embodiment is not apposite

Here’s Tim Ingold from his 2013 book Making citing Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (who has long been critical of how we in dance use the term embodiment):

… animacy and embodiment pull in opposite directions: where the former is a movement of opening, the latter is bent on closure. For the living, animate beings we are, argues dance philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, the term ‘embodiment’ is simply not experientially apposite. We do not, she insists, experience ourselves and one another as ‘packaged’ but as moving and moved, in ongoing response – that is in correspondence – with the things around us (Sheets-Johnstone 1998: 359).

– Tim Ingold Making (2013: 94).

In the detailed, messy and complex conversations between Katye Coe and me after each improvisation we both seem to share a similar experience of slippage or “correspondence” between the interior and exterior. As if that which is contained in a “bag of skin” (from Alan Watts) is not functionally discreet from that which is out.

The Sheets-Johnstone reference is from The Primacy of Movement (1998) Amsterdam: John Benjamins.