Transmitting Senses in Street Dance: Body, Freestyle, and Deixis

Abstract What does training look like such that one’s improvisation can be experienced as spontaneous? In this paper, I explore how the aesthetics of “freestyle” in street dance are constituted by empirically achieved bodily capacities contingent upon recognitions. Through examining the pedagogy of freestyle, I show how semiotic labor registers the apparent solipsism of freestyle in street dance into reflexive accounts of sensory-affective capacities selected for cultivation, scaffolded through the deployment of terms like “feeling” and “relation” within participation frameworks. I suggest that ethnographic approaches to the relationship between discursive and non-discursive dimensions of aesthetic-social practices, such as street dance, need to remain both affectively attuned to and semiotically informed, attending to how sensory-affective experiences are rendered discernible and enactable within intersubjective spaces. In addition to exploring these semiotic processes, I also gesture toward the evaluative dimensions of street dance through my fieldwork in a local community in the US and my participation in its transnational scene.