When arguments are not enough: A kinesthetic intervention

My book Why We Dance: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming (2015) calls attention to dance as a theoretical and practical resource for discerning how to respond to this cultural moment in ways that will, in the words of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, ‘Remain faithful to the earth’. Central to my argument is the notion of an experience shift: practices of dancing can offer us the opportunity to know ourselves as movement – not as bodies that move, but as rhythms of bodily becoming, always creating and becoming patterns of movement. After writing the book, I translated my ideas into nine song-poems in order to invite visceral responses. This article shares these song-poems and discusses their importance for dance philosophy.