NIETZSCHE’S VIEW OF DANCE AND BODY IN THE LIGHT OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE- AND BODY- ORIENTED PSYCHOTHERAPIES

Abstract

Nietzsche writes on many occasions about dance and body in a very affirmativeway. Dance is for Nietzsche a metaphor for the ultimate nature of reality and the numinous, butalso a concrete, embodied practice characterized by lightness, creativity and ecstatic reunion ofman with man and nature. These features contain the therapeutic and the autopoietic characterof dance. In this article we show how Nietzsche’s dance metaphor corresponds with the viewof reality in contemporary science and delineate the connection between the ecstatic Dionysiandance and the appearance of the modern dance on the beginning of the 20th century that was aprecursor of dance therapies.

Nietzsche’s affirmation of the body goes beyond the scope of its rehabilitation after a longhistory of religiously based animosity towards the body. For him body as a totality has ontologicaland methodological primacy over mind or soul. Nevertheless he does not understand the bodyin Cartesian conceptual frames dominant in his time. We see him rather as a forerunner of theunderstanding of body developed later in philosophy (phenomenology of embodiment) as wellas in phenomenological and body oriented psychotherapies, organismic and somatic psychology,and holistic, salutogenetic medicine.

We view Nietzsche’s praise of dance and body in the light of his rebellion against Christianityboth as a metaphysic and a form of life and his admiration for the pre-Socratic Greek culture andits Dionysian qualities.