Topoi (2005) 24:81--91
DOI 10.1007/s11245-004-4163-9
Choreographing Empathy
ABSTRACT: The paper builds an argument about empathy,
kinesthesia, choreography, and power as they were constituted
in early eighteenth century France. It examines the conditions
under which one body could claim to know what another body
was feeling, using two sets of documents -- philosophical
examinations of perception and kinesthesia by Condillac and
notations of dances published by Feuillet. Reading these
documents intertextually, I postulate a kind of corporeal epi-
steme that grounds how the body is constructed. And I
endeavor to situate this body within the colonial and expan-
sionist politics of its historical moment.
…there are nations whose disposition has more sensibility
than that of other nations, we shall have no difficulty
understanding that the mute comic actors could so deeply
touch the Greeks and Romans whose natural gesticulation
they imitated.1
In her ‘‘Indian Journal’’ of 1971, postmodern chore-
ographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer records the
following description of a solo performance she wit-
nessed depicting the Ramayana’s character Nala:
A once great king doomed to exist as an ordinary man after
a serpent sent by a jealous god bites him...I got so involved
that I began to mimic Nala’s hand gestures. Felt very
powerful and quick as though I could actually do it. Now I
see what great performance really is in this form. The
younger ones wiggle their eyebrows, turn up the corners of
their mouths and do a few more things and that’s about it.
But this guy actually projects ‘emotion’. His cheeks vibrate,
he seems about to cry, he looks startled, he looks afraid, he
looks puzzled, he looks proud. But all through extremely
small changes in particular parts of his face. Watching his
face is like watching a map while on LSD. A chart of hu-
man feeling. You notice a change and then register the
reading. Perhaps it is a lesson. I do not watch most people’s
faces that closely, but it must all be there. His hands I could
not read. I simply responded kinetically. I have not expe-
rienced kinetic empathy for years.2
This passage raises multiple and crucial questions
about the conditions under which one body can claim

Springer 2005
Susan Leigh Foster
to experience what another body is feeling. What
might it mean to respond with ‘‘kinetic empathy’’? In
what ways might one come to feel inhabited by the
sense of motion, but also emotion conveyed in and by
another body’s movement? How was Rainer’s own
kinesthetic sense, the sense mediated by end organs
located in muscles, tendons, and joints and stimulated
by bodily movements and tensions, activated by this
dancing Other?
This essay pursues answers to these questions by
examining two historically related forms of docu-
mentation about the body: discussions of gesture and
kinesthesia by Enlightenment philosopher Etienne
Bonnot, Abbé de Condillac and notations of dances
published by Raoul Auguste Feuillet.3 By placing
these two distinct discourses alongside one another, I
hope to build towards an epistemological grounding
for bodily experience in early 18th century France. In
undertaking this comparison, I approach dance
notation as an archive that documents a certain kind
of kinesthetic awareness cultivated in dancing bodies.
It evidences the way that bodies are summoned into
an awareness of themselves as physical beings. When
read intertextually with Condillac’s treatises on lan-
guage and the sensations, the notation conveys a
sense of how the body experiences itself kinestheti-
cally and also how it apprehends other bodies.
I am particularly interested in raising the issue of
what Rainer calls ‘‘kinetic empathy’’ in a comparative
cultural context, as she herself experienced. And I
hope to interrogate the staging of power upon which
such encounters take place. As part of a larger study
that will construct a genealogy of kinesthetic empa-
thy, this essay focuses on France in the early 18th
century, a time when empathy, or ‘‘sympathy’’ as it
was then called, emerges as a major preoccupation in
philosophical discourse.4
According to linguistics historian Hans Aarsleff, the
notion of sympathy as a universal capacity to feel what
82 SUSAN LEIGH FOSTER
another is feeling first occurs in the fourth edition of
Bernard Lamy’s comprehensive study of rhetoric.5
Drawing on Horace and also Cicero, Lamy proposes that
Human beings are bound to one another by a wonderful
sympathy (sympathie) which naturally makes them com-
municate their passions… We assume (nous nous revêtons)
the sentiments and affections of those with whom we
live…and this is because our bodies are disposed such that
simply the idea of an angry person raises our blood pressure
and moves us to anger. A person who makes evident sad-
ness on the face, gives the feeling of sadness; those who give
the mark of joy, impart joy to those who see them.6 (My
translation)
Suggesting a line of reasoning that many 18th century
philosophers and aestheticians would adopt, Lamy
here identifies the body’s gestures as capable of a
universal form of communication. The angry body
gestures its anger and the observing body is immedi-
ately galvanized into a similar state of feeling. This
underlying capacity to read and then experience
another’s feelings through the signs the body is
making establishes a human bond on which society
can be built.7
Jean-Baptiste Du Bos similarly argues for a uni-
versal sense of sympathy, basing it in the soul’s nat-
ural responsiveness to danger or pain. This animating
responsiveness to others underlies the popularity of
all forms of spectacle from public executions to tight-
rope dancing.8 Nature, he explains, has given humans
this ability so as to draw them out of themselves and
their own self-interests:
Nature, for this reason, has thought proper to form us in
such a manner, as the agitation of whatever approaches us
should have the power of impelling us, to the end, that
those, who have need of our indulgence or succour, may,
with greater facility, persuade us. Thus their emotion alone
is sufficient to soften us; whereby they obtain what they
could never compass by dint of argument or conviction. We
are moved by the tears of a stranger, even before we are
apprized of the subject of his weeping. The cries of a man,
to whom we have no other relation than the common one of
humanity, make us fly instantly to his assistance, by a
mechanical movement previous to all deliberation. A per-
son that accosts us with joy painted on his countenance,
excites in us a like sentiment of joy, even before we know
the subject of his contentment.9
Like Lamy, Du Bos conceptualizes sympathy as a
physical change that occurs in response to witnessing
another’s plight or good fortune. The observer’s body
markedly changes, softening or becoming agitated, in
response to the image of another body in distress or
rage. Also like Lamy, this responsiveness precedes
any reflection, occurring immediately and spontane-
ously upon seeing the other’s image.
