JDSP 3 (1+2) pp.

524 Intellect Limited 2011

Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices

Volume 3 Numbers 1 and 2
2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jdsp.3.1-2.5_1

Andre Grau
University of Roehampton

Dancing bodies, spaces/

places and the senses:
A cross-cultural investigation
Abstract

Keywords

This article demonstrates that dancing bodies, space, place and the senses cannot
be accepted as universal concepts since they are embedded within typically western
understandings, and argues that all corporealities and spatialities are socially and
culturally mediated. Wanting to engage with dance as a complex holistic, polysemic,
multi-sensory and socially/culturally rooted practice, dance scholars need to be aware
of cultural variations in conceptualizations of dancing bodies in space. The article
offers a cross-cultural perspective, presenting different corporealities, sensoria and
spatial orientations of dancing bodies using a variety of examples, ranging from
Balinese dance to Josephine Baker, from Namibian to Australian Aboriginal dance.

corporeality
spatiality
sensorium
ballet
verticality
Josephine Baker
Tiwi dance

Setting the scene

My starting point, as an anthropologist specializing in dance, is that dance is
a somatic, kinetic and linguistic phenomenon; that these three domains are
inextricably intertwined; and that all are culturally and socially rooted. The
terms used in my title dancing bodies, space and place therefore cannot
be accepted as universal concepts since they are embedded within typically
western understandings, firmly rooted in a Kantian perspective of the body
in space. Similarly, I argue that the commonly understood concept of the five

Andre Grau

senses is an ethnocentric construct, and that such a narrow framework is not

very helpful in understanding the multisensory practice that dance is.
The cultural theorist Stuart Hall drew our attention to the fact that meaning is assigned through the frameworks of interpretation which we bring
to them (1997: 3). These frameworks are often implicit and part of our tacit
cultural knowledge, rather than explicit and fully thought through. Many years
ago sociologist Marcel Mauss indicated in his seminal article Techniques
of the body (1935) that human beings have many different ways of using
their bodies in everyday life, yet few individuals stop to think about how they
conceptualize body, space and bodies in space. These are often seen as empirically objective in that they can be measured according to specific scientific
criteria. It is important, however, to note that how human beings conceptualize the body, how they carve it into distinct body parts, and how they use it
to create metaphors are culturally specific. People in one society may see the
hand as being bounded between the wrist and the fingertips, whilst those in
another see the elbow as one extremity (Ardener [1971] 2007). In one society
the heart is perceived as the seat of love, but in another it is the liver: My
liver, my soul is not stranger than you have stolen my heart (Gutirrez Prez
2008: 31).
The cultural and science historian Shigehisa Kuriyama, in his remarkable
book The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese
Medicine (1999), contrasted the human body as described in classical Greek
medicine to the body as envisaged by physicians in ancient China. Kuriyama
demonstrated the fundamental differences and cultural distinctiveness in the
conceptualization of the body in both societies, one emphasizing anatomy
and muscle, the other more sensory aspects. Similarly, medical anthropologists have recognized that patients, physicians and other health practitioners
often hold quite different beliefs about the body, health and illness, and that
they sometimes use startlingly divergent bodily metaphors to describe different diseases, according to the stigma and the scientific and/or popular beliefs
held about them. They have also noted that there were both intra-cultural
(in terms of gender, age or class, for example) and cross-cultural variations
in the ways individuals conceptualized and talked about their bodies, and
that no society ever presents a homogeneous picture (see, e.g., Green et al.
1994; Henry 1999; Inhorn 2006; Kirmayer 1992; Weiss 1997; Whitaker 2003).
Scholars in dance education are also aware that they need to develop a culturally sensitive and responsive pedagogy (see, e.g., Cooper Albright 2003;
Melchior 2011; Rovegno and Gregg 2007). As anthropologist Brenda Farnell
argues, human beings everywhere engage in complex structured systems of
bodily action that are laden with social and cultural significance (1995: 343),
and, if sociologist Bryan Turner is to be believed when he contends that We
live in a somatic society in which our present political problems and social
anxieties are frequently transferred to the body (2003: 6), then it is essential
for everyone involved in movement practices to acknowledge that body movements are culturally and semantically laden actions couched in indigenous
models of organization and meaning (Williams 1982: 15).
Whilst the body has been the subject of much writing and the notion of
its social and cultural construction is not contentious, space has not been put
under the same scrutiny. Many forget, for example, that the way many people
in the West perceive and talk about space is largely from an anthropocentric perspective, yet cognitive scientists (cf. Bowerman 1996; Hickmann and
Hendriks 2010), philosophers (cf. Sheets-Johnstone 2010), social geographers

Dancing bodies, spaces/places and the senses

(cf. Stein 1987; Porteous 1990) and linguists (cf. Levinson 1996, 2003; Munnich
and Landau 2003) have pointed to the complexity of the acquisition of spatial
knowledge and demonstrated that there are many cultural variations in the
way space is conceptualized, imagined and talked about. This article will
therefore attempt to open up a number of avenues that a cross-cultural investigation can bring.

Towards a cross-cultural understanding

of the dancing body
It is common in somatic studies to start with a discussion of the Cartesian
body/mind dualism, showing how somatic work is in part about reuniting the
two. For this reason, it is worth considering a remark made by the philosopher Ren Descartes (15961650) in a letter to Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia
(16181680). Descartes corresponded with the princess between 1643 and
1649, the year before his death. In his letter of 21 May 1643, he wrote:

1. Descartes here
contrasts mental
images of space, which
are physical, with
thoughts about it,
which are immaterial.
For example, an
imagined rectangle
is physical in that
it has extension,
but thoughts about
rectangles (the idea of
a rectangle without
instantiation) are
immaterial and occur
independently of any
medium.
2. See also ONeill (1987)
for a defence of
Descartes.

