LandMark: dance as a site of intertwining

Abstract

In the performance installation, LandMark (2011), dancers Deborah Saxon and Henry Montes and the visual artist Bruce Sharp explore both the facticity of human experience and the frailty of connections between people and between them and the world that they inhabit.1 I suggest that their work may also be understood to probe the complexities of the interrelationships between consciousness-world and self-other that are the focus of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s text, ‘The intertwining-the chiasm’. His analysis of intercorporeality is particularly relevant to understanding the significance of the dancers’ somatic investigations that inform their artistic practices. Further, by drawing on developments upon Merleau-Ponty’s work in ecological aesthetics and social philosophy, I explore how the artists’ creative practices may be understood to foster intercorporeal negotiations of significance. This is suggested to be of increasing importance within an intracultural context in which people have a complex variety of cultural experiences even while sharing in a national identity.