Neither Lamy nor Du Bos comments specifically
on the power relationship between observer and actor
in the scenes they utilize to describe sympathy. Each,
however, illustrates the concept by placing the
observer as the fortunate individual who is capable of
providing support or consolation to the one observed.
Is sympathy the unmarked and universal tendency to
feel for another, as Lamy and Du Bos claim? Or is it
also stimulated by an imbalance in power relations
between those who feel and those who feel for them?10
Here, I hope to pose the question of why, at this
particular historical moment, a theorization of sym-
pathy becomes a philosophical preoccupation. It is in
this moment that France, only recently consolidated
as a nation state, and along with many other Euro-
pean nations, begins to explore and establish trade
relations with an expanding number of regions glob-
ally. It likewise undertakes to secure ownership of
vast tracks of land in North America and Africa as
part of its competition with other European nations
to capitalize on foreign resources. How might an
analysis of human society grounded in a notion of
sympathy assist in this colonial project?
I will read Condillac’s essays as potentially
predictive of how the colonizing body might be
constituted, asking how his particular conception of
the body would encounter the unknown and foreign.
In so doing, I am not referencing any specific
encounter between a colonial explorer and a local
inhabitant, but rather the consolidated assumptions
concerning how to regard and evaluate another’s
physical presence that informed bodies that resided in
France as well as those that journeyed abroad. I will
place Condillac’s conceptions of the body in dialogue
with the practice of dance notation in order to
flesh out the sense of how the body is aware of
itself, and also how it senses other bodies. How might
these documents help us to speculate about colonial
corporeality? What do they suggest about how
the body might be cultivated so as to assume a
relationship of power over another body, or what
the preconditions for that presumption of power
might be?
 CHOREOGRAPHING EMPATHY
1. Sympathy and the origin of language
Although Condillac’s contributions to philosophy
have been widely debated, few have noticed his
concern for and with physicality. He is the first to
articulate a theory concerning the origin of language
in relation to gesture.11 He envisions consciousness as
the product of a physical reaching out and encounter
with the unknown, and he is also one of the first phi-
losophers to stake a claim for consciousness based on
the experience of touch. Deeply influenced by Locke,
Condillac argues that knowledge comes from experi-
ence.12 Yet he profoundly differs from Locke in two
respects: first, he makes language the essential pre-
cursor of thinking rather than the product of thinking;
and second, he examines in detail the role of the body
and of gesture in the production of consciousness.13
Prompted by reports of travelers’ encounters with
new and strange peoples worldwide, philosophical
inquiry into the origin of language began to take on
momentum in the late 17th century. Not an historical
hypothesis, since it went uncontested that God gave
the capacity for language to man, the scene of lan-
guage’s origin served to stage an epistemological
inquiry into contemporary human nature. As part of
this burgeoning inquiry, Condillac sets the origin of
language as a hypothetical encounter between two
young children who have been separated from their
social group before they learned to speak in order to
imagine how would they learn to communicate.14
Separately, the children live one day to the next,
unable to sustain memory or exercise imagination.
Together, however, they note the similarity of their
responses to hunger or danger.
Condillac presumes an instinctive responsiveness
on the part of the children to their surroundings, and
because they react in an identical manner to events,
they begin to develop and sustain their communica-
tive powers:
…their mutual discourse made them connect the cries of each
passion to the perceptions of which they were the natural
signs. They usually accompanied the cries with some move-
ment, gesture, or action that made the expression more
striking. For example, he who suffered by not having an
object his needs demanded would not merely cry out; he made
as if an effort to obtain it, moved his head, his arms, and all
parts of his body. Moved by this display, the other fixed the
eyes on the same object, and feeling his soul suffused with
sentiments he was not yet able to account for to himself, he
suffered by seeing the other suffer so miserably.15
83
In this complex scene, one child, craving the fruit on a
tree, cries out, and also gestures towards the fruit that
is unobtainable. The other child, witnessing the first,
then looks at the tree, the object of the first child’s
desire, experiences the same suffusion of feeling, and
is moved by the companion’s suffering.
Condillac asserts that this entire sequence of events
is spontaneous and ‘‘instinctual’’. However, the
frequent repetition of similar scenes instills in the
children a habitual association between the cries/
gestures and that which provoked them. Eventually,
the children are able to imagine and remember the
scene simply by performing the cries and gestures,
and they begin to implement this system of signed
associations in order to communicate with one
another. They gesture and cry in order to report on
past events, or to signal impending events, therein
‘‘doing by reflection what they had formerly done
only by instinct’’.16 Condillac calls this system a
‘‘language of action’’ and explains that it persisted
over many generations, until eventually the voice
developed sufficient articulateness that it became
equally convenient and finally easier to communicate
using spoken words alone.
