Susanne Ravn

Choice of jumping strategy in two standard jumps, squat and countermovement jump: effect of training background or inherited preference?

Six male subjects, three professional ballet dancers and three elite volleyball players, performed maximal vertical jumps from 1) a static preparatory position (squat jump), 2) starting with a countermovement (counter‐movement jump) and 3) a specific jump for ballet and for volleyball, respectively. The jumps were recorded on highspeed film (500 Hz) combined with registration of ground reaction forces, and net joint moments were calculated by inverse dynamics. The purpose was to investigate the choice of strategy in two standard jumps, squat jump and countermovement jump. The volleyball jump was performed with a sequential strategy and the ballet jump was performed with a simultaneous strategy. In the two standard jumps, the choice of strategy was individual and not related to training background. This was additionally confirmed in a test of seven ballet dancers and seven volleyball players.

Listening to the body? How phenomenological insights can be used to explore a golfer’s experience of the physicality of her body

Based on a single case study of a Danish elite golfer, this article focuses on describing the different ways in which the golfer experiences the physicality of her body during training. The aim of the article is to explore how phenomenological insights concerning self-consciousness can be used actively in the analyses of the golfer’s descriptions to better understand how the embodied expertise is practised in her training. The descriptions of the elite golfer’s daily practice were generated using a combination of participant observations and interviews. Drawing on phenomenological insights, we suggest that the golfer’s experience of the physicality of her body can be considered in relation to three possible dimensions of self-consciousness: a pre-reflective subject-related dimension, a reflective object-directed dimension and a pre-reflective performative dimension. The pre-reflective performative dimension is to be understood as a non-objectifying dimension of subjects experience and, in the present case, appears central to how the golfer adjusts and reshapes her technical skills. The golfer exemplifies how a possible pre-reflective performative dimension reflects the overall ‘feeling’ of the moving body. From a methodological perspective, the analysis of the single case study also exemplifies how phenomenological insights might concretely influence the analysis of an actual practice and how the achieved understanding can be important to the further development of elite athletes’ expert training.

How to explore dancers’ sense experiences? A study of how multi-sited fieldwork and phenomenology can be combined

In this article, we deal with how sense experiences can be described and analysed in movement activities such as dance. We present a methodological framework of how multi-sited fieldwork and phenomenology can be combined to explore ongoing constitutive processes of subjects’ sense experiences. The challenge of how to employ phenomenology in relation to a fieldwork based on particular and subjective experiences is constructively related to phenomenological discussions of the content versus the structure of experience. Phenomenology as a philosophical enterprise is subsequently linked to concrete methodological challenges, by presenting and discussing how, in a specific study, we handle the ‘in practise’ sense experiences of different dancers. Being a dancer herself, the first author included her embodied competence when performing the fieldwork. The body thereby became both the researcher’s tool and the subject to be investigated. The comparative structure implicit to performing a multi-sited fieldwork was used to build a creative tension between the researcher’s and the dancers’ experiences. Two descriptions of dancers’ sense experiences are presented. They exemplify how the dancers turn to an overall sense of how the body feels in preference to working with specific modalities of sensing. Furthermore, the dancers’ sensing of the physicality of their moving bodies appears to be shaped by their unique intention is at the same time given form through their interactions with other dancers.

The promise of ‘sporting bodies’ in phenomenological thinking – how exceptional cases of practice can contribute to develop foundational phenomenological concepts

Abstract For decades, qualitative researchers have used phenomenological thinking to advance reflections on particular kinds of lifeworlds. As emphasised by Allen-Collinson phenomenology offers a continuing promise of ‘bringing the body back in’ to theories on sport and physical activity. Turning to philosophy, traditionally, phenomenologists have not paid much attention to qualitative research. Nevertheless, phenomenology does contain a strong emphasis on using ‘data’ or experiences from daily life and on drawing on data from medical pathology. In other words while qualitative researchers employ phenomenology to empirically investigate the domain of sport and exercise, phenomenologists employ empirical data to substantiate their claims concerning foundational conditions of our being-in-the-world. In this article, we suggest a way to enhance the collaboration between the two fields by pointing out and giving examples of the resource of ‘the factual variation.’ Coined by Shaun Gallagher and developed from the Husserlian eidetic variation, the factual variation uses exceptional cases, normally from pathology, to shed new light on foundational phenomenological concepts. Drawing on our research of sports dancers and expert musicians, we indicate how qualitative researchers across the board, through the factual variation, can contribute to phenomenological thinking and thereby also strengthen their own theoretical foundation.

Expert tool use: a phenomenological analysis of processes of incorporation in the case of elite rope skipping

Abstract According to some phenomenologists, a tool can be experienced as incorporated when, as a result of habitual use or deliberate practice, someone is able to manipulate it without conscious effort. In this article, we specifically focus on the experience of expertise tool use in elite sport. Based on a case study of elite rope skipping, we argue that the phenomenological concept of incorporation does not suffice to adequately describe how expert tool users feel when interacting with their tools. By analyzing a combination of insights gained from participant observation of 11 elite rope skippers and autoethnographic material from one former elite skipper, we take some initial steps toward the development of a more nuanced understanding of the concept of incorporation; one that is able to accommodate the experiences of expert tool users. In sum, our analyses indicate that the possibility for experiencing a tool as incorporated depends on the existence of an extraordinary kind of relationship between the tool and the expert tool user. This relation, that can persist even when successful manipulation of the tool fails, is not only cultivated through deliberate practice of physical skills, but also through the collective sense-making process going on within a particular community of practice. Therefore, expert tool users may experience a more profound kind of incorporation that can persist even when normal motor incorporation fails.

