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Choreography Empathy, by Susan Leigh Foster

When I was researching about choreography I wanted to see if I could find anything that has to do with the relationship the dancers have with the audience. As a good choreographer you know how to tell a story and how to make sure your dancers connect with the audience the way you want. Of course it is the dancers job as much as the choreographers to perform and take the audience with you on your journey. However, I would like to think that it is the choreographers job to know how to do that and bring it out of hers/his dancers. When I am in the audience I always want to leave the theatre feeling like I’ve been taken on a journey together with the dancers. I want to feel touched by whatever feeling they felt, wether they are happy, heartbroken, sad, in love etc. So that will be the main thing I’m going to focus on if I ever become a choreographer. 

I found this amazing book called Choreographing Empathy, by Susan Leigh Foster. What she talkes about and trying to answer questions is: 

”What do we feel when we watch dancing? Do we ”dance along” even without moving overtly? Do we sense what the dancer’s body is feeling? Do we imagine ourselves performing those same moves? Launching buoyantly into the air? Rolling with increasing speed across the floor? Balancing on our toes? Undulating the spine? Floating? Diving? Bursting? Or pausing in stillness? Do we sway to the rythm of the motion we see? Do we strain forward, lift upwards, or retreat backwards in response to different motions? Might we even feel our muscles stretching or straining? Our skin rushing past air or sliding across the ground? A shortness of breath? The damp from perspiration? Do we feel fear, witnessing the precariousness of the dancer’s next step? Delight in its expansiveness? Anxiety from its contortedness? And to the extend that we feel any of these things, in what ways do these responses form part of or otherwise influence how we experience dancing and how we derive significance from it?” (p.2 of 282.)

She has devided the book in three parts: Choreography, Kinesthesia and Empathy.

”I argue that any notion of choreography contains, embodied within it, a kinesthesis, a designated way of experiencing physicality and movement that, in turn, summons other bodies into specific way of feeling towards it. To ”choreograph empathy” thus entails the contruction and cultivation of a specific physicality whose kinesthetic experience guides our perception of and connection to what another is feeling.”  

So there is actually an explanation to the way we feel when you watch someone dance.

She also talks about a guy called John Martin and his theory is about kinesthetic sympathy that I agree on:

”When we see a human body moving, we see movement which is potentially produced by any human body, and therefore by our own… through kinesthetic sympathy we actually reproduce it vicariously in our present muscular experience and awaken such associational connotations as might have been ours if the original movement had been of our own making. ” (p.7.) 

Our body is built so we can dance and move around. So when dancers move around and tell us a story we can relate to it because our body respond to what our eyes see. I think it is really cool how our body works.