The Triple Irony of Asking How Dancers Feel

I was about to write a post with my reflections on the conversations we had during our Baseworks presentation at the Neuro last week, when Patrick requested a constraint: frame it as something positive, since my previous two articles were framed through absence or loss. Fair enough, I thought. Shouldn’t be that difficult. Why don’t I write about the felt aesthetics of spatial experience and counterfactual richness—something I’ve wanted to write about for a while? As a responsible author, I decided to check how others usually write about this topic—to avoid repeating existing content and cliches.

So, I opened Google and typed, “how do dancers experience their body.”

“How do dancers experience their body.”

The AI summary told me that dancers experience their bodies through a “shifted sensorium,” a heightened intellectually engaged awareness of physical sensations like gravity, muscle tension, and weight. Encouraged by this meaningful start, I scrolled down to human-written content.

And at this point, I wished I’d instructed Google more precisely to search for something positive. Here’s what I saw on the first results page:

• An essay by Alice Robb, “What ballet taught me about my body,” in The Atlantic, which starts by criticizing the modern disembodied culture where women are especially prone to feeling detached from their bodies, and then requires a subscription to read further. I later found the book that this essay was adapted from—more about it below.
• An academic paper, “Exploring body consciousness of dancers, athletes, and lightly physically active adults,” which reports that dancers are marginally better at copying leg postures and have slightly higher scores on the BAQ questionnaire. Nothing on “how dancers experience their body.”
• Harvard Medical School’s page titled “Dancing and the Brain,” which explains that dancing is good for you. It stimulates the somatosensory cortex, motor cortex, basal ganglia, and cerebellum. It has the benefits of physical exercise, reduces stress, improves balance, improves mood, and increases levels of serotonin, and so on. No phenomenology either.

And then, the rest of the search results consisted of blog posts and Reddit threads on body image, eating disorders, and ongoing body dissatisfaction and negative embodiment due to the lasting internalization of ballet body ideals.

I thought my query, “How do dancers experience their body?” was self-explanatory. I was searching for first-person sensorimotor content. But it seems like the internet understood my query as “what is the relationship between dancers and their bodies,” interpreting it almost entirely as a pathology-and-identity question.

Wow, I thought. So much for positive content! I shared my search frustrations with Grok and asked: “Can you point me to specific online articles that describe the positive phenomenological qualities of dance/movement experience?”

And now the punchline:

Number 2 on Grok’s reading list was my own article, “Disembodied by Dance: When Art Hooks an Embodied Mind.”

So, the double irony:

1. When, as part of my research, I ask AI to find positive first-person phenomenological accounts of sensorimotor experiences, AI returns my own article.
2. This article is actually about the most disembodied experience I’ve had in a while—so disembodied that it moved me to write about it.

What Gets Lost When Skill Becomes Tribe

Now, back to Alice Robb.

Her essay in the Atlantic seems to have been adapted from her memoir, “Don’t Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet—A Powerful Memoir from the School of American Ballet and the Women Who Survived It.”

I found the book and read it.

In relation to my Google query, “how do dancers experience their body,” here is the single paragraph in the entire book that comes closest to what I was looking for:

“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.”

That’s what I personally want to read about. I want to know how a dancer feels when they are not dancing. I want to hear how people who have been dedicated to a particular physical practice describe how it has shifted their ongoing experience and perception. Beyond the experience of being engaged in the practice.

But that’s not what this book is about.

It’s about growing up inside the School of American Ballet in the early 2000s, about loving its discipline, hyper-femininity, and sense of purpose while slowly realizing how it warped the author’s (and her classmates’) relationship to their body, voice, ambition, pain, sexuality, and femininity. It’s an interesting book, it’s well written, but it has very little to do with the first-person phenomenology of sensorimotor experience.

The following two passages are particularly symptomatic:

“In 2003, the medical anthropologist Caroline Potter—hoping to learn about how dancers experience their bodies—enrolled in an elite dance academy in London. She spent her days training and her nights socializing with her classmates (and slyly taking notes on their conversations). 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.”

and

“Dancers cultivate a sense of otherness, consciously drawing a line between themselves and “civilians,” “pedestrians,” even “people.” Nondancers, too, have remarked that dancers resemble a “different species.” 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.”

The first passage is about a study by anthropologist Caroline Potter. In perfect resonance with my search query, she wanted to “learn about how dancers experience their bodies,” so she enrolled in a dance school and wrote a paper about her observations during the training. The most interesting thing for me here is that in her paper, Potter notices and tries to describe certain perceptual shifts but ultimately ties them into “cultural identity” instead of discussing the phenomenon for its own sake. Robb is also quoting her on this “cultural identity.”

And in the second passage, extracted from the closing paragraph of the book, Robb herself makes a phenomenological observation that dancers develop perceptual capacities that non-dancers often don’t possess, but also immediately converts it into social hierarchy.

What’s fascinating about this is that this book is supposed to be a feminist critique of ballet culture. Robb makes all these, at times genuinely funny, observations about how disembodied the loudest female voices of our times are (for example, Sally Rooney with her fantasies, growing up, about being “a brain in a jar”) and explicitly distances herself from them. She writes,

“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.”

