Shared Views on the Emergence of Bonds through Dance. The Value of Subjective and Aesthetic Experience in a Research Process

The practice of dance mediation for young autistic children and their parents in multi-family groups serves as a basis for reflection on the value of subjective and aesthetic experience in a therapeutic and research approach. The resulting setting (EtuDanse) enables us to cross-fertilize the viewpoints of dancers, observers and clinical researchers, paying particular attention to the heuristic potential of shared aesthetic emotions in understanding the archaic processes that unfold in the danced encounter. These archaic processes, both experienced in improvised dance movement and brought to light by a specific narrativity derived from observation, make more intelligible the emergence of spatial and bodily representations that foster children’s intersubjective exchanges with their environment.