Abstract
The body plays a constitutive role in all the arts. The performing arts would simply not exist without the body, and hence it constitutes their medium. The body has manifold forms of manifestations. It is the vehicle of an implicit knowledge that largely escapes linguistic fixation but nonetheless finds an articulation in aesthetic forms of expression. The relationship between them is often a pre-conscious mimetic one. The specific role played by the body and its figurations in the various arts depends on the historical and cultural situation of the arts, on the one hand, and on the historical and cultural situation of the audience, on the other hand. The “tacit” knowledge articulated in the representations of the body is very powerful; it creates aesthetic figurations and allows their mimetic reception. The study of this kind of aesthetic bodily knowledge is a task that the sciences of art and aesthetics have hardly dealt with until now.
