Dee Reynolds

Kinesthesia, Empathy, and Related Pleasures: An Inquiry into Audience Experiences of Watching Dance

Dance is frequently described as being “about” movement. “Dance,” writes Ann Daly, “although it has a visual component, is fundamentally a kinesthetic art” (Daly 1992, 243). Audience experiences of dance can therefore be conceptualized in terms of responses to movement, most prominently in terms of what has been described as “kinesthetic empathy.” What does it mean, however, to watch, respond to, or appreciate movement? And how does the historical and theoretical concept of kinesthetic empathy relate to contemporary audiences articulations of the experience of watching dance? This article sets out to answer these questions by exploring different kinds of kinesthetic and empathetic responses and pleasures (and indeed displeasures) articulated by spectators of live dance across different styles and contexts. Pleasure is of particular importance to audience studies because it relates to motivations. Why do people seek out dance performances to watch? What are they looking for in the experience? In this context, we are interested in kinesthetic empathy as a mode of engaging with dance that can give pleasure to spectators and can be a strong motivating factor in why people choose to watch dance.

Response to skin and the self: Cultural theory and Anglo-American psychoanalysis'

In ‘Skin and the Self: Cultural Theory and Anglo-American Psychoanalysis’, Marc Lafrance examines the work of two little-known contemporary AngloAmerican psychoanalysts, Esther Bick and Thomas Ogden, who, he argues, provide useful conceptual tools which can help cultural theorists to make sense of the relationship between the skin and the self. Bick’s landmark paper, ‘The Experience of the Skin in Early Object Relations’ (1987), influenced Didier Anzieu’s model of the ‘skin ego’ (1989). Bick develops Freud’s model of the ego as ‘the projection of a surface’ by looking at the role of the caregiver in very early infancy, and argues that the sense of self as contained can only be achieved through substantial experience of skin-to-skin contact with a caregiver, and that it is also through this contact that the infant discovers space inside, into which an object can be introjected.1 Through the infant’s successful introjection of the caregiver’s functions, the skin symbolically takes on the caregiver’s containing role. If the subject’s development of a ‘mental skin’ is impeded, this can lead to severe problems and to the search for ‘second skin’ formations. Bick’s work has been taken up and used by others, including the psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden (1989). For Ogden as for Bick, sensory impressions at