SENSUALITY

Sensuality is a deep connection with bodily sensations and feelings, in which we are fully present in each moment and attentive to everything that surrounds us. It is revealed in how we perceive touch, smell, taste, sounds, and images, but also in how we internally respond to them. It refers to how we physically and emotionally react to stimuli that inspire, calm, or evoke emotional resonance.

In the context of dance, sensuality is particularly important, as it enables expression through movement in a way that transcends mere physical execution and includes inner experience. Sensuality brings authenticity to movement by exploring texture, speed, and quality—what the movement communicates to us and how we feel within it. The significance of sensuality in art lies in its ability to draw the viewer or listener in, awaken their own sensory world, and allow them to experience art in a more personal, intimate way.

Sensuality offers the viewer of dance performances a rich experience that goes beyond merely observing movement. When a dance performance is truly sensual, the viewer doesn’t just see the dance, they feel it. Sensuality in dance can awaken emotions the viewer might not even be aware of, as it speaks to the body and the subconscious, where our internal responses and intuitive perceptions are stored.

We are interested in the ability to perceive sensually.

We do not encounter only ideas or things, but through embodiment and disembodiment, gathered in traces of the visible, audible, perceptible, or sensual. To be sensual means to be perceivable, noticeable. Sensuality means perceptibility, visibility.

Arnold Berleant (2015), in his essay Appropriation of Sensibility and the Subversion of Beauty, argues that we all have a tendency toward engaging in aesthetic experience, even if this tendency is not always fully developed. The ability to experience sensory pleasure lies at the heart of aesthetic judgment in art, and sensual satisfaction plays a role in most experiences in life. In our profit-obsessed culture, there also exists a more subtle and almost entirely hidden exploitative practice. It is a refined form of subverting genuine human fulfillment that lies at the core of the aesthetic. As he states, what some call the "aesthetic need" is often appropriated—our longing for beauty, for inspiration, for pure pleasure is co-opted to serve profit, at the expense of individuals and society as a whole. He refers to this as the appropriation of sensibility, a practice well known and utilized by consumerist culture.

To avoid this instrumentalization of the ability to experience sensory pleasure at the heart of aesthetic judgment, where sensual satisfaction plays a key role in experiencing contemporary dance, we can say that aesthetics, as a tool for social analysis and political critique, also holds another function.

Sensuality in dance invites the viewer to dive into their own sensations, to find resonance in their own body, and to feel a deep connection with the movement—an experience some describe as an almost tangible presence. Such experience transforms a dance performance into an intimate encounter, where there is not only visual contact but also an indescribable, powerfully sensual connection.

To be connected, sensual, embodied for the very existence of contemporary dance art!

Mojca Kasjak, Artistic and Programme Director of the Festival