Dance teaching involves gestures to be taught, pedagogical gestures, gestures reproduced by students and gestures specific to each of them. This article follows an anthropological survey carried out in Corsica, from 2007 to 2016, by participant observation and semi-structured interviews, and supplemented by explicitation interviews with dance students. It analyzes the extent to which both rational and emotional processes of cognition are related to locomotion in contemporary dance learning. The verbalization of theoretical knowledge and the metaphorical description of the gestures to be taught have their full place in the transmission of this dance. Its learning, however, resides essentially in the acquisition of procedural knowledge, incorporated by direct experience and vicarious observation. It is based on a sensorimotor education with reciprocity of kinesthetic and sensory listening between the dancers. It consists in learning not to reproduce the gestures of a dance technique but to signify and interpret a choreographic sense, according to its own style and by means of the gestures of this technique. It is a process of corporal ecologization in accordance with a neurocognitive process which takes into account sensations, proprioceptive sensitivity, emotions and affects, and the kinesthetic and empathic awareness of its partners.
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