Abstract:

When children step into a theater for the first time, their bodies become acute instruments of perception: they notice squeaky chairs, the antiseptic scent of cleaning solutions, and the harsh materials in hot light instruments, details that many adult artists have long tuned out. These off-hand queries reveal an embodied intelligence rooted in sensory immediacy. In Africanist aesthetic traditions, sensory perception is central to movement. This essay situates children’s perceptual wisdom as a form of choreographic insight. Children’s insights are not simply found in pedagogy; they ignite artistry and invite practitioners to reawaken sensory attention through childlike first encounters. Drawing from my work as a choreographer and community practitioner, I weave frameworks of sensing, improvisation, and diasporic epistemologies rooted in the Africanist diaspora. I offer this essay as an invitation, a reflection that serves as a civic and creative call to root dance making and our embodied presence in the world in the wisdom of sensory perception.

Introduction: Stepping into the Unknown

In preparation for their first performance for a live audience, a group of young children enrolled in a dance program at a community extension center shared the experience of entering a live proscenium theater. The massive, dim space, resembling a movie theater, was cooled by a stream of perpetually circulating air. As the group of children noticed hundreds of chairs that would soon be filled with an audience there to watch them, they audibly gasped - vocalizing the tangled feelings of nervousness and excitement. When invited to ask questions by the hosting venue’s stage manager, the children responded with their bodies acting as finely tuned sensors. They asked, “Why does it smell like the dentist’s office?”; “Why are the chairs so squeaky?”; and “Why do the lights get so bright and hot?” Their questions remind us that movement begins not only in the body's action, but in the body's perception. In Africanist aesthetic traditions, the senses are not secondary to movement; they are its ground. Rhythm is felt in the chest before it is counted, vibration is received in the bones before it is named, and the smell of a gathering signals the energy of community before a single step is taken (Gottschild 2003; Daniel 2005; Welsh-Asante 2019).

Moved by a series of questions rooted in the body, I began reflecting on how and when these practices of sensing shift from the ground beneath the dancers’ feet to the backdrop behind their movements. As adults, we often lose this sensory alertness, numbed by repetition and habit; yet children model this choreographic practice of perception as an improvisatory way of being that refuses to mute, normalize, or take for granted embodied experiences. To witness them is to be initiated into a practice of reawakening in and listening with our whole bodies to the spaces we inhabit.

The Body as Sensor: Africanist Ways of Knowing

In Africanist diasporic traditions, the body is not merely a vessel that executes steps, but an instrument for sensing, perceiving, and transmitting knowledge. Brenda Dixon Gottschild describes the African aesthetics as rooted in polyrhythmic embodiment and epistemologies of these senses, where vibration, smell, texture, and sound are equal partners with movement in shaping the experience (Gottschild 2003). Improvisation, as Yvonne Daniel and Kariamu Welsh-Asante emphasize, is not only a technique but also a way of navigating the world: trusting the body’s perception to respond authentically and dynamically in real-time (Daniel 2005; Welsh-Asante 1994). Thomas DeFrantz (2002) also reminds us that African diasporic performance is a technology of the body where improvisation and perception themselves generate knowledge.

This orientation resonates with my creative practices, in which I have continually sought to move dancers away from performative dance expression toward deeper sensory presence that invites more authentic connections with the audience. Reflecting on the presence of these sensory practices rooted in Africanist aesthetics throughout my work as a choreographer, I think of an earlier duet I created between two individuals from different movement backgrounds: a dancer and a football athlete. I did not begin with setting choreography, but rather by exploring playful movement games, stream-of- consciousness storytelling, and sharing movement vocabularies that reside within our individual bodies. These practices created an authentic connection between the two dancers and established an aesthetic of joy and play for the choreography. Here, both performers’ everyday kinesthetic lives, on the stage and on the field, became equal entry points to artistry. The process underscores how sensing, listening, and noticing are central to creating dance, aligning with Africanist principles where joy, play, and improvisation are integral to aesthetic and communal life. This foundation of play supports my ongoing practice of exploring choreography with people from a range of movement backgrounds, including dancers without formal dance training. It offers the universal experience of child-like curiosity as a tool for co-creating material.

Children as Choreographic Teachers

Children remind us of the wisdom of perception that often recedes in adulthood. The listening that occurs when one has not yet had enough experiences to jump swiftly to conclusions instead remains reliant on engaging one's whole self to make sense of the problem at hand. In my teaching and choreography, I return to practices that cultivate this childlike immediacy of sensing, where dancers reawaken their perceptual capacities and reorient themselves to space, community, and vulnerability. For instance, in my university classes, I often guide dancers to close their eyes and move through space with a partner. At first, this begins as a trust walk: listening for footsteps, following breath, attuning to the faint changes of light even behind closed lids. Gradually, the practice becomes a choreographic tool, allowing dancers to enter improvisation with heightened vulnerability and authenticity. In these moments, the dancer must trust not only themselves, but also their partners and the environment, the vibrations underfoot, the sounds in the form, the press of air around them. This shift moves dancers from the realm of performative dancing toward intuitive dancing, where sensory awareness generates a more human and authentic presence.

These practices of perception cultivate risk-taking and trust in community, qualities echoed in Africanist traditions where improvisation is inseparable from society (Daniel 2005; Welsh-Asante 1994). Takiyah Nur Amin (2016) states that Black dance sustains cultural memory and acts as a form of cultural citizenship. From this perspective, children’s perceptual wisdom is not merely pedagogical, but a vital part of an intergenerational lineage of embodied knowledge. Aligned with my values of offering culturally sustaining pedagogy as director of the dance program for predominantly Black youth, adults, and seniors in a large urban area, it is critical to reinforce this historical way of knowing through embodiment.

