Pour une approche critique et pragmatiste du système chorégraphique d’Alwin Nikolais

Seeking to address some of the challenges in understanding Alwin Nikolais’s choreographic system, the project examines three fundamental concepts of his philosophy of the body and dance movement: decentering, convergence, and Gestalt. This approach to dance, which sought to deconstruct the body by subverting its habitual movements and emphasizing abstraction, paved the way for a heightened awareness of the body—a soma-aesthetic philosophy that developed proprioceptive tech niques and an ecological and democratic conception of movement as participation. In doing so, the project explores some of the principles of American pragmatist philosophy (Dewey, "Art as Experience", 1934) that converge with those set forth by Nikolais ("The Single Gesture", trans. 2018).