My talk title was:
Shogo Tanaka
"The enactive approach meets art: The phenomenology of one-time performances"
Here I put my abstract.
The enactive approach meets art: The phenomenology of one-time performances
In recent years, phenomenological research has been expanding its horizon into the realm of performance, including music, dance, and theater (Gallagher 2021, Krueger 2014, Zarrilli 2020). This move was partly made possible by integrating the enactive approach, which emphasizes the ideas that perception is for action and that action orientation shapes cognitive processes. Combined with a phenomenological description of experiences with its emphasis on the first-person perspective, the enactive approach attempts to explicate what really occurs in unrepeatable performative and aesthetic experiences. In this talk, I introduce three enactive-phenomenological notions: (1) intercorporeality (Merleau-Ponty 1961): a potential intersubjective relationship between self and other that manifests through a perception-action loop of each other’s body; (2) enactive intersubjectivity (Fuchs & De Jaegher 2009): embodied interactions between two participants, including nonverbal signals, which create a dyadic system through which intersubjectivity develops; and (3) aida (Kimura 2005): the “in-between” of interactants starts to have its own autonomy as an intersubjectively shared mood, outside of which each participant would act differently. All these notions share the view that the key to understanding one-time performances is in the emergent process among participants. An intersubjectively shared mood emerges through embodied interactions, and the common sense-making process develops as performance. Based on this theoretical underpinning, I take up two examples. One is an observational study on the process of spontaneous drawing that I conducted as a psychological experiment in past research. The other one is a performative artwork called “Heat-Touch Therapy” proposed and practiced by the Japanese artist Mew Imashuku (2024). In both cases, performance proceeds in an unpredictable manner, but the participants experience shared processes of sense-making.