While a large portion of my dance practice takes place within Black communities, I find that these traditions of perception are invaluable to all my communities, as the concept of sensing with the entire body is central to the human experience. In the 2024 remounting of a work, Ova, on a group of five university dancers, one dancer spent the majority of the work standing on a twenty-foot platform that was set upstage right, facing backwards close to the curtain, and oriented much closer to the overhead grid of lights than dancers typically experience. Enveloped in soupy choreography in the lateral plane, her entire sense of embodied grounding was disoriented. Her steady presence, rooted in perceptual trust, yielded a raw and honest performance that could only emerge from deep listening to the body, space, and environment. The rehearsal process involved practice on an elevated surface and dancing fully with eyes closed. This dancer, familiar with improvisation, was intrigued by this challenge. It is also no coincidence that this dancer, a teacher of youth dance classes, was engaged in our rehearsal process. At the same time, she was simultaneously immersed in the joyfully unpredictable practice of teaching dance with a highly perceptive community.

Perception as Compositional Material

If perception is the ground of movement, then it can also be treated as a form of choreographic material. My process often centers not on shaping external form first but on heightening dancers’ attunement to the sensory world around them. From this orientation, choreography emerges as a conversation between body, space, and perception. The duet between the private studio-trained dancer and football athlete illustrates this orientation. Their starting point was not uniform in technique, but in games, storytelling, and sharing movement. What unified them was not the choreography itself, but a commitment to noticing overlaps in experiences shared in stories, responding to a playful touch, or the rhythm of shared breath. These fragments of perception became the fabric of the piece, generating an aesthetic of joy and immediacy. Developing a deep connection based on shared sensory experiences was the path to creating a connection so authentic that it invited audiences through familiar, relatable moments.

Similarly, in my university classes, I use practices such as eyes-closed improvisation to turn perception into compositional raw material. When I ask dancers to notice the gradations of light behind their eyelids or the shifting weight of air as they move, the choreographic possibilities multiply. A moment of imbalance becomes a phrase; the faint vibration of footsteps across the floor becomes a cue. Through such practices, dancers learn to compose not by reproducing form, but by amplifying what they sense.

This approach also extends to staged works. In Ova, the dancer balanced on the platform, performing the deep lateral tipping pathways under shifting stage lights. The instability of the peripheral field, the glare and shadow constantly changing, became part of the dance. What the audience received was not only movement but an atmosphere of heightened sensing; the body negotiating lights, space, and balance in real time. The rawness of this performance underscores how perception itself choreographs, inviting the performer into risk, the audience into empathy, and the work into authenticity.

In Africanist aesthetic frameworks, this is not a departure but a continuation. Improvisation and performance are always responsive to the environment, with drummers and dancers engaging in dialogue, the audience contributing to a call-and- response dynamic, and the collective body attuned to vibration and rhythm (Daniel 2005; Gottschild 2003; Welsh-Asante 1994). As DeFrantz (2016) notes, choreography is a relay in motion, a corporeal practice of transmitting and transforming knowledge. To treat perception as compositional material is to align with these traditions, and to insist that dance is never detached from its sensory environment but made by it.

Invitation to Practitioners

The practices I describe, games that surface joy, eyes-closed improvisations, and choreographies built on perception, are not only teaching tools or compositional experiments. They are also invitations. They invite dancers, choreographers, and witnesses to step into a deeper mode of sensing, which recalls the unfiltered perception of children and aligns with diasporic traditions where the body is constantly in dialogue with environment, community, and spirit.

As movement practitioners, we often become habituated to form, to repetition, and the aesthetics of polish. Children interrupt this. Their questions about squeaky chairs or the scent of a theater refuse to normalize embodied experience. They invite us back in time, and back into our bodies, to when we experienced the world with our whole selves – fully present. When we heed their calls, we return to artistry that is porous, listening, and alive. In Africanist frameworks, this openness is not an exception, but the ground of aesthetic practice: improvisation as responsiveness, rhythm as vibration through the whole body, and performance as a reciprocal exchange (Gottschild 2003; Welsh-Asante 1994). This echoes Amin’s (2016) framing of Black dance as cultural citizenship: a practice of belonging and civic presence. To reawaken perception in our choreographic practices is to deepen both our artistry and our citizenship as movers. This reawakening allows our practices, whether in studios, theatres, or community spaces, to be infused with the wisdom of a child sensing with their whole bodies.

Conclusion: To Enter Again as Children Do

I return to that moment when children stepped into the theater for the first time, their questions spilling into the space like improvisations. Their questions slip into the space like a dancer’s first time jumping into a freestyle circle. Starting timidly and building in confidence as they find their voice. Children remind us that the body is already dancing, sensing, noticing, and responding long before the performance begins. These encounters affirm that artistry begins in the act of paying attention. They illuminate that choreographic work is not built only from phrases and scores, but from vibrations underfoot, the rhythm of breath shared between performers, the textures of sound, scent, and light. When we, as adults, artists, and citizens, allow ourselves to reawaken the sensory presence, we move closer to dances that are authentic, communal, and alive.

My invitation is simple: to step into any space like children do. To listen with skin, smell with memory, see with more than eyes, and feel with your entire self. To move from this root of perception into dances that connect us to ourselves, one another, and to the world we share. Let us reawaken as sensors of space and one another, so that dance continues to be not only an art form, but a practice of presence, connection, and shared humanity.