Dance, empathy, and care - with Christine Leroy
Episode 7 of Careful Thinking
The seventh episode of the Careful Thinking podcast features my conversation with dancer and philosopher Christine Leroy. Christine is a researcher at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, working at the intersection of philosophy, dance, and care ethics. She also directs a dance theatre company and leads contact dance improvisation workshops in clinical settings. Christine is the author of Phénoménologie de la danse: De la chair à l’éthique, published in 2021, which develops original and intriguing connections between the experience of dance and the practice of care. She is also the author of La Phénoménologie, published in 2018, a useful introduction to some key phenomenological thinkers, and of Le Corps, from 2022. With Chiara Palermo, Christine edited the collection Pesanteur et portance: Une éthique de la gravité, also published in 2022. Although most of Christine's writings have yet to be translated from French, she's the author of a forthcoming article in English, ‘Performance and bodily anchoring of care: dance’s power to care’, which will be published later this year.
I was first alerted to Christine's work by Maurice Hamington, my guest on the previous episode of the podcast, who has collaborated with Christine, and it was Maurice who facilitated an introduction and also sent me a copy of Christine's forthcoming English language article. I then got hold of some of Christine's writings in French, which I've read with great interest, despite my rusty schoolboy French. Although no expert on dance, I have a growing interest in the subject, and it was a nice coincidence to discover that the preface to Christine's Phénoménologie de la danse was written by the choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, whose ballet Le Parc I saw performed last year in Munich, and also to see that Christine discussed that particular work in the book. So I was really pleased to have this opportunity to talk with Christine about her work and to explore some of the fascinating connections she proposes between dance and care.
Christine Leroy
We began our conversation by discussing Christine’s early training in classical dance and her introduction to the study of philosophy, focusing on the influence on her research of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and other phenomenological thinkers. Turning to Christine’s book on the phenomenology of dance, we explored her key concept of ‘kinaesthetic empathy’ and her argument that ethics - and care - are inescapably anchored in the body. Other important influences on Christine’s thinking, discussed in the episode, include the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and the contemporary French philosopher, Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, and in particular the latter’s concept of portance, an apparently untranslatable word which the English words ‘uplift’, ‘holding’ and ‘upholding’ don’t quite capture. Along similar lines, we discussed the difficulties involved in finding equivalents in French for ‘care’ and ‘care ethics’.
However, our conversation wasn’t entirely abstract and theoretical. We discussed the relevance of the concept of kinaesthetic empathy for thinking about responses to disability, and we talked about Christine’s association with the French organisation ‘Clown Up’, whose members use dance, music and touch to engage with elderly nursing home residents. In the final section of the episode, Christine explained how she uses dance in workshops with adolescent girls suffering from anorexia nervosa, as a way of helping them to change their relationships with their bodies, and thus with other people.
As always, interesting connections emerged between this conversation and discussions in previous episodes of the podcast. Maurice Hamington’s pioneering work on embodied care, which I discussed with him in Episode 6, has obviously been a key influence for Christine, while her interest in Donald Winnicott’s theories echoed my conversation with Petr Urban in Episode 4, particularly as it touched on his work with Alice Koubová on care and play, which also drew on Winnicottian ideas.
Here are a few quotation by Christine from the episode, to give you a taste of our conversation:
I don't regret having gone into philosophy, but in a way, philosophy takes you away from your body. And I suffered a lot from having to put my body on hold to become a good philosopher. And it's a bit of this suffering that my work reflects. To a certain extent, my work is a form of militancy for the rehabilitation of motor skills in the exercise of thought. I really think that the body is the root for thought as well as for ethics.
…
I want to convince philosophical readers that disembodied ethics, for instance, normative or utilitarian ethics…have the merits of being reassuring because they provide invariant points of reference. But to my mind…they do not conform to human reality, because human reality is contingent, and above all, it is lived. We are living people, and we are not just minds. And we live in material conditions, which means our existence is embodied. Everyone has to drink, to sleep, to eat, even the persons who only think….If you remove the resistance of the air, a dove will no longer fly, it will freefall. And in a similar way, my aim is to argue that the negation of the body in the increasingly virtual world is an illusion, because without a body, thought falls into a void…Without the body, morality loses all foundation. We have no moral feeling unless we experience adversity, the precariousness of our lives, our vulnerability. And this is where my work can be considered part of an ethic of care…I insist on the kinaesthetic anchoring of care, on the fact that care presupposes an intentionality that is kinaesthetic, that is embodied. So care seems to me to be a kinaesthetic impulse, an empathic reaction, precisely due to the kinaesthetic dimension of empathy.
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The advantage of the concept of kinaesthetic empathy is that it presupposes an ability to place oneself in the physicality of others, whoever they may be. And indeed, kinaesthetic empathy does not take account of disability as a deficiency, but as a singular type of physicality...So my premise is that there is no reason to consider a disabled person as in need, but simply as a different able bodied person with a physicality that echoes our own physicality and that calls our bodies to react if action is required, not to have pity.
You can listen to the whole episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can download a transcript of the podcast here:
As always, comments and feedback are welcome.
Further reading
Readers and listeners interested in learning more about recent French-language scholarship in the field of care theory might want to take a look at Care Ethics in yet a Different Voice: Francophone Contributions, edited by Sophie Bourgault and Frans Vosmans, and published by Peeters of Leuven in 2020, which includes chapters by (among others) Sandra Laugier and Patricia Paperman, both of whom are mentioned in this episode of the podcast.
About the header image
The header image for this post shows the gravity-defying ‘flying kiss’ from Angelin Preljocaj’s ballet Le Parc, discussed in the episode. The dancers are Madison Young and Julian McKay and the photograph is from the 2023 production by Bayerisches Staatsballett, Munich.