[T]here are two things in the human soul on which all the knowledge
we can have of its nature depends on: one of which is that it thinks
and the other that, being united to the body, it can act and be acted
upon along with it. []. I will try here to explain the manner in which
I conceive of the union of the soul with the body and how the soul has
the power (force [in French]) to move it.
First I consider that there are in us certain primitive notions that are like
originals on the pattern of which we form all our knowledge. There are
only very few of these notions, for, after the most general those of being,
number, and duration, etc. which apply to all that we can conceive, we
have, for the body in particular, only the notion of extension,1 from which
follow the notions of shape and movement, and for the soul alone, we
have only that of thought, in which are included the perceptions of the
understanding and the inclinations of the will, and finally, for the soul and
the body together, we have only that of their union, on which depends that
of the power the soul has to move the body and the body to act on the
soul in causing its sensations and passions.
(Descartes, 21 May 1643 in Shapiro
2007: 6364, emphasis added)
This is not quite the complete separation of mind and body and the assumption of the superiority of the former over the latter that is generally attributed to
Descartes and then presented as a typical western understanding of the body.2
As philosopher Lisa Shapiro argues:
Though mind and body are really distinct entities for Descartes, in the case
of a human being they join together to form a true unit. Our sensations
of the world around us and of the condition of our bodies are evidence of
this union.
(2007: 22)
Wanting to engage with dance as a complex holistic practice that engages
both affect and intellect is about recognizing that human experiences are not
all of the same order. Sensing, feeling and thinking, for example, are all part of
human knowledge, and they do not operate in isolation. They are, however,

Andre Grau

3. See Synnot and

Howes (1992) for an
excellent historical
survey of the different
anthropologies of the
body and the senses.
4. Scholars in other fields
also explored the
conceptual integration
of different modes
of experience. For
many dancers and
dance scholars, for
example, the notion
of a thinking body,
to borrow Mabel
Elsworth Todds
(1937) expression,
is their point of
departure. Similarly,
the philosopher Rudolf
Steiner proposed, in a
series of three lectures
given in Berlin in 1909,
a theory based on
twelve senses, linked
to the abilities of
willing (the senses of
touch, motion, balance
and life/metabolism);
feeling (senses of smell,
taste, sight and heat/
cold); and thinking
(senses of hearing,
language, thought
and self/other). For
Steiner, movement was
a way of awakening
perception and
thinking, an idea he
developed especially
in his educational
methods where
different kinds of
movements are
introduced to foster
different learning
processes at different
ages. Neither Todd
nor Steiner, however,
have received much
attention from
anthropologists, and
many dance scholars
who have been
interested in the notion
of a constructed body
have often thought
of the body as a text,
as an entity on which
cultural beliefs can be
inscribed, forgetting
that such language
somehow presupposes
the primacy of the
mental over the
physical (Hsu 2008: 443)
and often assumes the
universality of Todds
and other somatic

different ways of apprehending the world. It is only through an investigation

of the many distinctive channels experienced in dance that one will understand the phenomena better. Furthermore, it is important to emphasize that
whilst shared throughout the human species, cognitive capabilities are used
in varying ways across the world and in different social contexts. As anthropologist David Howes argues, The perceptual is cultural and political, and
not simply (as psychologists and neuroscientists would have it) a matter of
cognitive processes or neurological mechanisms located in the individual
subject (2005:1). Starting the search towards an understanding of the crosscultural dancing body from the perspective of the senses is useful in that
one could argue that they belong to the interface between body and mind
(Hsu2008:433); that indeed our sensorium, as the seat of our senses, straddle
the domains of sensation and cognition (Howes 2009: 1); and that our understanding of space also depends on our sensual engagement with it.

A sensory anthropology
As a number of anthropologists became more and more dissatisfied with
much of the discussions regarding human meaning-making the core subject
of anthropology two new subfields have emerged in the past 30 years or
so, medical anthropology and the anthropology of the senses, following the
anthropology of the body that had started earlier.3 This is not to say that anthropologists and sociologists had never engaged with bodies and senses before.
As mentioned above, Mauss wrote about the body and its habitus in the 1930s,
and German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote an essay entitled Sociology
of the senses in 1908, which he later translated and adapted for an English
version (Simmel [1908] 1921). Similarly, during the same period linguists such
as Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf documented variations
in bodily and sensory terminologies in different societies.4 These, however,
were relatively isolated examples, and the new generation of anthropologists
wanted the body and the senses to become central to the discipline. They
argued that too much of the anthropological discourse was disembodied,
and they recognized that the senses were not just means of engaging physically with the world, but rather were avenues for the transmission of cultural
values (Classen 1997: 401) and not biological and pre-cultural elements
of our humanity. For them it was important to acknowledge that different
societies espoused different sensory models. Whilst few worked directly with
dance, their findings about the body and its senses are nevertheless useful to
dance scholars, as they highlight cultural variations. Anthropologist Constance
Classen, for instance, commented on how the Hopi of Arizona in the United
States place an emphasis on sensations of vibration (1993: 11), and how their
language is extraordinarily rich in terms for vibratory phenomena (Whorf
1936: 129), while the Desana of Colombia in contrast highlight the symbolic
importance of colour, as a certain pattern of colour, for example, will bring to
mind related odours and flavours and their symbolic role in Desana social life
and cosmology (Classen 1993: 133). Therefore, the emphasis was to demonstrate that the Aristotelian model of the five senses, giving a prerogative to
vision,5 and linking each sense to a specific bodily organ, was not universal.
As Classen argues:
When we examine the meanings associated with various sensory faculties
and sensations in different cultures we find a cornucopia of potent sensory

