Abstract
Salsa dancing, a partnered dance premised on the felt sense of connection, is well suited to an exploration of Henry’s radical phenomenology of immanence and Heidegger’s facticity of life. Birthed in social celebratory contexts, salsa carries a particular motile freedom. What matters most is not how the dance movements are created from an outer frame of reference, but the experience of interactive responsiveness that emerges from unanticipated acts of giving life to another. Connecting to one’s partner and exuding a presence filled with life is revealed in an indepth interview with two-time world champion salsa dancer, judge, choreographer and coach, Anya Katsevman. This interview attempts to invoke the kinetic, kinesthetic and affective registers of the lividness and livingness of salsa dancing. As a phenomenological inquiry into factical life, the inter-view is presented not so much as a matter of shared perspectives or viewpoints, but more in the way of an inter-feeling, a practice of life engagement. This affectively-oriented approach provides both promise and challenge to the field of phenomenology. It invites us to delve more deeply into feeling acts of seeing. It also helps us understand how, through attending more fully to acts of seeing, we can increase the intensity with which we feel the upsurge of life.
Highlights
Jose presses ‘play’ and rushes over to get into position
The applause fades to silence and seven seconds pass until we hear the slow sensual wail of horns that mark the beginning of our fast paced song, “Mama Guela,” by Tito Rodriguez
Phenomenology & Practice 60 before we focus upon whatever is ‘here.’ In the present inquiry into salsa dance, I am interested in this phenomenality of life that is manifested in this particular disciplinary form of life
Summary
Jose presses ‘play’ and rushes over to get into position. His stance is open, facing the front of our practice stage. Silly me that loves to come out when I dance, the ‘ham’ if you will, but the real me, the part of me that is a constant beneath the outer blinks of sheathed eyes This opening vignette is about sensing life through a mutual gaze of sustained duration. While there is a degree of routine, an automatized familiarity in moving into the opening position, the sense of life and all its intensity emerges when the eyes meet Such looks are difficult to sustain, if the dancers stay present to one another, there is an awareness of life as it is happening, right in the flow of these living moments. This exploration offers a way of engaging in a phenomenology of life as life itself is most intensely felt, in its essential facticity
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