Originating in an instinctual and spontaneous
capacity for expression, language emerges as the
conscious implementation of both vocal and gestural
actions. Cries and gestures are distinctive insofar as
gestures provide both a denotative but also vivid and
striking accompaniment to vocalization. The child
shows, by pointing towards, the desired fruit, but the
addition of bodily action also makes for a compelling
image that ‘‘moves’’ the observer into sympathetic
accord. It is the body’s gestures that prompt the
observer to regard the tree and then begin to suffer
‘‘by seeing the other suffer so miserably’’. What is
unclear in Condillac’s description is whether the
observer’s suffering is caused by seeing the other
person suffer or by projecting the self into the scene of
suffering. In either case, Condillac asserts, both
sufferer and observer act according to instinct, neither
contriving to create the scene or to alleviate suffering
except as an immediate and urgent need.
Condillac’s theory of language presumes an
expressive responsiveness and a sympathetic bond
with others that precede the capacity to reflect on
one’s thoughts or actions. One reacts physically and
emotionally to events in the world, and these reac-
tions are sensed in an unmediated way by others. The
84 SUSAN LEIGH FOSTER
process of reflection becomes possible through a
cognitive ability to associate ideas, one that connects
the cry or gesture to something in the world.17 Thus
an instinctual physical responsiveness provides the
basis upon which language is built, and language
depends upon an ‘‘instinctual’’ against which its
reflective capacity is compared and contrasted.
Even as Condillac instigates a binary between
sympathetic responsiveness and reflective language,
thereby giving language something to reflect on, he
does not create an opposition between gesture and
language. The earliest language, the language of
action, incorporates both vocal and gestural elements
that become increasingly refined over time. In suc-
ceeding the language of action, speech retains many
of its features, such as prosody: ‘‘Therefore to take
the place of the violent bodily movements, the voice
was raised and lowered by strongly marked inter-
vals’’.18 The vivid and clarifying powers of gesture
become incorporated into the voice’s tone and
intensity.
Traces of the language of action remain, however,
in both ancient and modern cultures. Greek and
Roman declamation, for example, contained a ges-
tural repertoire that far exceeded that of contempo-
rary times. Renowned for their moving and artful
speeches, these declamators utilized gestures that
became notated, and then metered, resulting in the art
of pantomime.19 Even contemporary Greeks and
Romans are more naturally vivacious in their ges-
tures, as Du Bos, quoted above, observes. Condillac
elaborates on Du Bos’ theory of northern and
southern climate differences in order to explain that
varying degrees of both gesture and prosody give each
region a distinctive profile.20 Similarly, Condillac
draws on Bishop Warburton who provides this
description of Oriental character:
Use and custom, like most other things in life, afterwards
changed into ornament what had been due to necessity, but
this practice lasted long after the necessity had ceased,
especially among the oriental nations whose character
naturally inclined them to a mode of conversation which so
readily exercised their vivacity by movement and so greatly
suited it by a perpetual representation of sensible images.21
In the same way that the tone used for anger in
England is only that of surprise in Italy, so the tem-
perament of Asians, more vivacious and dramatic,
manifests in their mode of conversation.22
Condillac finds that, lamentably, the French have
lost these capacities. Because French language is
almost devoid of prosody, its inflections cannot be
notated, nor can its intent be partitioned between
actors, as the ancient pantomimes learned to do. For
this reason
… the art of miming has little appeal to us, and dramatic
performances have had to be enclosed in theaters which left
no room for the common people. From this follows the
saddest part, our limited taste for music, architecture,
painting, and sculpture.23
Whereas the ancient pantomimes performed in large
amphitheaters, witnessed by thousands of viewers,
contemporary dance and drama are housed in pro-
scenium-style theaters seating hundreds. As a result,
Condillac observes, few have access to the artistry
through which matters of deep concern can be
expressed.24 Citing the dances of the ancient Hebrews
and Greeks, Condillac asserts that ancient dance
instructed these citizens in pressing matters such as
those addressed by government and religion. In these
ancient times, when language was less developed, a
gestural system acted with greater force on the
imagination, creating a more lasting impression.25
In order to create this ancient dance, gesture
underwent a process of cultivation and refinement
similar to that of the voice in developing speech.
Developing out of the language of action along with
speech, the dances’ repertoire of gestures evidenced
the same capacity for reflection, and indeed, accord-
ing to Abbé Du Bos, these gestures, some ‘‘natural’’
and others ‘‘institutional’’, all enjoyed the same status
as signs.26 Du Bos points out that even the simplest of
gestures conveys different meanings in different
locales, and he emphasizes that the ancient mimes
worked assiduously to train both themselves and their
audiences in how to implement and read movement.
Eventually, according to Condillac, dance developed
into two separate arts, one to express thoughts and
the other to express feelings:
As their taste improved, people gave greater variety, grace,
and expression to this ‘dance’. They not only submitted the
movements of the arms and the attitudes of the body to
rules, but even marked out how the feet should be moved.
As a result dancing was naturally divided into two subor-
dinate arts. If you will permit me to use an expression from
the language of the ancients, one of them was the ‘dance of
 CHOREOGRAPHING EMPATHY
gestures,’ which was maintained for its contribution to the
communication of their thoughts; the other was chiefly the
‘dance of steps’, which was used for the expression of
certain states of mind, especially joy; it was used on
occasion of rejoicing, pleasure being its principal aim.27
Unlike Du Bos, who mentions the new experimentation
with pantomime taking place in England and at the fair
theaters in Paris during the early 18th century,28
Condillac finds no evidence of a contemporary practice
of gestural dance. Still, Condillac demonstrates a clear
knowledge of dance and even of Feuillet notation, and
he accords it an important status among human
expressive practices.
