There are two ways to know something: by description and by acquaintance. What we know by description are things that we have read or heard about; what we know by acquaintance are things that we have experienced ourselves. Descriptions can only be made at a distance which acquaintance requires direct involvement. At first encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans, the parties often danced as a way to get to know each other. In Europe, kings and diplomats danced for the same reason. However, colonialism requires knowledge by description, and thereby an entirely different attitude to the world. A world described in books and in research reports is far easier to control and to exploit.

How to explain the curious movements in which people of the past engaged? Critique of interpretivist approaches – cultural theory and post-modernism. Movements as intentional acts are best described by means of cognitive theory and phenomenology. Movements as a matter of attuning oneself to the mood of the situation one is in. All meaning is grounded in such fundamental movements. The history of movement is a history of the world that we made.

The imagination depends not on pictures but on experiences. When we imagine something we conjure up past experiences. This explains the vividness of the imagination, and how it can serve as a creative force. Collective imagination relies on movements and on shared props. Historical examples include German nationalism, social movements, the suffragette movement, movements for decolonization. Today we experience many movements only vicariously, for example, as we watch sports.

Thinking as a way of coping with the situations in which we find ourselves. Internal dialogue and gestures. Situations calling for thought. Thinking and rational deliberation. Actions and plans for actions as having entirely different ontological status. In the seventeenth century the mechanical worldview separated bodies from minds, and thinking thereby became a disembodied process. The body was instead equated with “the passions.” As a result, movements such as the ballet came to be regarded only as aesthetic objects. Eighteenth-century theories of the origin of language buttressed this claim. The ridiculousness of ballets d’action. Ballet dancers now became sex workers, and the theater became a location where rational, disembodied, human beings keep their emotions.

Taken as a whole the story told in this book is one of disembodiment, a loss of body. As such it corresponds to other stories of alienation told by sociologists. Yet restoring what has been lost is fraught with dangers. We cannot readily go back, and attempts to do so have had disastrous consequences. It is not enough to simply add physical exercises to our daily routine. Instead, we need once again to take movements seriously as intentional acts.

Being as the most fundamental intentional state. Being as a matter of “being-there,” where the “there” is determined by metaphors. Sovereign states and sovereign individuals in early modern Europe. The uncertain ontological status of both subjects. Theater and theory as ways to make both subjects beholdable and indisputably there. Dance as a way to come into being. Social ontologies based on dance metaphors – the world-stage and the social interaction of resident ambassadors.

Willpower is often understood as a muscle of the mind that we can learn to flex. The perennial philosophical problems of weakness of the will and freedom of the will. But as science reminds us, everything has a cause, and this includes our will. These conclusions accord well with our phenomenological experiences. Most of what we do is governed by habits. We act as we come to do what a certain situation calls for. As a result there can be no such thing as self-determination. We can never have power over ourselves. The historical overview focuses on the crisis of willpower at the turn of the twentieth century. Factory labor, standing to attention, and the mechanization of life resulted in neurasthenia and other mental afflictions. Dreams of daredevilry, colonialism, and war were ways to break free and restore freedom of movement. The illusion of national self-determination.