To dance is to move in time. This thesis examines the experience of dance as a durational experience and argues that the ontology of dance raises a methodological question of temporality in studying experience. Two major schools of empiricist thought are taken up here: phenomenology and process philosophy. Through studying the theorisations of dance by way of phenomenology and process philosophy, I explore how time is embedded within the methodologies themselves.

Part I focuses on a reading of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s The Phenomenology of Dance and Brian Massumi’s Semblance and Event. The comparison reveals how the two books make use of a combination of phenomenology and process philosophy to address the ongoing ontology of dance. This emphasises the temporal dimension of experience, and the associated temporal dimension of the methodologies in analysing experience. Part II engages in a rereading of phenomenology and process philosophy in association with radical empiricism to effect an understanding of embedded time. I focus on how phenomenology and process philosophy encapsulate the emergence and duration of experience within their conceptualisations and the methodological tools which are proposed for analysis. The temporality of methodologies is thus studied through dance.