Embodying Interaction in Argentinean Tango and Sports Dance

In couple dancing dancers are generally required to be able to incorporate the partner’s movement at the level of the dancing. Couple dancing is, in this sense, about embodying interaction. This chapter is focused on analysing the experiences of dancing recreational Argentinean tango and elite sports dance, respectively. The aim is to specifically explore how these cases of dancing together might expand and possibly challenge phenomenological descriptions of reciprocal interaction. The interviewed dancers’ descriptions bring to the fore that when dancing with a partner their sense of movement neither begins nor stops at the surface of their physical body, but rather goes beyond their physicality. In other words, their sense of movement is based on a body extending and includes a sense of the other on the level of operative intentionality. Furthermore, the tango dancers and sports dancers, in their own way, describe that in their shaping of the interaction the body can be experienced as an individualised unity and as extended and shared at the same time. Being elite athletes aiming for the highest scores, the sports dancers specifically bring to the fore that they shift their embodied awareness strategically between extending the body as if shared and controlling their body as if an entity. Accordingly, the practices of the couple dancers indicate that the sense of the other can be deliberately trained and modified. Reciprocal interaction is, to some degree, also trainable on a bodily level.

Dancing Practices: Seeing and Sensing the Moving Body

This article aims to explore the relation between body and space – specifically how the relation between the embodied awareness of movement and the sense of one’s body-space can be modified and changed deliberately in different kinds of dance practices. Using a multi-sited design, the ethnographical fieldwork, which formed the empirical ground for the study, was from the outset focused on acknowledging the diversity of the dancers’ practices. Each in their own way, the 13 professional dancers involved in the study relate to and experience bodied potentialities, body-space and the spatiality of movement differently. Through their practice, they indicate that the body image is shaped through a multisensorial process of reification, and that seeing is to be related to a broader perceptual engagement. Furthermore, they exemplify how seeing can be deliberately used to expand the sense of their body-space and thereby to affect the spatiality of the fields of their embodied interaction.

Embodied Involvement in Virtual Worlds: The Case of eSports Practitioners

Abstract eSports practice designates a unique set of activities tethered to competitive, virtual environments, or worlds. This correlation between eSports practitioner and virtual world, we argue, is inadequately accounted for solely in terms of something physical or intellectual. Instead, we favor a perspective on eSports practice to be analyzed as a perceptual and embodied phenomenon. In this article, we present the phenomenological approach and focus on the embodied sensations of eSports practitioners as they cope with and perceive within their virtual worlds. By approaching eSports phenomenologically, we uncover ways in which its unique forms of virtual involvement overlap with as well as differentiate themselves from traditional structures of embodiment.

Book review: Body memory, metaphor and movement: by Sabine C Koch, Thomas Fuchs, Michela Summa and Cornelia Müller (eds)

As the editors announce in the introduction, this volume brings together contributions from different disciplines on the phenomenon of body memory, understood as ‘the totality of the embodied subject’s dispositions, which allow the person to react to present situations and requirements on the basis of past experience’ (p. 2). The first part of the book presents contributions from phenomenology, the second part from cognitive science and the third part from ‘embodied therapies’, namely, therapeutic practices, which somehow include movement practices and different bodily techniques (such as Mindfulness, Authentic Movement, Dance/Movement Therapies, Focusing). This division reflects the threefold aim of the book: to clarify the phenomenon of body memory, to develop empirical approaches from an embodied perspective and to discuss the implications of this embodied perspective for the field of therapy. Some of the central questions that the book seeks to address are as follows: What is body memory? Is the concept of body memory a useful one? How can body memory be measured? When and how does body memory become explicit? How can therapists access body memory in order to efficiently treat individuals? We shall review each individual book section in turn to assess whether the volume successfully answers at least some of these questions.

Book review: Body memory, metaphor and movement

As the editors announce in the introduction, this volume brings together contributions from different disciplines on the phenomenon of body memory, understood as ‘the totality of the embodied subject’s dispositions, which allow the person to react to present situations and requirements on the basis of past experience’ (p. 2). The first part of the book presents contributions from phenomenology, the second part from cognitive science and the third part from ‘embodied therapies’, namely, therapeutic practices, which somehow include movement practices and different bodily techniques (such as Mindfulness, Authentic Movement, Dance/Movement Therapies, Focusing). This division reflects the threefold aim of the book: to clarify the phenomenon of body memory, to develop empirical approaches from an embodied perspective and to discuss the implications of this embodied perspective for the field of therapy. Some of the central questions that the book seeks to address are as follows: What is body memory? Is the concept of body memory a useful one? How can body memory be measured? When and how does body memory become explicit? How can therapists access body memory in order to efficiently treat individuals? We shall review each individual book section in turn to assess whether the volume successfully answers at least some of these questions.