real (83), it evolves (43), and it gives us knowledge (68). Her view contrasts with the materialist paradigm on these three issues because it gives priority to movement as a medium through which matter is shaped.

Chapter One, To Dance is to Matter, is a critique of the first materialist thesis, that matter is real.  The problem with this materialist claim, according to LaMothe, is that it suggests treating movement as something that happens to a body externally, and consequently, that we treat matter as that which can have a determinate identity that cannot be changed through movement. For materialists, movement changes the position of material objects but does not alter their essence (18). LaMothe asserts that an implication of this idea is that material bodies can be predicted using scientific laws. For her, however, this way of treating human bodies in movement reduces our way of being a body and impoverishes our appreciation of other bodies to being merely physical objects. She says, “I am no longer a material mass of flesh and blood, muscle and bone. I am movement expressing the energy of life” (21). This chapter asserts that that one of the essential characteristic of matter is movement and that through movement, as its medium, matter is defined (25).

Chapter Two, To Dance is to Evolve, critically evaluates second materialist thesis that matter evolves (41). LaMothe claims that, according to this thesis, only matter and not movement evolves (43), and she invites us to rethink and view movement by not focusing on the object of movement but movement itself. The problem with the theory of evolution is that that we think of matter as the identity of a placeholder, whereas it is through the movement of the body that the identity of the body is shaped. In her view, even when we talk about bodily movement we tend to focus on the body itself and not its movement; we see a horse galloping and in fact we should say that we see a gallop. 

Chapter Three, To Dance is to Know, takes up the third materialist thesis that knowledge about objective reality is possible (58). “To know in a materialist paradigm is to have a true and certain purchase on what is real”. On her alternative view, we need to define knowledge in terms of bodily becoming (68).  To claim that we have knowledge is to take into account thinking through the lived body and the experience of it. There is a certain wisdom to our bodily way of being in the world that cannot be overlooked in making epistemological claims. To illustrate this point, LaMothe refers to her practice of teaching dance. When she asks her students to perform a movement they may not necessarily have the knowledge how to move but their bodies do.

Chapter Four, To Dance is to Be Born, begins by quoting Martha Graham, who said that dance allows us to be born to every moment, by which she means that our bodily selves are present in the moment and through dance we experience ourselves as embodied beings. To be human is not to realize the telos (82) of being a mind that controls the world through controlling its body. Rather bodily movement is essential to self-identity and is the enabling condition of our health and well-being (103). To support this claim, LaMothe gives an account of her giving birth to her youngest child, with whom she relates through bodily movement, which she calls dance.  In this sense, for LaMothe, dance, as the moving of the body, is not just a biological fact but it is also a biological necessity (105).

Chapter Five, To Dance is to Connect, builds on the claim that dance is a biological necessity and proposes that a dancing-self is always relational, and hence, it is a moral self that connects with other beings (117). LaMothe argues that dance is an ethical necessity because we are shaped by virtue of our relationships, which enable an interaction of individual ways of bodily movement between individuals. She supports her claim by discussing infants’ response to touch and mirror neurons (127-30), which show that our embodied selves are sensitive and empathetically responsive to the movement of other bodies.   

Chapter Six, To Dance is to Heal, discusses pain and its permeating presence in our lives. According to LaMothe, pain in the materialist approach is treated as a problem or an obstacle that had to be avoided, whereas from the perspective of a living body, pain should be seen as a mobilizing power of the mind to correct malfunction (139). LaMothe’s phenomenological description of feeling pain, which motivates her to jog, is a very compelling account of how pain motivates performing other bodily movements that cope and transform our feeling of discomfort. The pain she feels becomes the pleasure she takes in jogging.

Chapter Seven, To Dance is to Love, calls on us to rethink the distinction between culture and nature from the perspective of bodily becoming. Dance is the force of nature “seeking its own becoming in human form” (174). Through dance we create and become movement patterns that connect us to our social and natural environments. Ritual dances, to use LaMothe’s example, are a way to express our humanity in both social and natural ways. We are the kind of imitative beings who recognize the intention behind the movements of others, and “recreate it in spite of ourselves” (187). Our culture is a series of the recorded “leaps” that consist in imitating others and expressing ourselves.

Overall, LaMothe’s book breaks new ground by asking us to rethink the notion of embodiment in light of dance. However, the book could have been stronger if its core philosophical commitments had been clarified in greater conceptual and argumentative detail. Here are two points I would like to raise.

In the first three chapters, a reconstruction of the materialist paradigm that is being attacked would have been helpful. What the reader is presented with are references to the secondary literature on materialism, often to critiques that reduces this metaphysical view to a straw man. While Chapter One seems to address Cartesian dualism, which draws a distinction between mind and body as separable substances, LaMothe does not explain how this distinction stands in our way of appreciating bodily movement as vital. The book would have been stronger with more detail on her critical target and exactly how her view is distinct from it.

Additionally, it would have been helpful for LaMothe to more carefully explain and justify key terminology, contrasts, and claims, such as what a ‘vital art’ is. This is especially important because Why We Dance makes a series of metaphysical claims about how we become the beings that we are in a biological and moral sense, but makes no explicit references to aesthetics. What is the connection of these metaphysical claims with aesthetic issues about the ‘vitality’ of an art? This issue seems to me symptomatic of a more general problem. By trying to make dance everything (the lens through which to understand nature of matter, biological evolution, morality, the nature of pain, the nature-culture distinction), LaMothe’s account is in danger of losing what is distinctive and particular about dance as an art form. What can the metaphysics of the general nature of material bodies in movement tell us about what is distinctive about human bodily movement? Closely related to this problem, at several points, LaMothe seems to elide dance as an art form with all kinds of human bodily movements, such as when she suggest that pre-natal movements in the womb are a kind of ‘dance’ between fetus and mother. This is a striking and lovely metaphor, but what does it add to our understanding of how we evaluate and appreciate the expert bodily movements of professional dancers? I think this book would have been helped by greater clarity on what dance is, and how it differs from both ordinary movement and other kinds of expert bodily performance, such as athletic.

Overall, philosophers interested in writing about dance may find this book as a source of thoughtful provocation. From the many claims that it makes about dance, one may select one path to tightly focus on and more fully clarify key concepts.

© 2015 Edyta J. Kuzian

Edyta J. Kuzian, Fordham University