Dancing bodies, spaces/places and the senses

symbolism. Sight may be linked to reason or to witchcraft, taste may be

used as a metaphor for aesthetic discrimination or for sexual experience,
an odour may signify sanctity or sin, political power or social exclusion.
Together, these sensory meanings and values form the sensory model
espoused by a society, according to which the members of that society
make sense of the world, or translate sensory perceptions and concepts
into a particular worldview. There will likely be challenges to this model
from within the society, persons and groups who differ on certain sensory
values, yet this model will provide the basic perceptual paradigm to be
followed or resisted.
(1997: 402)
The anthropology of the senses is therefore primarily concerned with the way
sensory experiences are patterned and interpreted. As ethnomusicologist and
anthropologist Anthony Seeger, a pioneer in the subfield of the anthropology of the senses, put it, It is important to analyse how people think they
perceive (1981: 80). Doing this, one quickly becomes aware that a sensory
model of only five senses is not particularly adequate for understanding the
variety of existing sensoria. Anyone working in dance will concur with this.
Anthropologist and dancer Caroline Potter, for example, commented that
among the western theatre dancers she worked with:
A sense of motion, while excluded from the classic five sensory classification, is highly elaborated among students of British contemporary
dance. [ A]ttending with and to the body [] through this often overlooked sensory mode is necessary for both identity with the professional
dance community and subsequent professional success.
(2008: 446)
Dancer and educator Susanne Ravn made similar observations in her study of
professional dancers in the United Kingdom and Denmark (2009). However,
little work has been done to offer a cross-cultural perspective. My aim is therefore to present here, by way of an introductory exploration, different corporealities, sensoria and spatial orientations of dancing bodies using a variety of
examples, ranging from Balinese dance to Josephine Baker, from Namibian to
Australian Aboriginal dance. Interestingly, Balinese dance places the body in
space according to sacred directions: the mountain where the gods live and
the East where the sun rises, whilst for the Tiwi Aborigines, the body is not
seen as bounded by its skin, but rather as able to meld into the landscape.
Additionally, for the Tiwi the verticality of the spine shown by a good dancer
brings together human beings and landscape. In contrast, Josephine Baker
popularized a new corporeality significant for the development of modernist
abstraction precisely because it displaced body parts away from the verticality
of the spine. I hope that these examples will help dance scholars in thinking
about and examining their own understanding of dancing bodies in space.

practitioners thinking
body because they
have broadened their
mind by being inspired
by non-western views
and practices.
5. This prerogative of the
visual can be seen in
everyday life, when
seeing is equated
to understanding,
for example (see Alan
Dundass ([1972]
1980) essay Seeing
is believing for an
excellent discussion
on this preference of
vision over the other
senses), but it has
also been significant
intellectually in
recent years, when
the concept of the
gaze first offered
by the philosopher
Jean Paul Sartre was
developed further by
psychoanalyst Jacques
Lacan and philosopher
Michel Foucault. The
concept was borrowed
by film theorist Laura
Mulvey, and developed
in her article Visual
pleasure and narrative
cinema (1975), which
has had a significant
impact on dance
studies. Similarly,
the anthropological
concept of worldview
derives from the
western habit of
transforming actuality
into something largely
picturable.

Verticality and the dancing body

I have discussed in an earlier article, published in Body and Society (Grau 2005),
how notions of verticality have been significant in a number of western theatre
dance genres. Here I want to develop these ideas further. Ballet, for instance,
is often perceived in terms of its verticality. Ballet scholar Tim Scholl argues,

Andre Grau

for example, that [ballets] erect body, the leaps and jumps into the air, and
the poses and movements executed high on the toes represent [its] conquest
of vertical space (1994: 9). Ballet dancers are described as Apollos Angels
(Homans 2010), and the verticality of the genre is often discussed in terms of
its Apollonian qualities because the technique is seen to resist gravity and the
dancers limbs are centred and aligned in such a way as to allow maximum
stability and ease of movement, which flow from the bodys vertical axis. In
1922, Akim Volynskii, the Russian literary critic, journalist and art historian,
wrote about Olga Spesivtseva in Sleeping Beauty:
The dancers entire body is actually directed upward, not with timidly
effeminate emotion, but with a firm, immovable will, like the gentle
rippling of water. The back is held in aplomb. The head sits on the neck
confidently and proudly. In this apotheosis of verticality, the dancer all
a line straight up in the air, all ascent and heroic exertion, all attention
and a perception suddenly freezes for several terrifying long moments.
This is a genuine miracle of beauty and morality.
(Volynskii 1922, in Rabinowitz 1996: 11)
Because ballet technique grew out of the elegance of European court dance
and a classical artistic tradition, it is argued by its aficionados that ballet like
all the arts, only more so ultimately reflected the essence of a supreme moral
perfection toward which humanity must strive (Rabinowitz 1996: 5). On the
other hand, as it developed as a courtly spectacle to glorify and sanctify absolute monarchical power (Thomas 2003: 95), its detractors argue that its training,
technique and aesthetic reproduce the values and beliefs of the owning classes
(Adair 1992: 8290). Verticality then is seen by some to have a political dimension. Dance scholar Roger Copeland, for example, argues in his discussion of
ballet in Cuba that:
the upright carriage of a ballet dancers body seems to reflect the sort of
pride exuded by a once colonized people now standing tall and exerting
an impact on international affairs that seem totally disproportionate to
their actual size or military might.
(1978: 13)
Verticality is also often invoked when dealing with spirituality. The architecture of Christian churches, for example, is frequently interpreted as a reach
by humanity towards Heaven. Ruth St Denis, one of the early pioneers of
American modern dance, commented on verticality when she wrote, my own
body is the living Temple of all Gods. The God of Truth is in my upright spine
(in Desmond [1993] 2001: 261). Verticality is therefore seen as representing
both higher orders and control: control over ones own gravity and over other
people. This can be seen not only within dance practice but also in everyday life, as, for example, in the discussion of the male upright gait of the
German bourgeoisie in late 18th century (Falk 1995: 95). By extension then,
verticality, for some, becomes linked to western hegemony.
Josephine Baker and other African American dancers, for example, are
presented as disrupting this verticality, which was permanently altered with
the arrival of jazz when the centre of gravity dropped from the solar plexus to
the pelvic area and body part isolations were introduced. Baker undoubtedly
brought a new bodily aesthetic. Her black dancing body contrasted with the

