Making Dance Together: Intersubjectivity in Dancing "Together With" and "In Front Of" Others

Starting from Schutz's (1951, 1976) phenomenological approach to music and social relationship, I consider issues of intersubjectivity in the case of another performative art: theatrical dance. The paper is based on the multi-sited ethnography that I carried out on the Italian dance field. After a brief panoramic on the process of collective and emergent construction (cf. Atkinson, 2006; Becker et al., 2006) of the dance work, I focus on what is needed for any dance performance to be (properly) enacted and its meaning communicated, on the abilities that are consequently required to performers, and the practices they exploit in order to succeed. The latter may be regarded as practices of experiential transformation.
We may say, paraphrasing Schutz, that a piece of dance is a "meaningful context". It is meaningful to the choreographer; it can be understood as such by the spectator, and it is the task of the (group of co)performer(s) to bring about the correct meaning. To this aim, dancers need, firstly, to embody the piece trough its repeated, and repeatedly corrected, execution. In so doing, they acquire the capability to avoid reflexivity while performing, to experience "flow" (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975), to abandon themselves to their durée (Bergson, 1896, 1922), and thus to-be-in-there, i.e. to experientially enter and remain inside the "province of meaning" (Schutz, 1945) which is integral to the dance, and to meaning-make by (inter)acting in it. When, as mostly happens, there is a group of coperformers, it is necessary for their durées to be mutually attuned; they should be-together-in-there, be together in the ongoing, collectively created and sustained meaningful context which the dance piece itself is. To this aim, dancers need to learn, through repeated collective practice, to "feel one each other", as they put it.
Once onstage, finally, performers need to share the same flow of experience with the audience as well; they must drag the spectator into the experiencing of that meaningful context they are simultaneously (re)creating and inhabiting. Given the relationship of simultaneity between dancers and spectators, the former have "simply" to enter such a context through a sort of experiential footing (cf. Goffman, 1981), i.e. by changing their own stance towards reality. Ultimately, however, this is allowed by audience's presence itself, which not only works as a legitimating factor for the performance-as-social-ritual, but also entails strong emotions for the performer: if, on the one hand, s/he must master and transform them, on the other, they constitute footing's raw material itself. Performers' experience and audience's one are mutually constitutive.