‘Getting it into the body’: understanding skill acquisition through Merleau-Ponty and the embodied practice of dance
September 14, 2017 A. Purser
This paper argues that Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology offers a non-dualist framework for understanding embodied athletic expertise, skill acquisition, and bodily knowledge in sport and movement cultures. The author brings Merleau-Ponty's concepts of tacit practical knowledge, the sedimentation of habit, and the corporeal schema into conversation with qualitative interview data from dance practitioners. The dancers' accounts of learning, remembering, and performing movement patterns, particularly their notion of getting a movement 'in/into the body', resonate with Merleau-Ponty's conceptualization of the habit-body and the incorporation of behaviors into the corporeal schema. The paper suggests that theoretical concepts about practice can illuminate how expertise is embodied in practice.