Lecture: Choreographing Embodied Presence in a World That Touches Back

Lecture: Choreographing Embodied Presence in a World That Touches Back

In this keynote, I explore embodiment not simply as a physical condition but as a relational and choreographic event—what I call other flesh. Drawing from my research into couple and group dances as well as from phenomenological thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I look at how dancing bodies extend into one another and into the world through empathy, reversibility, and shared horizons of experience. 

The lecture is in dialogue with the performance Worlds End Inside, which beautifully enacts many of the questions I raise: What does it mean to feel the world ending inside the body? How do subtle perceptions—moments of hesitation, resonance, and inner listening—shape our sense of presence, connection, and becoming? 

Rather than offering a fixed theory of embodiment, I invite the audience into a lived and poetic reflection on how dance creates meaning through mutual exposure, attunement, and transformation. Through examples from folk dance traditions and references to contemporary choreographic thinking, I show how embodiment is never solitary—it is always shared, always touching and being touched.

Petri Hoppu is Principal Lecturer of Dance (Oulu University of Applied Sciences) and Adjunct Professor (Docent) in dance studies (Tampere University). He is a co-editor of Nordic Dance Spaces (Ashgate 2014), The Nordic Minuet (OBP 2024), and Skolt Saami Dance (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2025). His areas of expertise include theory and methodology in dance anthropology and embodied ethnography as well as research of Finnish-Karelian and Saami vernacular dances and Nordic folk dance revitalization

We warmly encourage the audience to attend the lecture prior to the performance—as a sensuous and thought-provoking entry into the performance’s themes.

The event is free of charge.