Om kropsbevidsthed og bevægelsesfornemmelser: en fænomenologisk beskrivelse af danseres bevægelsesekspertise

Interweaving phenomenological explorations and ethnographical methods this paper aims at contributing to explicating how dancers use their sense of the physical body and its movements when training and performing their expertise. The aim is pursued in two analyses. The first analysis focuses on the practices of professional dancers, who in different ways are trained in ballet and contemporary techniques. Their descriptions reveal how the body's physicality is present to their experience in a non-objectifying way while dancing. This kind of experience is to be considered an extra dimension of the dancers' bodily self-consciousness, which concerns what the body feels like in a physical sense when undergoing the movement. The second analysis, which is based on the practices of tango dancers and elite sports dancers, focuses on how they come to form a shared body when dancing with a partner. Phenomenologically described, their bodies extend: their sense of movement includes the "other" in a fundamental way and unfolds on the level of operative intentionality. However, these dancers also make us aware that experiencing the body as extended and shared does not only "happen" but is worked strategically throughout their practice. Accordingly, the two phenomenological analyses challenge the idea that in the skilled performance, the expert is absorbed in the doing. Rather, an extra dimension of bodily self-consciousness is important to the dancers' way of performing - and the dancers' sense of movement involves continual processes of mutual incorporation.