Comprehending Dance through Empathy: A Spectator’s Total Body-Mind Experience of Watching Wind of May (Moon, 2020)

Abstract

This article advances a hermeneutico-phenomenological enquiry into the lived experience of watching the recently created ballet, Wind of May (Moon, 2020), to examine the role of empathy in comprehending this dance performance. Drawing on Edith Stein’s work, it shows how dance spectatorship entails dynamic interactions between the core processes of empathy formation, namely, direct multimodal perception, emotional engagement, and cognitive thinking. It further employs Dee Reynolds’s concept of ‘affect’ to highlight how empathic experience can be physically embodied yet non-emotional. In doing so, it argues that empathy involves a total mind-body experience that can be valuable to dance interpretation.