What does it mean for your body to be the instrument of your art, as it is often said of dance? A human body is not an inanimate object, like a puppet. Yet your body is part of the material world. In the sun, its skin will burn and blister. In the rain, it will get wet. If something heavy falls on it, it will be crushed or bruised. The physical mechanism can and will (someday) also stop all together. And at one time it didn’t exist at all. It originated from matter, from the material stuff of two existing human beings who, together, created a chemical reaction. That is the minimal story.
An augmented story is that we cannot be reduced entirely to matter. We do not understand, precisely, how thought works even though we can pinpoint the neurons that are activated when we are thinking, and which are involved in memory. We also don’t understand where reflexive thought comes from, the “I am.” We don’t understand intentionality, either – why human beings want things or love things that do not seem to be explicitly or implicitly tied to biological directives.
One answer to this, a religious perspective, is that we are part divine. Some religions would have it, for example, that a divine being breathed life into clay and thereby made human beings. This life, or spirit, is the animating force, the will, the source behind our intentions. It is the part of us that makes choices, that can be identified with a particular “soul” or “character,” the actions of which we are accountable for in a moral sense. These actions can make us “good” or “bad.”
If we go with this way of thinking, “the dancer inside” is thus the divine part of the human being – the part of us that directs, wills, organizes, threatens, praises, punishes and rewards. It is the part of us that governs the system of muscle, bone, blood, sinew, nerves that create the movement we know as dance. If this is right, there is some sense in which I could have “a dancer inside” even if I had a paralyzed body. But could I be a dancer with no body at all? With no nervous system? Where and what would “I” be then? Pure spirit?
On another way of thinking, what philosophers of mind would call “enactivism,” my ability to think at all – to understand “here, there, up, down” is conditioned by my body’s interaction with the world and the resistances and affordances it encounters. Part of this interaction includes input and feedback from other human beings – which is how one learns language and a genre of dance altogether. If this is right, then who “I” am, as a person and a dancer, necessarily includes my body. There is no dancer without a body. Any limitations of my spirit are limitations that are connected to the ways my body is able to live, interact and exist in the world.
My view is neither of these, but a pragmatic one. Whether or not there is an “I” apart from my body, what matters as I see it is the condition that I, in fact, find myself in. What I am aware of right now as I write this that “I” am embodied. I am embodied in a way that has always seemed to require a great deal of attention and care. As I age this body is sometimes less bothersome than it was when I was younger (I have fewer violent passions, and fewer hormonal changes) than when I was younger. In other ways it’s more bothersome (my injuries last longer, for example, and my metabolism is slower). Getting older comes with deeper experience and depth of wisdom but also with new limitations on how I think in terms of memory, quick reaction time, and the ability to learn some kinds of new things. There is an “I” that remains insofar as there is a body to house it. And that “I” is still a dancer. Beyond that … I will no longer be able to write to you. That is all I know for sure that I can say.
Copyright © Aili Whalen 2025. All rights reserved.
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