Kinesthetic culture: A comparative study of the movement practices of Spanish bullfighting and Flamenco dance

This research examines the relatedness of two cultural practices, Spanish flamenco dance and Spanish bullfighting, which function as a cultural complex centered in Andalusia, the southern region of Spain. Both practices manifest as cultural rituals, performance events, social occasions, and unique expressions of individuals and the cultural group. These performance traditions enliven Andalusian communities, providing opportunities for sociality, heightened affect, and cathartic release. As cultural practices reflecting a unique worldview, flamenco dance and bullfighting overlap, sharing personnel, aesthetic values, and performative functions. The social circle, which enables social cohesion and communication, informs the performance practices of both bullfighting (in the formal context of the bullfight arena) and flamenco dance (in the informal context of the social circle). The cultural values of these overlapping domains are embodied and sustained through somatic processes and kinetic enactments. The relatedness of the flamenco arts and bullfighting is often remarked upon in the respective literatures of flamencology (flamencologia) and tauromachy (tauromaquia). Their connection is traceable within the somatic phenomena of their respective movement vocabularies and the behavioral protocols influencing public performance.;This intracultural ethnographic research project employs somatic inquiry methods that focus on movement phenomena and the first-person lived experience of the body. Somatic research provides insight into how matadors and flamenco dancers employ their movement practice to produce meaning within their cultural context. Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), based on the work of twentieth-century movement theorist Rudolph von Laban, was utilized, along with active ethnographic participant observation methods, to reveal that movement principles fundamental to bullfighting occur as movement motifs within the flamenco dance vocabulary. Primary among these shared movement attributes are spiraling and arcing body shapes, maintaining direct eye contact, dynamic phrasing characterized by intensity, acceleration, and impact, and a unique organization of muscular tensions energizing the space around the body. A theory of kinesthetic culture is proposed that recognizes embodiment, in both its sensory and kinetic functions, as a key to understanding ordinary as well as extraordinary events within affective culture.