In this symposium I zoom in to a part of my doctoral thesis from 2021 where I relate play, movement and perception in early childhood to Erin Manning ́s philosophy of movement. Manning states that through perception individuals not only experience the world, but the world is drawn into the experience. Rather than as something stable with an inner and outer zone, she describes movement as a field of relationships and as force taking form, in a world as it worlds. This is the virtual power of the movement, how the movement feels just before it is actualized, the feeling of the movement’s gathering. In dance, it is known as the virtual momentum in the formation of a movement that is born before we begin to move. In the same way, thoughts are not about the mental mind, according to Manning but about bodily becoming. A body perceives through change, according to Manning. A change in the environment evokes an event in the senses. The inner movement becomes an outer movement in a folding and island bridging into an intensity that Manning describes as “preacceleration”. This means, in my interpretation, that the movement never stops and that there is really no beginning or end to movement. Movement is one with the world, not body/world but in a body-world. 

References:Manning, E. (2012). Relationscapes: movement, art, philosophy. MIT press. 

Theorell, E. (2021). Force, form, transformations: on kinesthetic musicality and body worlding in boy ́s war play. Doctoral thesis, University of Stockholm.