10

Dancing bodies, spaces/places and the senses

vertically aligned body of European ballet blanc. She disrupted the established
picture of classicism. She was beautiful, sexy and funny. Many in the audience felt she was bringing a new age of innocence, a sort of return to a purer
natural state. She entranced and inspired artists such as Picasso, Colette and
Gertrude Stein. For many she was the meeting point between modernism and
the Harlem Renaissance. She somewhat embodied the modernist concerns of
alienation, primitivism, and experimental forms (Gosselin 1996: 37). Often
scantily clad, she was seen as a magnificent ebony statue, a black woman
many a white man could fantasize about sleeping with, with the frisson of the
forbidden that this entailed.
For others, along with the other African American dancers and jazz musicians, she was bringing about the end of European civilization. For example,
the dancer Isadora Duncan argues in her autobiography:
I often wonder where is the American composer [] who will
compose the true music for the American dance which will contain no
jazz rhythm no rhythm from the waist down, []. It seems to me
monstrous that any one should believe that the Jazz rhythm expresses
America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage. [] America
will be expressed in some Titanic music that will shape its chaos to
harmony, and long-legged shining boys and girls will dance to this
music, not the tottering, ape-like convulsions of the Charleston, but
a striking, tremendous upward movement, mounting high above the
Pyramids of Egypt, beyond the Parthenon of Greece, an expression of
beauty and strength such as no civilization has ever known.
([1927] 1933: 358)
Unpacking the representation offered by Baker is complex and beyond the
scope of this article. On the one hand, according to cultural historian Iris
Schmeisser, we can see her as a figure of cultural power and influence who
resisted a racist power structure (2007). Alternatively, she can be seen as a
perpetrator and even a victim of white primitivist stereotypization (Schmeisser
2007: 107). Here is not the place to discuss this fully. Suffice it to say that
despite her enormous importance in bringing a new corporeality to dance in
the early twentieth century, Josephine Baker has largely been placed at the
periphery of a modernist dance movement, even though the move away from
verticality and the exploration of different corporealities is often presented by
dance historians as being central to the development of modern dance. Joyce
Morgenroth, for example, discussing the rebellion of the pioneers of American
modern dance, argues that:
Dating back to the first decades of the twentieth century, early modern
dance choreographer Isadora Duncan rejected ballets verticality and
grace and made dances based on the wavelike movements of nature;
not much later Ruth St Denis created an exotic movement vocabulary
that balanced precariously between sensuality and religion.
(2004: 5)
I would argue that Bakers marginalization within the dance canon is largely
because she worked within entertainment culture rather than within art dance.
Although Duncan and St Denis started as small-part actresses, musical comedy
chorus girls and variety-show skirt dancers. [] They took their theatrical savvy

11

Andre Grau

6. It is interesting how
Deborah Jowitts
comment echoes
uncritically that of
Duncan offered earlier.
7. In French, the
translation has
been given as Pays
des Hommes Dignes
(Englebert 1986: 8)
and Pays des
homes intgres
(Deschamp 2001).

into new directions, dignifying dance by associating it with great art or music
or philosophical ideas (Jowitt 2011: 3).6 Because she knowingly drew from the
aesthetic codes of black exoticism in her performances (Schmeisser 2007: 109)
and manipulated the conventions of primitivism to gain a considerable measure of control over her audience (Martin 1995: 313), Baker is now celebrated
and placed in a pantheon of black feminist heroines (Bennetta 2007: 1).
Because she remained within the world of music-hall rather than high art
theatres, however, she is barely mentioned and often totally ignored in histories
of dance whether for a general public (cf. e.g. Garofoli 2008) or for a scholarly
audience (cf. e.g. Cohen and Matheson [1974] 1992; Partsch-Bergsohn 1994;
Kassing 2007). Similarly, Baker has tended to be ignored in discussions dealing with primitivism in modern art (Clifford 1988: 197199). She somehow
represented the primitive fantasies of white artists, reinforcing their belief in an
exoticist concept of black cultural difference (Schmeisser 2007: 111): she could
inspire artists but could not be one in her own right.
However, let us return to verticality. Whilst there is no doubt that one can
look at verticality in the way mentioned here, it is also important to remember that it is the result of human beings becoming bi-pedal and could therefore
signify humanity in contrast to a non-human state. If humanity is defined in
relation to the agency and freedom of human beings, then one could argue that
when in 1983 the revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara, combining two local
languages, Moor and Dioula, coined a new name Burkina Faso, the land
of upright people (Wikipedia) or the land of honorable men (Manson and
Knight 2006: vii) for the western African state of Upper Volta, erectness indicated democratic freedom and dignity.7 Verticality, however, could be about
something else altogether. The Tiwi of Melville and Bathurst Island, of North
Australia, with whom I have been working since 1980, certainly praise a straight
spine and a quality of walking that they label as walking flash, but this has
nothing to do with power or control. The vertical spine connects the human
body to the trees with their clear lines once the grass has been burnt after the
rainy season, and this is the very clarity of line that is at the heart of Tiwi aesthetics (Grau 2003). My point here is that whilst verticality may be seen as a universal
component of our humanity, its meaning is culturally and socially mediated.