Throughout his analysis of language’s origin,
Condillac implements a standard of comparison
based on greater and lesser degrees of difference more
than differences in kind or quality. Using sympathetic
responsiveness as the primordial state, Condillac
founds language on the capacity for reflection.
Despite this initial positioning of physical expres-
siveness as prior to language, Condillac incorporates
both gestures and cries into his language of action. He
sees gestures as performing a function distinct from
that of vocalizations, yet rather than assigning them a
unique function, he calls them ‘‘more’’ vivid or
‘‘clearer’’ than cries. Similarly, some cultures, south-
ern and Asian, have retained ‘‘more’’ prosody than
others. Condillac’s discussion of Asian character, in
particular, takes place within his chronological
charting of language’s development. Their use of
prosody, like that of the ancients, locates them along
a continuum as more advanced than those who
practiced only the language of action, but less ad-
vanced than contemporary Europe. He also associ-
ates gesture more with ‘‘the limited intelligence of the
first children’’.29 In these tacit references, however, he
does not establish the body or gesture as the pri-
mordial Other out of which language is born. Nor are
foreigners described as unknowable or impenetrable;
they merely implement different gestural as well as
vocal vocabularies.
Where does Condillac locate himself in relation to
this history of language? On what basis does he judge
the degrees of difference that he notes among different
bodies and cultures? Condillac provides answers to
these questions in his Treatise on the Sensations, pub-
lished eight years after his theory of language.30 Where
his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge under-
85
takes to explicate human consciousness as a product of
language, his theory of perception poses the question
of how a world exterior to the body is produced and
verified.31 In so doing Condillac demonstrates how
perception organizes the world in relation to the body,
and how it defines otherness in relation to self.
2. A statue’s view of the world
Condillac’s Treatise on the Sensations examines per-
ception by constructing a hypothetical statue, a
motionless body frozen in marble, whose senses are
awakened one at a time in order to apprehend how
each works. Although the last of the senses to be
discussed, touch is identified as playing a central role
in constituting the self:
Our statue, deprived of smell, hearing, taste and sight, and
reduced to the sense of touch, now exists in the feeling it has
of the action of the parts of the body upon one another, and
especially through the movements of respiration. Here we
have the lowest level of feeling. I will call this the funda-
mental feeling, because it is at this play of the machine that
animal life begins. It depends uniquely upon it…In fact we
shall find that the statue can say ‘I’ as soon as some change
in its fundamental feeling occurs. Consequently the feeling
and the ‘I’ are in their origin the same thing; and it is suf-
ficient to observe the different ways in which the funda-
mental feeling or the ‘I’ can be modified in order to discover
what it is capable of solely by the aid of touch.32
Condillac identifies sensations emanating from the
viscera and muscles, especially during the act of
breathing, as forming a base-line state from which a
sense of self emerges. However, insofar as the statue
remains untouched and unmoving, ‘‘It cannot notice
the different parts of its body. It cannot feel that one
part is outside the other, or contiguous to it. It is as if
it only existed in a point, and there is as yet no pos-
sibility of its discovering that it is extended’’.33 Only
through the action of touching itself does the statue
gain a sense of the space it occupies. Unlike all the
other senses, touch offers the possibility of a double
sensation, that of touching and of being touched.
Once the statue touches itself and compares that with
the sensation of touching something else, it begins to
establish both self and otherness.
Movement is what extends the body outwards from
a point, giving it an expanded sense of interior space,
86 SUSAN LEIGH FOSTER
and touch gives the statue an awareness of itself as
having a body that moves.34 The statue thus learns
that it does move, can move, and can will movement,
which allows for further discovery. Extension is the
process through which the body comes to exist in
space and through which it takes up space so that it
becomes something that one ‘‘has’’.35 Space is a given
within which the body and then a succession of
objects are located. The body that exists in space and
can be extended through space then assists in the
production of knowledge as a sequence of incremen-
tal, contiguous units, acquired through the action of
moving and then registering the results.36
Although seemingly neutral, even clinical, in the
conditions it sets for investigating perception,
Condillac’s statue performs according to several tacit
assumptions that make possible its discoveries. In the
very fact of freezing the body, Condillac sets up the
conditions under which the self is separated from the
sense of the body and actualizes as a being that has a
body. Bodily identity also depends upon the prior
existence of space, existing as an unmarked and
abstract given into which the body extends itself. It
instigates motion and then determines what it has
found.37 Although it comes to understand the world
by moving in it, it nonetheless perceives the world
through a binary process in which sensory informa-
tion is encountered through movement, yet the
receiving of that information is fundamentally pas-
sive, a process of imprinting sensation onto the sense
organ capable of receiving it.
In the same way that he stages the origin of lan-
guage as the hypothetical interaction between two
young children, so Condillac uses the scene of the
statue to probe the origin of consciousness prior to
the invention of language. In both cases the individual
is isolated from the group as a way to determine what
is natural. And in both cases pleasure and pain, like
danger or joy, are universal experiences that provoke
immediate and unmediated responses. As witness to
these scenes, Condillac places himself both outside
and inside the bodies of those he is describing. He
observes the child crying and gesturing towards the
fruit on the tree, and then he notes how the other
child feels suffused with sentiment and is motivated to
ease the first child’s suffering. Similarly, the statue is
shown moving through and sensing the world, while
at the same time its thoughts and feelings are fully
explicated. Condillac thus directs himself in the same
sympathetic role for each scenario. And his presence,
like the space into which the statue extends itself, is
unmarked and all-encompassing.
