Figure: Schlemmer, ‘Relation of Body to Stage’, 43

In his article “Popular Culture and the Imagined Body,” dance critic Thomas Hagood argues that in today’s world, we run the risk of completely divorcing our bodies from our minds. As virtual realities and cyberspace allow us to partake in non-physical actions and interaction, the importance of the physical body is diminished.

Gartner suggests that the

philosophical alienation of the body from the mind has resulted in the absence of embodied experience from almost all contemporary theories of meaning in architecture… Experience, as it relates to understanding seems reduced to a matter of the visual registration of coded messages – a function of the eye while might well rely on the printed page and dispense with the physical presence altogether (Gartner 10-11).

As society further disassociates mind from body, we run the risk of creating architecture that favors the visual over the experiential. The design process often takes the following path:

Site => Visual Experience => Graphic Notation => Architecture

This often results in architecture that is visually oriented, as that is the method of interpretation used to create it. However, this project agrees with architect and cultural theorist, Paul Virilio, when he argues that this type of design process often fails to create relevant architecture. Plans and sections do not indicate time – rather they try to apprehend objects by quantitative criteria instead of their qualitative aspects. He speaks of the

architectural measure of space… [as] movement; it is the quality of a volume and is therefore very difficult to note down (Virilio 107).

Faced with this dilemma, Virilio has turned towards dance, specifically movement notation as a source for a qualitative approach to design.

That being said, ‘Living Dance’ furthers this notion and attempts to put into practice the idea of using dance and movement notation as a tool for exploring and understanding existing sites in order to create a more body-oriented architecture. The resulting design process will now look something like this:

Site => Physical Experience Though Dance =>
Graphic Notation => Architecture

By using the body as a tool to both notate and interpret existing conditions and experiences, the resulting built form will, in theory, be more in tune with the actual site experience. Living Dance attempts to make an argument for a more ‘body oriented’ approach to design – to show how we can design for the body, with the body.

Figure: Laban, ‘Choreutics’, 89