Bodies-in-space
In 1908 the mathematician Henri Poincar argued in his book Science and
Method that:
It is in reference to our own body that we locate exterior objects, and the
only special relations of these objects that we can picture to ourselves
are their relations with our body. It is our body that serves, so to speak,
as a system of axes and co-ordinates.
([1908] 2003: 100)
In this he followed the philosopher Immanuel Kant ([1768] 2003: 36172),
who stated that:
Because of its three dimensions, physical space can be thought of as having
three planes, which all intersect each other at right angles. Concerning
the things which exist outside ourselves: it is only in so far as they stand
in relation to ourselves that we have any cognition of them by means of

12

Dancing bodies, spaces/places and the senses

the senses at all. It is, therefore, not surprising that the ultimate ground,
on the basis of which we form our concept of directions in space, derives
from the relation of these intersecting planes to our bodies.
([1768] 2003: 366)
Kants position was therefore not only that the body is a pre-condition of spatial
experience, which is inevitable, as it is through the body that the spatiality of
the mind can emerge, but that the very concept of space location can only exist
through the imaginary planes crossing the body: what in western anatomy are
referred to as the sagittal, frontal and transversal planes. This is also the position that developmental psychologists Jean Piaget and Brbel Inhelder and
their followers took when they postulated that children in their development
started first with a perception that was egocentric, that is, from their own bodily
perspective, and as they grew up were able to take other perspectives into
account following a specific time frame ([1948] 1956). This position continues
to be held by many contemporary psychologists. For example, Barbara Tversky
has argued that:
One of the first aspects of space that we confront is our own bodies.
Our bodies have three axes, that formed by our heads and feet, that
formed by our fronts and backs, and that formed by our left and right.
[ S]pace as we perceive and experience it is anchored, asymmetric,
and biased.
These facts about the space of our bodies and the world they interact
with form the basis for our conceptions of the spatial world.
(1998: 25960)
I do not deny the physical truth of the bodily axes, and I acknowledge that
using ones body as a point of reference is undoubtedly part of our human condition. That a baby first uses his or her own body as a reference before establishing outside, independent landmarks (Mishra et al. 2003: 367) is similarly hardly
contentious. I would argue, however, that whether this egocentric perspective is
the universal basis of all human spatial conception or that all children the world
over follow the same development path within the same time frame is much
more debatable. More cross-cultural research needs to be carried out to give
supporting empirical evidence to make such assertions (see Haun et al. 2011 for
a good review of the state of current research in the field).
One wonders what Poincar, Kant, Piaget and Inhelder would have made of
the comment by anthropologist Brenda Farnell, who studied storytelling gestures
among the Assiniboine, a First Nations people originally from the Northern
Great Plains of the United States and Canada, when she recalls that:
When working on the transcription of a particular story that contained
many pointing gestures that seemed ambiguous, [] I asked When
you make that sign, do you think of your hand as moving away from
your chest, or is it going towards the front, or towards something? The
reply was a slow, patient, No its going east.
(Farnell 1999: 15455)
Researching the perception of space, psychologists Holly Taylor and Barbara
Tversky have found that overall, theorists of spatial language have distinguished

13

Andre Grau

8. Since a car can move,

its front is the direction
of forward locomotion
as it would be in a
human being. A houses
front door would be
the one situated on the
side that is facing the
street as in a public and
privileged encounter,
whilst its back door,
if there is one, would
be used by tradesmen
(there may also be a
garden door, usually
giving way to a private,
family sphere). It is
interesting to note, for
example, that in the
majority of houses in
England the front door
opens in, welcoming
visitors in, whilst the
back door opens out.
Houses and their doors
can therefore be seen
in terms of human
encounters. This
anthropomorphism
continues when the
object does not have
an obvious front, such
as a tree, for example,
and the western viewer
often decides that the
front is the direction
facing him or her, as in
a social conversation.
This contrasts with the
Hausa of Nigeria, who
perceive the side closer
to them as the trees
back, conceptualizing
the tree as facing the
same direction as them
(Pederson 1993: 294).
9. A further study, using a
different simple dance
that included arm
movements towards
the body as well as
away from the body
(as in the previous
study) showed that
these movements
were preferentially
coded egocentrically
so that the allocentric
preference was
dependent on
the structure and
directionality of
the memorized
movements (Haun
2011: 60).