In her study of European travel writings of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Mary Louise
Pratt identifies this position for the observer as ‘‘anti-
colonial’’.38 Looking specifically at protégés of the
Swedish botanist Linnaeus and noting how they were
charged to classify the world’s flora and fauna using a
seemingly neutral system of analysis, Pratt argues that
they buttressed the colonial enterprise by cleansing
the world’s cultures of any signification that did not
conform to the taxonomy they utilized. The local
meaning or use value of plants, insects, and animals
became irrelevant in the push to collect and then
regularize as distinct species all types of living crea-
tures. Pratt calls this scientific quest an anti-colonial
project because it purposefully disavows any desires
to accumulate wealth or to govern the subjects it
scrutinizes. Instead, these botanists and other
explorers exercised the ‘‘objective’’ tools of scientific
measurement, seeking ‘‘innocently’’ to accumulate
only knowledge. As Pratt makes evident, however,
their reports, by creating a landscape that is both
uninhabited and unhistoricized, provide an intellec-
tual rationale for imperial conquest.
Condillac’s conceptualizations of sympathy and of
perception offer a similar kind of orientation towards
the world by making it available for spatial and tem-
poral regularization. As much as they contributed to
Enlightenment agendas for creating a human-centered
universe wherein knowledge is the product of human
inquiry, his theories also provide synergistic support
for the colonial enterprise. Colonization depended
upon and was instigated from an absolute center that
could extend outwards, receive information, and then
act on it. It presumed an ‘‘out there’’ separated from
the center, and it connected the out there to the center
through an unmarked and pure space that all bodies
share and in which they all move. The fact that the
colonial body, like Condillac’s statue, was seen to
passively receive an other’s cultural information
meant that it was not responsible for helping to pro-
duce that information, but instead it could simply
respond in the manner deemed appropriate. In these
acts of passively registering foreignness, colonizing
powers formed as having, owning their own distinc-
tive selves. They governed both a corporeality and a
sensibility that mutually reinforced one another.
 CHOREOGRAPHING EMPATHY
The premise of a universally shared sympathy
further rationalized conquest by enabling a colonial
presence to be moved by the plight of local inhabit-
ants and to respond by working to ‘‘improve’’ their
situation. In his discussions of prosody and gestural
proclivity, Condillac hints at the continuums of
development, based on degrees of difference, that
define both historical and ontogenetic progress.
Utilizing these scales of difference, native inhabitants
could first be evaluated and then subsequently laun-
ched onto the civilizing path. The fact that colonizers
could imagine themselves both inside the colonized
body and also outside observing it established their
omniscience and authorized their actions.
But how might a colonizing presence experience its
own corporeality? In what ways and according to
what patterns is power internalized physically within
the body? And how is the body trained in order
to wield power? For answers to these questions I turn
to dance practice of the period, and specifically to the
prevalent documentation of dances published in
notated form.
3. The art of writing the dancing
Raoul Auger Feuillet and Andre Lorin’s publication in
1700 of a standardized way of notating dances repre-
sents the culmination of research by Dancing Masters
working to fundamentalize a basic vocabulary of
positions and steps and a rubric for translating these to
the printed page. Sometime in the 1670s, Louis XIV
had ordered principal Dancing Master Pierre Beau-
champs to ‘‘discover the means of making the art of
dance comprehensible on paper’’. And according to
Beauchamps he set about to apply ‘‘himself to shaping
and disposing characters and notes in the form of
tablature in order to represent the steps of the dances
and ballets performed before the king and at the
Opera’’ in such a way that the dances could be learned
‘‘without need of personal instruction’’.39 Along with
Beauchamps’ system, at least three other distinctive
notation systems emerged in response to Louis’ man-
date, yet Feuillet’s and Lorin’s collection utilizing
Beauchamps’ system predominated, becoming so
popular that new collections of dances in notated form
were distributed annually through the 1730s, and
Feuillet notation, as it came to be called, was widely
adopted in England and throughout northern Europe.
87
Feuillet’s planimetric representation of the dancing
body highlights its directionality, the path it takes
through space, and the motions of the feet and legs. A
single line notating the dancer’s path is embellished
on either side by characters indicating the position
and action of the feet, the direction in which they
extend, their height, on the ground, on half point, or
jumping in the air, and their interactivity in beating,
paralleling, or turning. The line marking the body’s
path through space also references the vertical
placement of the body since it provides the basis for
one leg or the other to gesticulate on either side of a
continuous and stable skeletal structure. Thus the
graphing of motion summons the body into and
locates it within a geometrically defined grid stipulating
both horizontal and vertical positionings.
The characters on either side of the line frequently
resemble the movements they indicate, pictographi-
cally designating the ankle, toes, and position and
direction of the foot, or else metaphorically suggest-
ing the body’s actions, for example, the sign for
lowering the body into a bent knee position is lower
than the base line.40 This iconicity between sign and
movement carries over to the dance as a whole in the
transparent and unmediated relationship between
written and performed dance. Feuillet, who coined the
term ‘‘choreography’’, defined it as the writing down of
dances. ‘‘Choreographers’’, those who could read and
write the notation system, sometimes sat at their desks
and devised new dances through writing them down,
apparently able to rehearse the sequences in their
imagination or else believing that corporeal realization
of their inventions was unnecessary to the subsequent
process of learning the new dance from the notation.
