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Filming Dance: Embodied Syntax In Sasha Waltz’S ‘S’, Helen A. Fielding Jan 2015

Filming Dance: Embodied Syntax In Sasha Waltz’S ‘S’, Helen A. Fielding

Helen A Fielding

This paper brings Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to Sasha Waltz’s dance film S, which focuses on the relation between sexuality and language. Maintaining that movement in cinema takes place in the viewers and not the film, the paper considers how the visual can be deepened to include the ways we move and are moved. Saussure’s insights into language are brought to the sensible, which is here understood in terms of divergences from norms. Though film would seem to privilege vision, viewing this film helps to elucidate Merleau-Ponty’s claim that a film succeeds when it engages the viewer’s embodied understanding, and shifts …


Cultivating Perception: Phenomenological Encounters With Artworks, Helen A. Fielding Jan 2015

Cultivating Perception: Phenomenological Encounters With Artworks, Helen A. Fielding

Helen A Fielding

Phenomenally strong artworks have the potential to anchor us in the world and to cultivate our perception. For the most part, we barely notice the world around us, as we are too often elsewhere, texting, coordinating schedules, planning ahead, navigating what needs to be done. This is the level of our age that shapes the ways we encounter the world and others. In such a world it is no wonder we no longer trust our senses. But as feminists have long argued, grounding our thinking in embodied experience opens it up to difference and helps us to resist the colonization …