14

three kinds of reference frames depending on their origins: deictic or viewercentred, intrinsic or object-centered, and extrinsic or environment-centered
(1996: 372). In the following discussion I will primarily focus on the distinction
between egocentric-anthropomorphic and allocentric geocentric topocentric perspectives depending on the frame of reference used. In an egocentric
perception, objects or peoples are seen in relation to the viewers body where
the planes through his or her body are used to derive spatial coordinates (think
of spatial terms such as left/right/front/back), whilst in the latter they are seen
in relation to the environment (think of spatial terms such as uphill/downhill,
upstage/downstage). One can also talk about intrinsic, relative and absolute
ways of orienting ourselves in space. An intrinsic frame of reference establishes
the location towards an object and its intrinsic frame such as a parked car, a
house or a tree, for example8 in terms of its front/back/sides that are agreed
with. An absolute orientation, on the other hand, would be fixed and unchangeable: when we say the wind comes from the north, for example, it comes from
a specific direction and no other and it is external to the scene and the viewer.
Conversely, a relative frame is viewer-centred and the location of the objects is
described in terms of the viewers front/back/sides. All human beings have the
capacity to perceive space using this broad spectrum, but most tend to emphasize one over the others. In western cognition, for example, it has been shown
that much of our spatial thinking is egocentric and anthropomorphic (Levinson
2003: 11), and that it largely reflects a particular way of conceptualizing bodies
in space as well as the prejudices of Indo European languages. Moving outside
of this frame of reference, different conceptualizations and ways of talking about
bodies in space exist.
Let us look more closely at the notion of an allocentric perception of space.
A group of scholars from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in
Nijmegen, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig,
and the University of Plymouth investigated whether memory for movements of ones own body differs between cultures with contrastive strategies
for coding spatial relations (Haun and Rapold 2009: R1068) by comparing
two groups of kindergarten/primary school children, one in Leipzig and one
in Northern Namibia, among the Akhoe Hai||om people, traditionally hunters and gatherers. In each instance, using the participants mother tongue,
a simple instruction of lets dance! was given to the child positioned next
to an experimenter facing the same way in a closed room. The experimenter
counted and demonstrated the movement until the child could do it on his or
her own. The child was then turned around 180 degree and asked to perform
the task again. The experiment was done with 50 German children (25 boys
and 25 girls) and 35 Namibian (fifteen boys and twenty girls). The German
children produced 60% egocentric, 6% allocentric and 34% other responses.
Akhoe Hai||om children produced 20% egocentric, 54% allocentric and 26%
other responses (Haun and Rapold 2009: R1069), a response considered
statistically significant by the science community the researchers belong to,
which demonstrated for them that the ways in which we memorize movements of our own body differ in line with culture-specific preferences for how
to conceive of spatial relations, and that [T]hese results support the view that,
at least in some domains, cultural diversity goes hand in hand with cognitive
diversity (Haun and Rapold 2009: R1069).9
For me, what is interesting in this study is that the researchers chose to
use dance as a way of acquiring data, in contrast to other scholars who use a
number of tasks linked to relationships to objects or routes in the environment

Dancing bodies, spaces/places and the senses

(cf. e.g. the excellent interdisciplinary cross-cultural studies India, Indonesia,

Nepal carried out by Milena Abbiati, Nilima Changkakoti, Pierre Dasen,
Harold Foy, Ramesh Mishra, Shanta Niraula and Sunita Singh (see Mishra
et al. 2003, 2009; Dasen et al. 2009)). It must be said, however, that the notion of
dance is the researchers not the Akhoe Hai||oms, and for any dance specialist, it would be considered as extremely simplistic. I will therefore now present
two case studies from indigenous dance perspectives: one, Tiwi based on
my own extensive ethnographic fieldworks (see Grau 1983, 1992, 1998, 2000,
2001a, 2001b, 2003, 2005) and the other, Bali based on secondary sources
cited in the text.

Two ethnographic examples

Balinese dance
Balinese dance offers an interesting contrast to western theatre dance in that
its corporeity and its use of space are so very different. Indeed, East Indies
and dance scholar Claire Holt and anthropologist Gregory Bateson asked the
question: Why [] is the Balinese dance so totally different from the dance
forms of any people in the western hemisphere? ([1944] 1972: 55). They
stated that:
The Balinese [] never tend away from the ground. They do not dance
upward and away from the earth, but they move on it, along its surface,
in slow circles or lines, rapid semi-circles and serpentines, and in sudden
zig-zag of short duration.
(Holt and Bateson [1944] 1972: 6061)
They also noted that in both male and female dances the limbs form angles,
and there is a tendency to pull up the shoulders with upraised and out-turned
angular elbows pointed upwards so that the head sinks between them and
the neck disappears (Holt and Bateson [1944] 1972: 60). Similarly, after seeing
Balinese dance at the Paris Colonial Exhibition in 1931, French actor and theatre director Antonin Artaud commented on the dancers physicality. Whilst it is
true that his description of Balinese theatre was indeed one big mis-reading,
as contended by theatre specialist Edward Scheer (2004: 61), and that he was
essentially ignorant (Savarese 2001: 71) of the culture he was writing about,
his movement observations are nevertheless interesting. He commented, for
example, on the horizontal movements of the head and on the displacement of
the axis of the waist (Artaud [1938] 1964: 82, 81). In the same manner, dance
critic Andr Lvinson observed the young Balinese dancers oscillations of the
head, from one side to another, accompanied by a rolling of the eyes that
causes vibrations amongst the circlets of flowers on the edges of the mitres
in which the dancers are dressed (Lvinson 1931, cited in Savarese 2001: 70).
Artaud also talked about angular and jerky postures and about a maze of
gestures ([1938] 1964: 80). These descriptions indicate how the Balinese
corporeity is seen in contrast to the western spectators own.
Balinese teaching is also enormously different in that it involves an extreme
degree of touching and holding of the as yet untrained children by the teachers, who guide the movements of the pupil, leading them energetically by the
wrists until by sheer repetition the pupils acquire the feeling of the gesture
(Covarrubias ([1937] 1986: 221), see also early photographs taken by the artist
Walter Spies (18951942) and dancer Beryl de Zoete (18791962) who spent