The great analytic achievement of the notation
system is its breakdown of various steps, such as a
skip, a turn, or a triplet into smaller units capable of
infinite recombination. In addition to these basic
units, movements that adorn the basic units, such as
beats, circulars, or changes of orientation, are iden-
tified. The result is a system that suggests an infinitely
variable compendium of possibilities.41 It also disci-
plines the body in highly specific ways. By breaking
steps down into component parts, and specifying how
each of these parts should be performed, the notation
provides foundational units out of which all move-
ment is derived and clear guidelines regarding the
execution of all steps. Practicing a dance from the
notation, the dancer enacts a feedback loop between
88 SUSAN LEIGH FOSTER
step and written symbols that objectifies the move-
ment so that even as one is performing the step one is
aware of its proper features. The notation thereby
takes the dancing out of the body, and away from
body-to-body contact, and places it in circulation
with a codified symbolic system.
Remarkably similar in its organization and intent
to Linneaus’ taxonomy of plants, Feuillet notation
asserts that a small number of essential features are
fundamental to dance, and then shows how these can
be varied and recombined in an infinite number of
ways to produce any and all dances. Also similar to
Linnaeus’s system, Feuillet notation uses symbols
that reference seemingly neutral motions or aspects of
the body. Where Linnaeus uses Latin nomenclature,
specifically because it signified an extra-national
context for his enterprise, so Feuillet notation sub-
tends any movement’s significance by referencing only
its direction, timing, and the spatial orientation of the
body performing it. The body’s movement is reduced
to a set of possibilities to elevate and lower, to trace a
semi-circle or line, etc.
Precisely because of this breakdown of well-known
steps into smaller and more specific elements, some
aspiring students, according to literary historian Jean-
Noel Laurenti, found this system to be too complex.42 As
explanation for this complexity, Laurenti argues that:
The French dancing masters had to unify a vocabulary of
steps with diverse origins, from the provinces or from
abroad: to discover what this vast repertoire had in common,
it was necessary to first distinguish all the constituent parts.
This would permit the use of the same signs (in different
sequence of course) to note down a minuet or passepied,
originally from the west of France, as well as a gavot or a
rigadoon, imported from the southeast, or a ‘‘Spanish-style’’
sarabande or chaconne. The Feuillet system thus reflects an
approach which, by passing through the universal laws of
movement, finally arrives at a kind of universal language of
dance, allowing the different traditions to communicate.43
The ‘‘universal’’ laws to which Laurenti refers permit
a mastering of distinctive dance styles and traditions.
By breaking movement down into units similar to
Linnaeus’ basic configurations of stamen and pistil,
the notation subjects dancing to laws which all
movements appear to share. Cultural and historical
specificities of particular dances are smoothed out or
erased by the homogenizing system that implements
absolute conceptions of space and of time.
Feuillet’s rubric for conceptualizing and analyzing
dance movement also shares crucial features with
Condillac’s hypothetical statue. Both represent a
systematic effort to authorize founding principles,
and both share a remarkably congruent modeling of
the body. Just as the statue grounds bodily sensation
in a frozen origin prior to all sensation, so notation
establishes an underlying framework, both a vocabu-
lary of possible movements and a geometric orientation
for their execution. Just as the statue extends its limbs
outwards in order to discover the world, so notation
emphasizes the path the dancer travels.44 Both statue
and dancer extend themselves into space, a pure space,
unmarked and open, that exists prior to the entrance of
the body into it. In so doing, they each affirm the
centrality of a center and its governance over a
periphery.
This kind of conceptualization of a pure space,
capable of being organized only according to abstract
and geometric principles, worked effectively to
ground the colonial project. It not only supported the
notion of a centrality that extends itself outwards in
space towards a periphery, but it also reinforced a
bodily experience of having a center that extends into
and moves through an unmarked space. The act of
moving through such a pure space was characterized
as value-free, and any labor entailed in traversing this
space went unregistered. Within such a space, neutral
bodily features and motions, such as those identified
in Feuillet notation, operated to confirm the existence
of an absolute set of laws to which all bodies should
conform. Implementing this bodily disciplining, the
colonial regime could first institute protocols of
comportment at home and then proliferate these
standards and indexes of behavior to those foreign
bodies that it desired to govern abroad. These pro-
tocols acquired their persuasive force by standing as
the most basic and therefore universal units out of
which human behavior is composed.
In Condillac’s time these standards of behavior
exercised authority through an evaluation of degrees
of difference from the normative. As his work sug-
gests, the act of the body extending itself into such a
space establishes the possibility for continua of dif-
ference, all emanating from the center. The develop-
ment of dance notation prepared the way for
Condillac’s philosophy by cultivating a body that
could easily be turned to marble and analyzed sense
by sense as it moved out into the world. In Condillac’s
 CHOREOGRAPHING EMPATHY
moment this body and its dances still retained much
of their rhetorical force, as is evident in his treatment
of vocal and gestural signs as parallel and equivalent
ways of communicating in the world.
Only a few years later, however, Rousseau revises
Condillac’s theory of language by asserting a unique
functionality for both gestures and vocalizations. The
first cries, he argues, responded to the passions,
whereas gestures expressed needs. Speech, developing
from cries, carries with it the persuasive capacity to
elicit sympathy. Gestures, capable only of indicating
‘‘present or easily described objects and visible
actions’’, will never move another to tears.45 Could
this othering of gesture provide an epistemological
grounding for a different colonial policy, one in which
the foreign came to be unspecifiable in terms of
sameness and difference? As Pratt and others have
demonstrated, representations of colonized peoples
began to transform during the second half of the
eighteenth century into primitives whose habits of
mind and ways of life could not be fathomed.46
Comparative models based on degrees of difference
gave way to analyses emphasizing the unique
proclivities of the civilized and their others.
