The Challenge of a Perceptual Gap between Body and Mind

Abstract

The instruction to connect effort into pleasure directs a shift within danc-ers' attention into somatic awareness. While emphasizing the pleasurable stretching of the muscles, the motility of the joints works according to the operation of the body schema. Physical effort is invested in the mus-cles and affects the motility of the hip joints. Simultaneously, the mental interest is focused on generating a pleasurable sensuality from the activity of stretching. Subsequently, the effort is increased and the limits of the movements are further investigated. Eventually, the new physical limits are outcomes of the perceptual extension. The direction of the mood sup-ports perception, since it integrates the intentionality of the dancers with their bodily feelings. In this sense, the mental emphasis of Gaga is comple-mentary to the sensual research and the practice advantages the coordina-tion of body and mind. The shift of attention by such instructions as " connect effort into pleasure! " supports the sensuality of the research in cases when somatic awareness is hindered. Even though dancers work with their bodies and sensuality is the subject matter of dancing, to take hold of somatic aware-ness is not always easy for dancers. The perceptual process of dancing might become challenging once there is a gap between body and mind. 1 The dualism between body and mind is not merely a philosophical approach The Challenge of a Perceptual Gap between Body and Mind that relates cognition and thoughts as separated from physicality. A dual-ist division might also take effect within life experiences, among them the experience of dancing. The perceptual gap is developed once danc-ers perceive their bodies and their movements as external to themselves. Thus, attention is directed towards their appearance and the image of their doing, rather than to the perceptual process. As Manning describes it, attention is directed to the quantitative features of a movement, rather than its quality. 2 Quantitative features of movement in fact direct the ori-entation of intentionality to outward appearance—how impressive or vir-tuosic a movement is. In contrast, the perceptual procedure of dancing in Gaga is requested to take effect as an ongoing emergence of understand-ing movement as it is currently felt within the body, rather than how it seems. When the appearance of a movement is within focus, dancers try to shape an external effect. A perceptual gap between body and mind may appear when dancers are too conscious of their body image. According to Evan Thompson, in the case of having a body image, the relationship to one's own body is conceived as the relationship to " an intentional object of conscious-ness. " 3 Self-consciousness, in this respect, does not mean being conscious of oneself interiorly, but rather being conscious of an external image of the self. Thus, the body is related to as an object of a dancer. Consequently, dancers attempt to break in and teach their bodies how to achieve a requested shape, rather than living through it and shaping a movement. Consequently, such a case of self-consciousness is misleading, since it does not involve a phenomenological sense of self-awareness. The work is directed solely by an imaginary detached representation of a self and it does not embrace current physicality. " Body image " is a psychological term that is adopted nowadays by phi-losophies of embodiment as a cross-model to " body schema, " the system of sensory-motor abilities according to which the body functions in the world. 4 Shaun Gallagher defi nes the body image as consisting of " set of intentional states and dispositions—perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes—in which the intentional object is one's own body. " 5 Gallagher defi nes the body image as constituted from percepts of the body, concepts of it, and affects towards it. 6 On the one hand, perception, conceptualizing, and also emotionality 7 are comprehensive processes that evoke interior know-ing. On the other hand, percepts, concepts, and affects are features of the body image that function as an idée fi xe , an imaginary defi nition that one holds about one's body before experience. Perception, conceptualizing, and emotionality are not misleading by themselves. Percepts, concepts, and 94 E. KATAN