Your breasts must be firm, yet soft like the horns of the bull. Fried eggs up to the ceiling, ladies, as you go into the back bend. Breasts are for breast-feeding, it is the behind which is the crown and glory! Such are the instructions of three dance teachers working within very different dance traditions.' In this essay, I will examine these alternative significations of the sensuality of breasts in artistic dance using a phenomenological methodology.2 The question which motivates the comparison concerns the sensuality of classical ballet. In recent years, the classical ballet tradition has been severely criticized by feminists and others concerned with the physical oppression of women that seems intrinsic to the values of the art form itself. At the same time, there has been a proliferation of theoretical writing about artistic dance, much of which accords with structuralist and post-structuralist theory. is therein understood to be a symbolic activity, hence, broadly linguistic. Not only can the meaning of a dance be read as a text, the dancer's body also becomes a malleable product of the immanent values of a semiotic structure. Such being the case, it is necessary to pose the question concerning classical ballet again. Is the feminine sensuality of classical ballet an oppressive distortion and violation of the woman's body? How can an ethic that refers to a bodily integrity be defended if the body is only that which is constructed within a specific semiotic practice? My claim in the final analysis is that while there are reasons for rejecting the sensuality of the as it is constructed in the classical ballet tradition, the presence of the body to a performer as its own kind of sensuous openness to becoming is a constitutive aspect of even the ballet dancer's becoming-feminine. Moreover, inasmuch as the sensuality of becoming is preobjective, the phenomenology of bodily presence describes a deeper lying meaningful structuring of human existence than that which is indicated within a strictly semiotic reading. Reading the Body in It is because dance is expressive that many dance artists and critics have understood it to be a non-verbal language.3 Dance is the silent words of bodily language.4 Through it, emotions, feelings or moods, and ideas may be communicated. Moreover, in keeping with much current literary and art theory, dance is language. . . to the extent that it decodes an image that encodes itself through inscription.5 According to this view, the experience of a dance originates in the given values immanent to the differentiations of the particular conceptual system in which objects, such as a ballerinas, flamenco dancers, and erotic breasts have identity. Although the body is a needed categorical placeholder upon which the force of the significatory system is played out, it is a body in name only.6 This explanation of meaning in dance is akin to philosophical nominalism. The origin of meaning is linguistic consciousness. In other words, what is real is given through the idealization of named distinctions. What at one time was unself consciously called the physical or natural body is now problematized as the constructed perception of a discursive practice. The body is, thereby, denaturalized.7 What is natural is merely a fallacy or paradox of language.' By contrast, if the origin of experience is also embodied being in a contingent, physical world, then meaning is also to be found by way of embodiment in a more positive sense. While we do indeed abstract from brute physical existence and moreover, these abstractions take on a life of their own, for example, in art, literature and socially instituted values, abstractions also fold back upon themselves to influence bodily being. This folding back is illustrated, for instance by the impact of technology on the physiological/neurological makeup of human beings.9 It is also illustrated in the semiotic analyses of postmodern writers. …