Situating Sensing
Rebecca Loukes · 2024
This chapter explores the performer training practice of Elsa Gindler’s student Gertrud Falke-Heller (1891–1984); focusing on the three years she spent teaching at the Jooss-Leeder School of Dance at Dartington Hall, UK in the late 1930s. It explores Elsa Gindler’s radical sensing practice in relation to training through focusing on the work of an artist whose name is little-known today, yet whose work reaches into the twenty-first century travelling on unexpected paths. This chapter considers the implications for performance of an approach to training that is both ethically and pedagogically rooted within its situated context. It does this by exploring five manifestations of the concept of ‘situation’ in Falke-Heller’s work: (1) situating awareness of the whole body, (2) sensing the body in space, (3) developing awareness of the situation beyond physical contact, (4) situation in relation to time, and finally (5) situating historiographic performative traces. These practical principles are placed in conversation with the idea of ‘situation’ posited by twentieth-century pragmatist philosopher and educationalist John Dewey (1859–1952). By returning to Dewey’s words themselves, in dialogue with experiments drawn from Falke-Heller’s notes on performer training at Dartington Hall, this chapter asks, can we illuminate both Dewey’s theory and Falke-Heller’s practice while also developing the argument that Elsa Gindler and her students anticipated in the studio many landmarks in philosophical ways of knowing – including phenomenology and pragmatist thinking and writing?