Leo Steinberg, who was an art critic, art historian, refugee from National Socialism, and enthusiastic dancer and lover of dance in the mid-twentieth century, often encouraged his art history students to use their own bodies to emulate the poses and postures of figures in paintings and sculptures. He believed that for an art historian, sometimes the best way to understand a composition and its deeper meanings was to know it in a kinesthetic, embodied way, rather than a purely visual or intellectual sense.
Obviously, as an art historian and dancer, this idea really appeals to me. It reminds me, indeed, that I once heard James Elkins, who is an artist and an art historian, make the claim that if you draw a work of art, you can access it more fully; I don't remember that he stated explicitly that it is the bodily action, or the kinesis of drawing that effects the deeper understanding, but that at least was what I took from his lecture. There is a big problem having to do with able-ism in both of these thoughts, but I'll come around to that at the end of this post, not because it's ancillary, but because I think it deserves a post of its own, and I still have a lot of thinking before I, as a person who has not had to live with long-term sensory or movement impairment, feel I have anything really worthwhile to say.
What I want to focus on here is Steinberg's idea that dance is a way of knowing something visual, a kind of analogue to the way in which a person with synaesthesia perceives a sound as a color or a taste. In her wonderful book, Strange Ground, Seeta Chaganti writes about the "kinesthetic visuality" of some medieval poetics. Specifically, those lyrical forms that are generically described as "carole" (yes, the same word as carol, like a Christmas carol). The carole was, in its origin, a circular dance, so a poem that is a carol is at once a linear sequence of words and the movement of bodies in a particular pattern through space.
Can moving be a way of seeing? As a medievalist, I often think of a couple of graduate seminars I took with historians, namely Geoff Koziol at UC Berkeley and Jean-Claude Schmitt at EHESS in Paris, which focused on ritual and gesture in medieval textual sources. For example, how did prayer gestures evolve and what did different bodily postures both communicate about a person's spiritual state and induce in the person's embodied self-awareness? There were whole treatises written on this in the medieval period itself, so in a sense, these historians were engaging with the indigenous knowledge way of the culture.
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| An illumination from an Italian 13th century manuscript of Dominican De modo orandi Biblioteca Apostolica, Vatican |
I remember that quite often in both seminars, we, the students, would act out the gestures we were discussing, not because we believed that as late-20th century this would give us a direct line on how medieval people experienced them, but more (I think) because it just helped provide us with kinesthetic and visual information that we could incorporate into our historical analysis, along with the documentary record, literary works, artistic depictions, and archeological evidence.
Similarly, when I teach my course on medieval pilgrimage, I always take my students to a nearby Episcopal church that has a 1/2 scale labyrinth and with the help of a historical dance specialist, I have them participate in a chain dance based on the medieval sources about dancing the labyrinth -- it's not because I think that this provides an "authentic" medieval experience, but again, because the embodied, experiential knowledge feeds the larger critical project.
Dancers, yogis, athletes; we all know that the body knows things in its own sometimes inscrutable ways, but that inscrutable or not, that knowledge is not distinct from the mind, but different, as the medieval theologians would put it, from "intellective knowledge." That's what drives my current academic research project, which has to do with violent sports and wild dancing depicted in the margins of certain medieval manuscripts. I am telling you, there is some absolutely crazy dancing and some really rough play going on around the edges of written texts intended to structure quiet, inward experiences of reading and contemplation. It seems strange, from a modern, post-enlightenment perspective, but my hypothesis is that for the medieval users of these books, it was all part of a very embodied way of knowing the spiritual.
(If you're interested in the nuances of this argument, you can watch this video of me giving the 2025 ICMA lecture at the Courtauld in London).
I just want to circle back, now to the topic of ableism. Do embodied forms of knowing require a normative (not "normal," since normative is just a cultural idea of what "should" be not what is actually average or representative of a thing, be it a body or a poem) body? Almost certainly not. At that lecture by James Elkins that I mentioned, an audience member asked him, "What if for some reason, say a paralysis or a palsy, an art historian just can't pick up a pencil and draw?" Elkins did not have a great answer, but I would have said, "there are all kinds of ways a person could respond in an embodied way to the making aspect of a work, and simply reproducing it isn't always the only or the best way to embody it."
In the first video you're seeing above, one of the students who walked the maze lives with CP that impinges pretty seriously on their balance and stride. In a course evaluation later, they told me "I was really glad that we got to move in this class -- people assume I just want to sit in one place because of my CP, but I'm actually one of those people who learns best when I'm doing something with my body too." And in many indigenous and traditional cultures, dancing is not just for the athletes, sports are not just for the fit, but they serve as rituals of cohesion or fragmentation, of identity formation, of connection to the divine, of conflict and of peacemaking, so their participants are drawn from the community as a whole.
Personally, I am delighted to see more people with sensory, neurological, or mobility differences getting some space in the dance world, and even in ballet. To that end, here are a couple of videos to inspire you:
Kate Stanforth, from the Wellcome Collection
