Don't Think, Dear — Alice Robb: Phenomenological Quotes
Selected passages from Don’t Think, Dear by Alice Robb focused on the first-person sensory-motor experience of dancing — the felt quality of perception from inside the body.
Related
Section titled “Related”Robb’s own body awareness
Section titled “Robb’s own body awareness”Muscles brimming with potential energy
Section titled “Muscles brimming with potential energy”“I used to feel this sense of embodiment all the time, even when I wasn’t dancing. I would lie in bed or sit in class, my legs folded into a hard plastic chair, and I would sense my muscles brimming with potential energy; I felt powerful, knowing what my body could do. I felt like my body was different.”
Inhabiting from the inside
Section titled “Inhabiting from the inside”“At ballet, I had learned not only to think about how my body looked from the outside, but to fully inhabit it from the inside. As much as I obsessed about my reflection in the mirror, I thought even more about how my body felt: how my chest felt open if I imagined teacups on my shoulders; how my legs felt light if I lifted from underneath (striving to engage muscles that, looking back, might have been more of an idea). How every nerve and joint and tendon felt alert, alive.”
Sensory metaphors in learning
Section titled “Sensory metaphors in learning”“I didn’t know what muscles were involved when I held my foot in front of me in the air—but I knew that my leg should be so steady and turned out that I could balance a glass of water on my heel. I didn’t know what mechanism was at work when I prepared to take off for a leap, but I knew that I would jump higher if I pictured a cat getting ready to pounce. When I lifted my arms, I didn’t think about flexing my biceps; I thought about how my fingertips would feel if they were brushing against a velvet curtain.”
The floor, the air, space and each other
Section titled “The floor, the air, space and each other”“I remember being told to feel the floor, use the floor, strike the floor; that the floor was my friend. To piqué like the ground was hot and to dégagé like I was moving through water. When I struggled to balance en pointe, my teachers repeated Balanchine’s advice: ‘Just hold on to the air.’ We thought continuously about the relationship of our bodies to space, and to each other. We learned to dance in straight lines without turning our heads; to sense each other’s locations from the sound of our breath or our feet on the Marley floor.”
Alertness before going onstage
Section titled “Alertness before going onstage”“I’d hear my cue and run onstage, and the giddiness—which had escalated, briefly, into nerves—disappeared, leaving only a pleasurable alertness in its wake.”
Flying — partnered turning and jumping
Section titled “Flying — partnered turning and jumping”“I arranged my feet in fifth position with my back to him, relevéd onto pointe, and felt a pair of strong hands on my waist. For the first time in my life, I could turn not just two but three, four, five pirouettes. All I had to do was balance, secure in the knowledge that he would lend me momentum and catch me if I fell. When I reached the highest point of a jump, he lifted me another three feet; it was the closest I had ever come to flying.”
Motor demand shutting down anxious cognition
Section titled “Motor demand shutting down anxious cognition”“I loved how, at ballet, my anxiety-prone brain would shut down as I strove to make my fondu look like melting ice cream, or my frappés ‘like popping a bottle of champagne.’ Ballet demanded absolute focus; it was impossible to worry about my performance on the next day’s math test or my position in the middle school hierarchy while I listened to the music and thought about the placement of my hands and my arms and all ten of my toes.”
Fully inhabiting physical being
Section titled “Fully inhabiting physical being”“I found myself missing ballet—the only environment where I had been able to throw myself into my work without worrying about the sound of my voice. Where hard work made me not just stronger and more successful but more feminine, too. Where I fully inhabited my physical being while also engaging my brain—solving, for myself, the mind-body problem.”
Via other dancers
Section titled “Via other dancers”Flow state — multiple dancers (Panebianco-Warrens study)
Section titled “Flow state — multiple dancers (Panebianco-Warrens study)”“your whole mind is in bliss of some sort, and your body, you don’t feel tired, you don’t feel sore”
“I was just in my own space, I kind of became the character … you kind of forget who you are”
“your body just moves as it’s supposed to”
“I wasn’t thinking of what I was doing, it was just happening. I felt part of … an organism onstage; I wasn’t separate”
“music takes the body where it wants to be” / “You are in the music”
Flora Wildes — music reverberating through the body
Section titled “Flora Wildes — music reverberating through the body”“she loved how a feeling or a line of music would reverberate throughout her body—starting in the orchestra pit and showing up in the way she held her fingers or arranged her face onstage”
Flora Wildes — body as finely mapped sensory instrument
Section titled “Flora Wildes — body as finely mapped sensory instrument”“I feel that I have a connection to my body in a very unusual way… I am ‘profoundly physically sensitive’; if she so much as stubs her toe, she can sense the pain traveling up her leg, up her spine and neck, and arriving as a grimace on her face.”
Meiying — flying
Section titled “Meiying — flying”“If I’m really into it, then I feel like I’m, like, flying and I’m a bird.”
Alicia Alonso — dancing without sight
Section titled “Alicia Alonso — dancing without sight”“I danced—I danced inside of me. I danced with my eyes closed. My mental dancing became so real that I could watch my own performances and criticize them.”
Conceptual / framing
Section titled “Conceptual / framing”The shifted sensorium (Caroline Potter, anthropologist)
Section titled “The shifted sensorium (Caroline Potter, anthropologist)”“Dancers, she came to believe, occupy a ‘shifted sensorium’ featuring an ‘interconnected, bodily-grounded sense of cultural identity.’ They develop a heightened awareness of gravity, of the weight of the air and the resistance of the ground.”
Potter’s own perceptual shift after immersive training
Section titled “Potter’s own perceptual shift after immersive training”“She no longer perceived the world through the five senses… Her world came to revolve instead around ‘a dynamic sense of constantly shifting one’s body in space and time.’”
What makes a dancer identifiable
Section titled “What makes a dancer identifiable”“The reason, I think, that you can spot a dancer from across a room is not her hairstyle or her makeup or her thinness; it’s her ineffable presence in her body, her superhuman awareness of space and herself… her stillness, too, is deliberate, is pregnant with potential movement.”
The body that lingers after stopping
Section titled “The body that lingers after stopping”“You stop dancing and your body tightens. You feel like a piece of clothing that has shrunk in the wash. A sensation worse than any muscle ache.” (Sigrid Nunez, quoted by Robb)