Ničeovo shvatanje plesa i tela u svetlu savremenih plesnih i telesno orijentisanih psihoterapija
Nietzsche’s View of Dance and Body in the Light of Contemporary Dance- and Body- Oriented Psychotherapies

Summary/Abstract: Nietzsche writes on many occasions about dance and body in a very affirmative way. Dance is for Nietzsche a metaphor for the ultimate nature of reality and the numinous, but also a concrete, embodied practice characterized by lightness, creativity and ecstatic reunion of man with man and nature. These features contain the therapeutic and the autopoietic character of dance. In this article we show how Nietzsche’s dance metaphor corresponds with the view of reality in contemporary science and delineate the connection between the ecstatic Dionysian dance and the appearance of the modern dance on the beginning of the 20th century that was a precursor of dance therapies. Nietzsche’s affirmation of the body goes beyond the scope of its rehabilitation after a long history of religiously based animosity towards the body. For him body as a totality has ontological and methodological primacy over mind or soul. Nevertheless he does not understand the body in Cartesian conceptual frames dominant in his time. We see him rather as a forerunner of the understanding of body developed later in philosophy (phenomenology of embodiment) as well as in phenomenological and body oriented psychotherapies, organismic and somatic psychology, and holistic, salutogenetic medicine. We view Nietzsche’s praise of dance and body in the light of his rebellion against Christianity both as a metaphysic and a form of life and his admiration for the pre-Socratic Greek culture and its Dionysian qualities.

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