Dance Floors of Polish Traditional Dances

The question of how dances bear meanings is one of the key issues in the anthropology of dance. The author here describes how sensory participation in a dance party with traditional music allows the dancers to understand and negotiate the complex ideas behind the dances. She proposes the dance floor as an analytical category – an emergent modality of space that encompasses dancers and their materialising interactions. The research is based on the theoretical framework of embodiment. The material was gathered through participant observation during dance parties with traditional music. The data presented in this article was collected through observation, with a focus on the chosen senses. The study suggests that the personal engagement of a researcher in the field makes it possible to extrapolate the subjective information of bodily experience within a net of relations that come into being on dance floors. By focusing on the senses and materiality to explore the animated reality of dance, the author is able to provide a phenomenological description of how dance floors communicate information.