4. Rainer’s other
Returning now to Rainer’s recounting of her cross-
cultural contact, and working to historicize her own
experience of body, I want to ask how her description
of the performance and her own response to it might
resist and/or perpetuate the colonial legacy initiated
during Feuillet’s time. One of the intriguing features
of her account is the separation she makes between
the emotional and the kinetic. The face of the Indian
dancer projects a chart of human feeling whereas the
hands perform a purely kinetic repertoire. Rainer can
read the face, finding in its display a carefully crafted
representation of a universally recognizable repertoire
of emotions. In contrast, the hands do not ‘‘mean’’
anything, yet they elicit a spontaneous response in
which Rainer is seemingly able to replicate their
complex motions because they move in such an
energizing and charismatic way.
What is the significance of Rainer’s separation
between the kinetic and the emotional? Looking
closely at Rainer’s own aesthetic agenda, I would
argue that her conception of the kinetic was intended
89
to eclipse the universalizing rhetoric of modernism, a
universal based in psychological and archetypal truths
rather than physical facts. Rainer worked assiduously
to cultivate and valorize a ‘‘pure’’ physicality and to
imbue it with its own kind of power and dynamism, in
part in order to eschew claims of universal sharings of
values based in universally shared emotional states.
Furthermore, her conception of a pure physicality ran
counter to the dominant center and ornamental
periphery established in the eighteenth century body by
championing equally all parts of the body.
Even as she and her colleagues endeavored to
found a space for physical particularity by attending
to motion detached from its psychological or social
frames of reference, the claims for a pure physicality
nonetheless provide the grounding for colonial
practice, as Rainer’s own account makes clear. She
mastered the other’s movement, and in so doing,
came to feel powerful. Similarly, she read the
emotions projected on his face, proclaimed it great
art, and thereby secured her status as an authority.
My intent here is not to indict Rainer as a colonial
force. Her entire career as an artist makes evident the
radical politics to which she was committed. Still, the
passage in her journal provides a vivid description of
a process, often unacknowledged, through which one
body comes to know another. Rainer’s powerful
descriptive and analytic abilities make it possible to
look closely at one such exchange, and consequently,
to begin to re-choreograph the ways in which the
world’s dances have been learned and shared.
Notes
1
Condillac introduces the northern-southern climate split,
and he quotes Abbé Du Bos as observing that the Romans are
naturally much more vivacious in their gestures, ([1746] 2001),
p. 135.
2
Rainer 1974, p. 180. The otherness of Rainer’s encounter
was undoubtedly reinforced by the remoteness of the temple
site itself. She traveled four hours by train, then four and a half
hours on two buses, and after that a climb, and a truck ride.
This encounter seems to have been the performance highlight
of her entire six-week trip, occurring on January 31st as
reported in the diary that she kept from January 25 to
February 22. I was made aware of this passage by dance
scholar Ananya Chatterjea who encourages an interrogation
of these kinds of descriptions in her intercultural history. See
Chatterjea 2004.
3
See Condillac ([1746] 2001; [1754] 1930) and Feuillet ([1700]
1970).
90 SUSAN LEIGH FOSTER
4 20
Hans Aarsleff contends that sympathy and sensibility are
interchangeable in French philosophical discourse of the 18th
century. See his ‘‘Introduction’’ in Condillac ([1746] 2001),
p. xxiii. Along with Rainer, I am using the later term
‘‘empathy’’, which I see as genealogically related to this earlier
set of terms.
5
See Condillac ([1746] 2001), edited and translated by
Aarsleff, also, Lamy 1699. According to Aarsleff, ‘‘It is a bit
of a puzzle how Lamy came upon the term. It is Greek and its
philosophical home was in Stoic philosophy, in which ‘sym-
pathy’ is the name for the cosmic harmony that binds all things
together in an organized whole of interconnection that
embraces both the physical and the moral worlds. A loan-
translation appears in ecclesiastical Latin as compassio, which
in turn produced other loan-translations such as the German
Mitleid, Condillac ([1746] 2001), p. xxii. Aarsleff also quotes
Cicero as follows: ‘‘Action,’’ said Cicero, ‘‘influences every-
body, for the same emotions are felt by all people and they
both recognize them in others and manifest them in themselves
by the same marks’’ (Condillac [1746] 2001, p. xxi).
6 31
Lamy 1699, pp. 111--112.
7 32
Adam Smith (1817), for example, takes this line of reason-
ing.
8 34
Du Bos ([1748] 1978), Vol. 1: pp. 10--11.
9
Du Bos ([1748] 1978), Vol. 1: pp. 32--33.
10
See Marshall 1998.
11
Often regarded as the mere translator of Locke, or as a man
of popularity rather than influence, Condillac has also been
recognized for his imaginative theorization of language as a
system of signs (Derrida 1980). Aarsleff seems to be unique in
noting the originality of his thesis concerning gesture and
language (1982), p. 108.
12
See Locke 1689.
13
On this point, I am in agreement with Stam 1980, p. 81.
14
Condillac ([1746] 2001), p. 113.
15
Condillac ([1746] 2001), p. 114.
16
Condillac ([1746] 2001), p. 115.
17
As Isabel Knight observes, Condillac demonstrated that
‘‘signs could have been invented with nothing but physical
reactions to outside stimuli and the mental mechanism of the
association of ideas. Natural cries and gestures, with which the
body spontaneously expresses feelings and responds to exter-
nal events, make up the raw material of signs. Habitual
repetition of a cry or gesture in a recurring situation sets up an
association between the two, so that the cry or gesture comes
to signify the situation or the emotion the situation provokes’’
(Knight 1968, p. 41). And Aarsleff notes that ‘‘This all-
important act of institution would seem inconceivable without
the prior occurrence of some natural signs that provide
reflection with the suggestion for the making of arbitrary,
verbal signs’’ (Aarsleff 1982, p. 108).
