In the Intimacy of the Dancing Body

What constitutes an experience of intimacy? This presentation presents a research project about intimacy and dance, that aims to explore the topic of intimacy, combining perspectives from Anthropology, Dance Studies and contemporary Philosophy. Although intimacy is often mentioned across many disciplines of contemporary Social Science (Adis Tahhan 2010; Gauthier and Mercier 2017; Perrin 2012; Strasser 2017; Switek 2016; Tocheva 2017), the concept remains largely undefined and lacking appropriate methods (Register and Henley 1992). This research investigates the hypothesis that intimacy is a phenomenon dependent on both individual bodily experiences and the social. It will focus on the domain of contemporary dance, since dance is particularly suitable for the study of intimacy. Dancers have through their daily practices access to different kinds of intimate experience. Investigating bodies through dance exercises with professionals and amateurs in dance, intimacy will be considered in three venues: feeling, moving and touching. Overall the planed methodology of dance workshops builds from the experimental method “research-creation” (Manning 2018) which consists on an iterative process of doing, experimenting and researching, thereby providing a solid approach to overcome the duality between theory and practice. Such practice-based research can bring insights in social theories on the body, as well as offers new ways of writing. The objective is to disclose a living knowledge (in the dancing bodies) that has not found any linguistic translation yet, and doing so, improve knowledge on the concept of intimacy. Describing how intimacy is experienced, has the potential to contribute insights into wider questions such as what is self and the relation between self and social. Here, the study of intimacy has great potential to generate much broader theoretical insight into areas such as the nature of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, the formation of self and social bonds.