‘Getting it into the body’: understanding skill acquisition through Merleau-Ponty and the embodied practice of dance

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract This paper responds to calls across the sociological, philosophical and psychological dimensions of Sports Studies to attend to the promise of phenomenology as an approach to understanding the complexities and nuances of embodied athletic experience. The work of the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty is drawn upon to elucidate expertise through a non-dualist framework for understanding skill acquisition and bodily knowledge in sport and movement cultures. In particular, I explore how theoretical concepts about practice might actually play out in practice by bringing the notions of tacit practical knowledge and the sedimentation of habit that Merleau-Ponty emphasises in his theorisation of the corporeal schema into conversation with qualitative data from in-depth interviews with dance practitioners. The paper engages with dancers’ accounts of learning, remembering and performing patterns of movement and, in particular, with the dancers’ notions of having or getting a movement ‘in/into the body’, exploring resonances between these experiences and Merleau-Ponty’s conceptualisation of the habit-body and of incorporating behaviours into the corporeal schema.