Hi, this is Aili Bresnahan, a former ballet dancer and lawyer currently pursuing a PhD in Philosophy at Temple University. My research interests include Aesthetics, American Pragmatism, the Philosophy of Law and other areas that intersect with and bear upon arts practice.  Currently I am finishing a dissertation entitled, Dance as Art: A Studio-Based Account, which is an attempt to develop and defend an account of the kind of Western dance that is made and enacted by choreographer(s) and dance performer(s) that is conveyed to an audience during a live artistic dance performance. The experience of this performance, I claim, has aspects of interaction and shared cultural understanding that are tied to a concept of art in which a live dance performance is viewed as an artistic and public offering with appreciable features available for an audience to take up. Further, my dissertation shows how artistic dance performances of this kind are influenced by the intentional and intuitive stylistic and improvisational skills and ingredients supplied by the dance performers. This gives weight to the studio side of the dance-as-art equation, showing how a live dance performance can be viewed as artistic intentional activity that includes a choreographer's plan but that also involves the performer's self, in a way that blends the natural and trained aspects of this self in the service of the performance. In addition, it characterizes the ways in which a live dance performance shows both the result of conscious, intuitive and neuro-muscular thought along with the performing artist's improvisational doing-and-thinking-on-the-fly that allows him or her to navigate the contingencies of a particular performance in a particular place and time. The purpose of doing this is to lend additional support to the theories in philosophy of dance and performance (theatre and music as well) that show why performances may not either be reducible to scores or reconstructed in all art-relevant aspects through recourse to these scores.

My dissertation committee is comprised of my Advisor, Joseph Margolis (Philosophy), Philip Alperson (Philosophy), Miriam Solomon (Philosophy) and Karen E. Bond (Dance).  A first draft is complete, with revisions underway and the defense to take place in the Spring of 2012.  I am also on the job market seeking a full-time, tenure-track faculty position in Philosophy or a post-doctorate in the Humanities to begin in the Fall of 2012.  In the meantime I am editing the American Society for Aesthetics Graduate E-journal (ASAGE), moderating DancePhilosophers, an informal googlegroup for those interested in dance philosophy broadly construed, and teaching intermittent online courses for Temple's philosophy department.

Aili Bresnahan, JD, MA

aili.bresnahan@gmail.com