easter catch up

According to Skinner in social dance, one can play, fantasise, come together and create new feelings of sociality. So what is dancing? For Langer it is a much misunderstood art form, whereby the play of Powers are made visable. However it is not 'plastic art, nor music, nor a presentation of a story'. Thus social dancing could thought of as a pull of intuitions, tension between how one is interpreting the music, how one's body wishes to move, how one's partner is moving, how others on the dancefloor are moving, the atmosphere and mood of the dance space. Thought about in this way dancing depends alot upon one's imagination. For Kant the imagination is a mechanism by which the chaos of sensation is ordered. For Kant this mechanism was a faculty of the soul. Perhaps this explains why Harris suggests that there is something inside us that makes us all want to dance. But how does the imgination work in terms of our dancing?

Skinner suggests that this happens in two ways. Firstly by imagining similar movements in alternative setting, the imagination helps with the learning and teaching of dance. Such as when B, asks us to imagine crushing cockroaches as we step left, right, left, right. Secondly the imagination allows for a certain element of fantasy to be associated with the dance. Such as imagining meeting some kind of latin sex god in the Empire on Friday night.

With regards to the first type of imagination, Skinner suggets that as students mimick their teacher they are assisted by their imagination. The imagination has a close connection with the reality of the dance class, as it is being used to achieve a dance end point. The end point of 'crushing cockraoches' is to get the appropriate step movement. The execution is the visible manifestation or approximation of the imagination in these teaching and learning example.

On the other hand with mental representations that approximate the fantastical (such as the latin sex god), the imagination is not the desired endpoint. However I would contend that by allowing ourselves these imaginations we feel our selves transformed and this allows us to connect and communicate on a different level to the everyday. Which could perhaps be considered a different end point. We use our imaginations to depart from reality and experience the freedom Satre thought was intimately connect with the imagination. Possible narratives trancend our selves first in the mind and then in the body as we move onto the dancefloor. Here we see Langers play of powers made visable.