And after all this critique and sharing how her own heightened proprioceptive awareness and spatial sensitivity have enriched her relationship to being in a body, instead of reflecting on whether it’s teachable, whether it generalizes, whether “civilians” could develop it, she just draws the status line, framing herself and other dancers as “different species.” The capacity becomes an identity marker, which means it has to remain scarce to retain its social function.

How Alice Robb Broke My Heart

In my reflection on Patrick’s episode with Yuval Ayalon on Baseworks Transmission, I already mentioned Wallace’s essay “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart.” Briefly, David Foster Wallace, a writer, reads a memoir by a tennis player, Tracy Austin, hoping for juicy phenomenological details of “what’s going on in the mind of an athlete when they are showing top performance,” and finds himself disappointed when he discovers that it’s “nothing at all.”

The argument, articulated by Dana Ballard in his book on brain computation, is that after years of dedicated training, the skills (and here I extend the argument to perceptual skills) become so automated that the athlete stops being able to articulate them. What remains available to conscious report is everything built on top of that foundation: the social world, the hierarchies, the aesthetic judgments, the institutional culture, the emotions around performance and identity.

So when Alice Robb sat down to write her memoir, she wrote what she could actually feel and see, which is the social and emotional superstructure, not the sensorimotor substrate underneath it.

And it breaks my heart.

Because if your perception is so rich, why bathe in it like Scrooge McDuck without even describing it?

But, the “different species” language might not be elitism so much as the only language available for an experience she can’t directly describe anymore. Maybe she knows something is different about how she inhabits her body—but just can’t get inside the skill to articulate it. So she states that “dancers are different from civilians” instead of describing the perceptual content of that difference.

The passages where she does get close (teacups on the shoulders, fingertips brushing velvet, hold on to the air) are also quite telling. Those are all instructional metaphors, not direct phenomenological descriptions. She retained the teaching language that was used to produce the experience, but it doesn’t describe the experience itself—just labels it. Which is exactly what you’d predict from the over-learning model. So she has to borrow language (shifted sensorium) from an anthropologist who enrolled in a dance program in order to study the experience.

Having a Body Apparently Makes it Difficult to Talk About Movement

Now, the triple irony:

The original AI summary was way more positive and precise than the human content. It appears that AI was returning the conceptual center of gravity of how the topic is discussed in academic and theoretical writing, instead of drawing on human high-ranking content that is almost entirely about pathology, identity, and suffering.

So, the entity without a body produced a more accurate description of embodied experience than people who have one. The disembodied system accesses the distilled knowledge, while the embodied ones are too embedded in their own cultural context.

The embodiment is precisely what’s blocking the sharing of the experience of embodiment.

Following the keywords in the summary (such as “shifted sensorium”), I found the aforementioned Caroline Potter’s study, which was much closer to the first-person perceptual description I was looking for, though even she framed the experience as cultural anthropology and focused on the experience during dance rather than the lasting perceptual changes it produces.

Where does this leave a curious person in 2026 who wants to learn what it feels like to inhabit a body of a dancer who’s spent decades shifting their sensorium? Going to a dance class is not going to answer this question. And both human-written content in Google and a memoir by an elite dancer are sadly thin on the topic.

Why?

(1) What circulates on the internet is shaped by what resonates emotionally and culturally with other embodied people. The pathology content spreads because it has an emotional impact that is universal across sensoriums. The phenomenologically precise, sensorily-shifted content exists, but it doesn’t get amplified because it’s not legible to a sensorium that hasn’t been trained to notice it.

(2) The institutional culture around dance and movement actively discourages reflection and verbalization beyond the technical language. I myself have been told several times that I shouldn’t be analyzing the experience (no kidding!). As predicted by Ballard’s over-learning model, expert practitioners often can’t articulate their experience. Once a skill has been practiced enough to become automatic, it drops below conscious access—you cannot think about it, only do it. As a result, even when an expert practitioner tries to talk about their experience, they tend to focus not on the skill itself but on what surrounds it—the social world, body image, hierarchies, feelings about the performance.

The culture tells you not to think and not to talk about your experience. And by the time you’ve done enough to have something worth thinking and talking about, you’ve lost direct access to what it feels like.

Which is exactly the title of Robb’s memoir, in her teacher’s words:

“Don’t think, dear. Just do.”

It didn’t give me what I was looking for. But at least it answered why it couldn’t.

References

• Robb, Alice. “What ballet taught me about my body.” The Atlantic, 2023.
• Robb, Alice. Don’t Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet. Celadon Books, 2023.
• Potter, Caroline. “Sense of Motion, Senses of Self: Becoming a Dancer.” Ethnos, 2008.
• Virtanen, Niia et al. “Exploring body consciousness of dancers, athletes, and lightly physically active adults.” Scientific Reports, 2022.
• Ballard, Dana H. Brain Computation as Hierarchical Abstraction. MIT Press, 2015.
• Wallace, David Foster. “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart.” Consider the Lobster, 2005.
• Harvard Medical School. “Dancing and the Brain.” On the Brain, 2015.