Bodily Schemata and Sartre's I and Me: Reflection and Awareness in Movement
Performance Philosophy May 9, 2018 Jodie McNeilly
Dancers who stop relying on mirrors face the same problem philosophers have long grappled with: how to become aware of the inner, nonconscious structures that organize movement (bodily schemata). This article uses Jean-Paul Sartre's challenge to Edmund Husserl's pure ego—specifically his notion of object transcendence—to propose that dancers can access bodily schemata not by turning attention inward, but by focusing on a site of interaction where objects or materials (clothing, costume, digital representations) extend or supraextend the body. In this view, the dancer becomes an audience to these distally extended bodily reflections, making the hidden structures of movement perceptible through external, interactive technologies.