When Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that the spirit of a philosopher could wish nothing more than to be a good dancer, he adopted a perspective from which he saw the philosophy in dance and the dance in philosophy. 1 In this article I reaffirm the value of such a perspective. It is common in articles on the philosophy of art to outline the theoretical concerns first and then illustrate them with concrete examples. Here I try a different approach. I begin by describing the dance, and I let the philosophical issues emerge from the heart of the description. I am not interested in taking a philosophical paradigm or model and imposing it upon either dance or dance writing. It is my belief that dance is inherently philosophical and this only needs to be drawn out from within. In the first part of this article I discuss the work of Pina Bansch. In the second part (to be published in the next issue) I will look at the writing of Rudolf von Laban, and finally provide an account of the philosophy that emerges from the first two sections. I look at the work of Bausch and Laban with the interest of drawing out specific philosophical themes, not with the intention of providing a general overview of their work. The themes that I identify are those of the philosophical practice of phenomenology. Not only does their work illustrate three themes central to phenomenology, but it provides a ground from which these themes can be evaluated. The three themes that structure my investigation are:

i the concern with essences

ii the return to lived experience

iii the hyper-reflective moment in phenomenology