This presentation was delivered live over zoom on December 4th 2020 at our annual academic symposium. Jake was a third-year student at Ikon at the time of recording. This talk is the result of his personal final research project.
ABSTRACT:
Cartesian dualism has dominated dance philosophy since the emergence of Dance Movement Therapy (DMT) and Conscious Dance practices in the west. This has had detrimental epistemological implications for dance as praxis of bodily-self-becoming. In this paper I propose a radical new ontology, challenging the popular dualistic mind-body split, through the Enactive view of Embodied Cognition. With foundations in this new ontology, I will present a theoretically integrative hypothesis of how dance, when practiced in the embodied exploration of our intersubjective experience, is a radical way to increase ones sense of self and agency. Furthermore, I propose that this radical ontological and epistemological shift in philosophy of dance not only opens new doors to understanding how dance increases our sense of self but may in fact have larger ethical and environmental implications on the Anthropocene.
Jake Potter, Bachelor of Counselling and Psychotherapy