18
Condillac ([1746] 2001), p. 120.
19
Condillac ([1746] 2001), p. 133. And ‘‘...this is how they came
to imagine, as an entirely new invention, a language which had
been the first that mankind spoke, or which at least differed
from it only by being suitable for the expression of a much
larger number of thoughts’’ (Condillac [1746] 2001, p. 134).
Condillac ([1746] 2001), p. 135. Du Bos’ theory of regional
and national differences notes the distinctiveness of air and soil
and the profound effects that these can have on human
temperament. He also argues that members of different races
who go to live in foreign lands eventually take on the physical
characteristics of those in their adoptive locales. Hence, he sees
no intrinsic differences between racial types, but rather a series
of gradations, Du Bos ([1748] 1978), Vol. 2: pp. 176--234.
21
Condillac ([1746] 2001), p. 117.
22
Condillac ([1746] 2001), p. 147.
23
Condillac ([1746] 2001), p. 145.
24
Again quoting Warburton, Condillac argues that ancient
dance was cultivated to allow people to express that which was
of deep concern to them ([1746] 2001), p. 118.
25
Condillac ([1746] 2001), p. 118.
26
Du Bos ([1748] 1978), Vol. 3: p. 170.
27
Condillac ([1746] 2001), p. 118.
28
Du Bos ([1748] 1978), Vol. 3: p. 220.
29
Condillac ([1746] 2001), p. 115.
30
Condillac ([1754] 1930).
Condillac ([1746] 2001).
Condillac ([1754] 1930), p. 75.
33
Condillac ([1754] 1930), p. 76.
Condillac explains that only in this way can cognition
develop and can the statue become aware ‘‘that it has a body
which moves’’ (Condillac, [1754] 1930, p. 78).
35
Condillac explains: ‘‘The self of a child, concentrated in its
soul, would never be able to regard the different parts of its
body as so many parts of itself. Nature would appear to have
only one means of making the child know its body, and this is
to make it perceive its sensations, not as modifications of its
soul, but as modifications of the organs which are their
occasional causes. Therefore the self in place of being
concentrated in the soul must become extended, must be
spread out and repeated in some way in all the parts of its
body’’ (Condillac [1754] 1930, pp. 82--83).
36
Derrida comments on the particular form of knowledge
production in his analysis of Condillac, Derrida 1980, pp.
71--76.
37
Perhaps this contributes to the ways in which Condillac is
perceived as helping to establish the new rhetoric of scientific
discovery. See Anderson, 1989, p. 460--465.
38
Mary Louise Pratt 1992.
39
Qtd. Harris-Warrick and Marsh 1994, p. 84.
40
Laurenti comments on this, adding that the symbols are
sometimes completely arbitrary as well. The characters of the
Feuillet system are iconically related to the movements they
indicate. Laurenti distinguishes between those that pictograph-
ically represent the body e.g. the ankle, toes, and position/
direction of the foot vs. those which metaphorically represent
the body’s actions, e.g. the sinking sign set obliquely (sunk
down) or the sliding sign as a T that seems to resemble the foot
sliding across the floor. At other points the signs become
completely arbitrary, Laurenti 1994, p. 95.
41
Laurenti explains: ‘‘Thus the first movement of the contre-
temps balonné can be isolated and repeated, still on the same
leg, while playing on the possible modifications in the course of
 CHOREOGRAPHING EMPATHY
the free leg: the latter, during the first spring, can beat behind,
then in a second spring beat in front, or describe a half-circle in
the air; one may also add a half turn to each of the springs’’
(Laurenti 1994, p. 91).
42
Laurenti explains: ‘‘Thus the notation of an apparently
quite simple and very dynamic contretemps balonné…requires
no less than eight indications: a step forward with the free leg,
a sink, a spring, a foot in the air, a second sink and a spring on
a half-position sign; the two groups of signs, corresponding to
the two movements, are joined by a trait within the frame of
the measure. And if this contretemps balonné were to be
executed with a change in orientation, a supplementary sign
would have to be added’’ (Laurenti 1994, p. 91).
43
Laurenti 1994, p. 87.
44
This is the case even though the pathways indicated in the
notation are distorted because they necessarily accommodate
more and less complex movements. When the movements
require many symbols to represent them, the pathway is
indicated with a dotted line that shows that the person is still
on the same spot. See Harris-Warrick and Marsh (1994, p. 97).
45
Rousseau 1986, p. 243.
46
Pratt 1992, p. 111--143; Kriz 1995, p. 116--132.
References
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Anderson, W.: 1989, ‘‘From Natural Philosophy to Scientific
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Chatterjea, A.: 2004, Butting Out, Middletown: Wesleyan
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World Arts and Cultures
Kinross Building
Room 200V
Los Angeles
CA 90024
USA
E-mail: slfoster@arts.ucla.edu
Susan Leigh Foster, choreographer and scholar, is a Professor
in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at the Uni-
versity of California at Los Angeles. She is the author of
Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary
American Dance (1986), Choreography and Narrative: Ballet’s
Staging of Story and Desire (1998), and Dances that Describe
Themselves: The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull
(2002). She is the editor of Corporealities: Dancing Knowl-
edge, Culture, and Power (1996) and Choreographing History
(1995).