15

Andre Grau

much time in Bali learning and documenting local artistic practices (Spies and
De Zoete 1938)). Teachers often simultaneously keep a running commentary
describing what is expected of the student (see e.g. Jacques Brunets 1992 film
Sebatu: Un village balinais [Sebatu: A Balines Village]). Of special interest for
a discussion of spatiality, however, is the way the Balinese dancing body is
situated in space and place. Balinese dancer and scholar I Mad Bandem and
theatre scholar Fredrik E. de Boer have argued that the dances of Bali can be
classified in part through a hierarchy of places ([1981] 1995: 97). This value
scale of the dances is not related to their movement material, choreography
or content. Instead, it is linked to the places the dances are performed in, the
most sacred and hence higher place, being the innermost courtyard of the
temple, and the lowest being varying secular spaces, with many in between.
Throughout Balinese life the directional system is based around two
intersecting axes: kangin (East) kauh (West) and kaja (towards the mountain, sacred) kelog (towards the ocean, demonic) (Bandem and de Boer
[1981] 1995). The Balinese therefore use a spatial system that is primarily
geocentric. According to anthropologist Jrg Wassmann and psychologist
Pierre Dasen:
Orientation [in Bali] is geared to the islands central mountains, to the
uphill directions, prototypically to the central volcano, Gunung Agung
(3142m), the dwelling of the Hindu gods of Bali: Towards the mountain
is the sacred and pure direction, and is called kaja (from ke, towards; and
aja, hill, mountain) while towards the sea is the direction called kelog
(from ke, towards; and laut, sea). It should be noted that the sea is not
impure in itself, only the direction towards it; indeed, the sea can purify
and provide sacred water. [] Another direction, kangin, is also considered sacred: everywhere in Bali, this is the direction from which the sun
rises. Its opposite is kauh (for both terms there is no literal translation).
(1998: 692)
Whilst the axis kangin kauhi is fixed, kaja kelod is not, in that in the South
of the island kaja is North whilst in the North it is South, and when moving
around the islands the axis will alter accordingly. Consequently, the two
axes are rarely at right angles to each other and this is interesting. From the
perspective of a dancer brought up within the geometrical structure of western theatre dance with the spine as a central axis this seems incongruous and
raises many questions.

Tiwi dance
Among the Tiwi, although there is an extensive vocabulary to discuss different body parts, with specific terms, for example, for the side of the buttocks
or the back of the hips, as well as a whole vocabulary of pilosity depending
on where the hair is located on the body, there does not seem to be a word
for body, as a self-contained entity, separated from other human beings and
from the natural environment. Charles Osbornes Tiwi dictionary (1974), for
example, gives a word for a dead body but not for a live one. Death brings
boundaries to physical bodies, ghosts disassociate to roam their ancestral land
and dead bodies are buried in the earth. Life, on the other hand, expands the
body into the world, both natural and social, and this is done most explicitly
through dance.

16

Dancing bodies, spaces/places and the senses

Tiwi dance does not require a specific body type. There is no specific training, as all dance learning is done within the contexts of performances themselves, but a good dancer is able to sing and dance simultaneously by drawing
his or her energy from the imunga,10 the place in the lower abdomen that
holds life. Everyone needs to participate at one time or another, dancing being
a social and spiritual responsibility shared by all, so every Tiwi is capable of
at least an adequate performance. Tiwi specialists make a distinction between
what is innate/biological and what is learned/social in their dances. Their
distinction, however, is not the same as that found in western theatre dance,
where certain bodily attributes, such as loose hip joints, an arched foot or a
slender neck are seen as innate dancerly aptitudes, which give individuals the
talent they need to work on to become dancers. In contrast, Tiwi individuals
are born with whole dances inside their bodies. These are what one can label
the Dreaming dances. The Dreaming refers to a mythological time when the
world was created, and simultaneously to a contemporary spiritual sphere best
reached through ritual. All Tiwi inherit Dreamings at birth from their fathers.
Individuals are connected to the essence of animals, such as Crocodile, Dingo
or Shark; of natural phenomena, such as Rainbow; or geographical features,
such as certain rock formations. Each individual manifests as a representation
of these things, and as each Dreaming has a movement vocabulary attached
to it, individuals can move like their Dreamings without having to learn it.
Tiwi, however, also recognized the power of human creativity, and part of
their dance repertoire has been choreographed by known individuals, who
transmit their dances patrilineally through the next generation (men transmit
the dances to their children, women to their brothers children). These Just
a song dances, as some Tiwi people label them, are therefore learnt, and so
are the dances, which have been choreographed by the ancestors and which
can be labelled the kinship dances, as their movements show specific kinship
links between the dancer and those for whom the dance is being performed.
Looking at the Tiwi environment, three different kinds of places are
seen as important: countries, inherited patrilineally, where one can exploit
the resources, and where ones ghost goes back after death; sacred sites
where spirit children are found; and home/camp where one lives and
shares a social life with ones kin. In dance, the Tiwi often situate their
bodiesin space in terms of facing sacred places and countries that may be
miles away. They call out the name of the place or of the ancestress living
there and the vibrations in the air created by the voice link two geographical
spaces, reinforcing the bodily connections Tiwi people have with the land.
Western dancers may have a much more developed spatial intelligence than
non-dancers, but this awareness tends to be limited to their immediate
performing space, whilst among the Tiwi, dancers learn to be physically
aware of their whole geographical environment in order to respond appropriately when the need arises.
For the Tiwi, a ritual is most efficacious when the linguistic, somatic and
kinetic domains of dance are brought together. Through the use of evocative song texts, bringing together cosmology, kin dead and alive and
land, the feminine channel of the air is used. Through the dancing, kin are
manifested through the dancers bodies. The dancers stamp with their feet
the masculine domain of the earth, the land is enlivened and the Dreaming
perpetuated. In rituals, different physical areas and domains of experience
are brought together, creating a sense of plenitude that reinforces what it
means to be Tiwi.

