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around contemporary dance. It refers to processes of proprioception that underpin sensory awareness of felt movement, and also relates to the experience of feeling in ones body the moved gestures of another. This term gained currency in dance making, reviewing and practice through the work of John Martin, whose influential writing defined modern dance in terms of the “contagion of bodily movement, which makes the onlooker feel sympathetically in his own musculature the exertions he sees in somebody else’s musculature” (Martin, cited in Copeland and Cohen, 1983, p.22). Martin posits that it is through this “contagion” that “the dancer is able to convey through movement the most intangible emotional experience” (Martin, cited in Copeland and Cohen, 1983, p.22). The kinesthetic here is associated with feeling and the communication of the textually intangible, abstract and sensory.
Susan Leigh Foster also writes about the role kinesthetic senses play for dance audiences. As well as exploring kinesthesia as the communication of moved/sensory states, she also concentrates on the political, colonizing effects of kinesthetic empathy, particularly in eighteenth century France. In her recent article Movement’s contagion: the kinesthetic impact of performance (Foster, 2008) Foster discusses the history of the ‘kinesthetic sense’ along with terms such as proprioception and the sixth sense, with particular interest in how an audience watching a dance performance will be kinesthetically affected by the ‘contagion’ – a term Foster draws from Martin – of movement, initiated by the mobility of the dancers. With the term, ‘kinesthetic’, Foster refers to:
the sensations of our bones, muscles, ligaments, tendons, and joints. The sensory experience provided by these corporeal elements, often referred to as the kinesthetic sense, has been largely ignored in theories of performance, yet for those of us in dance studies, it remains a predominant aspect of aesthetic experience, one that must be interrogated as part of any inquiry into dance’s significance. (Foster, 2008, p.46)
Her earlier article Choreographing Empathy (Foster 2005) explores political and colonial assumptions embedded in assumptions of kinetic empathy, in relation to the development of choreography in eighteenth century France. Foster discusses how kinesthesia became a matter of interest for philosophers at this time. She focuses on the works of dance master Raoul Auger Feuillet and philosopher Abbe de Condillac, who she describes as,
the first to articulate a theory concerning the origin of language in relation to gesture. He envisions consciousness as the product of physical reaching out and encounter with the unknown, and is also one of the first philosophers to stake a claim for consciousness based on the experience of touch. (Foster, 2005, p.83)
Foster draws on Condillac in her working through of the role of embodiment and touch in relation to 67