10. Imunga is also one

of the names of the
ancestress who created
the Tiwi world, and
of the matrilineages
she started as she left
her daughters around
the island during her
journey.

17

Andre Grau

Conclusion
To conclude, I would argue that as human beings belonging to a single species
it is likely that in some instances our corporeality, spatiality and sensibility overlap, but the ways we perceive these, and conceptualize and talk about them are
certainly not identical. Assuming a universality in our sensorial worlds closes
doors, and as an anthropologist I want to open these doors, as we have much
to learn. I will echo medical anthropologist Margaret Locks argument that we
must remain inherently suspicious of universal truths, entrenched power bases,
and intransigent relativisms (1993: 134). The issue, however, is that although
dance seems to be an ideal domain to examine spatial language, bodily metaphors and how both are embodied and experienced by human beings, scholars interested in such issues, be they linguists, psychologists, neuroscientists,
anthropologists or social geographers, simply largely ignore it, even though
one could argue that corporeality and spatiality are somewhat crystallized in
dance and are often supported by detailed linguistic texts expanding verbally
on the bodily knowledge of the dancers. It is fascinating to me, for example,
that Wassmann and Dassen did not engage with dance for their analysis of
Balinese spatiality, or that a scholar examining the Tamil conceptualization
and verbal depiction of space (Pederson 1993) somehow chose to ignore
dance, even though Tamil Nadu is home to the well-researched dance style
bharatanatyam, a genre linked to numerous treatises that surely deal with
spatiality. I am even more puzzled that in a study focusing on motion events,
dance is barely mentioned (Loucks and Pederson 2011). Conversely, it is also
true that those scholars focusing on dance often do not sufficiently engage
with issues of corporeality and spatiality, assuming that their own understanding pertains to all, and they rarely investigate how dancers experience and talk
about them. They often fail to document fully and carry out detailed analyses
of bodies in space so that empirical evidence can support their research and be
used for cross-cultural comparisons to broaden our understanding of dance. It
is indeed only through a combination of efforts, engaging in multidisciplinary
frameworks, that the study of dance will reach its full potential.

Acknowledgements
Many ideas presented in this article have been tried out in my classes in the
Anthropology of Dance at the University of Roehampton and especially
during IPEDAM, an intensive Erasmus Programme held at the Norwegian
University of Science and Technology in Trondheim in 2011. I would like to
thank my students for helping me, through their questions, to clarify my ideas.
More formal presentations of some of this material have been given at the
Mind-Spirit-Body-Matter: Drawn to the Human Stations of the Temporal
Workshop, held at University of Cambridge, Kettles Yard in July 2010; at the
seminar Corps et genre dans les espaces publics et privs: Danse et espace,
at Bordeaux University, Laboratoire ADES, Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique, in May 2011; and at the Dance & Somatic Practices Conference,
Coventry University in July 2011. I would like to thank the organizers of and the
participants in these three events for inviting me to share my work. It is through
such sharing that ideas can develop, and I am deeply grateful to them all.

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Suggested citation
Grau, A. (2011), Dancing bodies, spaces/places and the senses: A crosscultural investigation, Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices 3: 1+2, pp. 524,
doi:10.1386/jdsp.3.1-2.5_1

Contributor details
Andre Grau is Professor of the Anthropology of Dance at the University
of Roehampton, London, where she directs the Centre for Dance Research,
and leads the M.A. in Dance Anthropology and the Erasmus Mundus

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Andre Grau

Choreomundus: International Master in Dance Knowledge, Practice and

Heritage. She supervises doctoral students in a variety of fields, including
flamenco in London; Ewe dance in Ghana and the United Kingdom; Indian
dance in transnational contexts; vernacular non-partnered dance; dance and
well-being; racism in ballet; and bodies and space in classical Greece and
India. After training in dance in her native Switzerland and in London, Andre
gained an Associate from the Benesh Institute of Choreology, London (1976),
and an M.A. in Ethnomusicology (1979) and Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from
Queens University Belfast (1983). She has carried out fieldwork in Australia,
South Africa, India and the United Kingdom. She has published widely,
contributing book chapters in French and in English and articles in numerous academic and professional journals, on a variety of topics including Tiwi
and South Asian dance, ice-skating, identity and bodily practices. Her childrens book Eyewitness Dance (Dorling Kindersley, 1998) has been translated
into eight languages. She is currently writing a book focusing on the Sarabhais
as three generations of performers involved in political activism in India.
Contact: Department of Dance, University of Roehampton, Froebel College,
Roehampton Lane, London SW15 5PJ.
E-mail: a.grau@roehampton.ac.uk

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