The Problem with “Embody”
Why We Need to Be More Precise in Artistic Language
In the current vocabulary of dance, theatre, performance art, and even contemporary spirituality, embody has become one of those words that appears everywhere. Dancers are told to “embody the music,” actors are urged to “embody the role,” facilitators invite participants to “embody their truth,” and choreographers speak of “embodying ideas.” The word rolls off the tongue with a sense of depth and mystery, and it seems to offer instant legitimacy to any artistic statement.
But herein lies the problem: embody is used so often and so vaguely that it risks becoming a hollow aesthetic flourish, a verbal accessory rather than a precise descriptor. In many contexts, it’s unclear what the speaker actually means. Is “embody” about mastering a set of movements? About deeply feeling an emotion? About entering a trance state? About channelling a deity? Or is it simply a poetic stand-in for “perform” or “express”?
To critique the overuse of embody, we first need to unpack its actual meanings, historical roots, and how it operates in different traditions of dance and ritual. Then, we can begin to offer more precise language and a framework that allows us to speak about embodiment in ways that are both rigorous and respectful.
Where “Embody” Comes From
The English word embody originates from the 17th century, combining the prefix em- (meaning “into” or “in”) with body. Its literal meaning is “to give a body to,” or “to make tangible.” In its earliest uses, it referred to giving physical form to abstract concepts:
“The nation embodies the principles of liberty.”
Here, the “nation” is the tangible vessel for an intangible idea.
The term later expanded into the arts, where the “body” in question became not only the physical human body but also any medium; a sculpture might embody an ideal, a song might embody a mood, a gesture might embody a story.
By the late 20th century, the rise of somatic practices, performance studies, and cross-cultural performance discourse brought embody into the language of dance and theatre in a more literal way: the human body as the vessel for meaning, memory, and transformation.
Embodiment in Dance: From Physicalisation to Ontology
When dancers and teachers use the word embody, they are often pointing to a continuum of possibilities. At its most surface level, it may mean physicalising an idea — turning an image, rhythm, or feeling into movement. At its deepest, it can mean becoming the idea so fully that the boundaries between “dancer” and “subject” dissolve.
1. Physicalisation
At this end of the spectrum, embodiment means rendering an abstract idea into physical form. A choreographer says “embody the wind,” and the dancer sways, spirals, and extends their arms as if pushed by a breeze. This is symbolic and representational: the body is showing something external to itself.
2. Integration
Here, the movement is no longer imposed from the outside but is internalised into the dancer’s own physical vocabulary. The dancer doesn’t just show the wind; they move as if their own tissue and breath patterns have been affected by it. The imagery has been absorbed into muscle memory.
3. Lived Knowledge
In somatic and ritual contexts, embodiment refers to a kind of knowing that is not purely cognitive. Knowledge is stored in muscle, fascia, breath rhythms, and reflexes. The body remembers patterns of oppression, joy, resistance, or devotion. A dancer embodying grief is not “acting” it but accessing a cellular memory of grief.
4. Ontological Transformation
In certain ritual dances, embodiment can mean becoming something other, a deity, ancestor, or archetype, in a way that is understood as real within the cosmology of the community. Here, embodiment is not metaphorical; it is a change of state. The dancer does not depict the goddess; they are the goddess, if only for the duration of the rite.
Embodiment in Ritual and Spiritual Contexts
In ritual settings, embodiment often holds sacred weight. In possession rituals, trance dances, and devotional performances, the dancer’s body becomes the site where the divine or ancestral is made present. This is not just artistic interpretation. It is an act of metaphysical hospitality.
Even outside of overtly religious contexts, rituals of theatre and community performance may treat embodiment as a means of connecting with collective memory. A performer might embody a historical figure not through exact imitation, but by letting the posture, rhythms, and affect of that figure reorganise their own body from the inside out.
The Overuse Problem
The trouble with embody today is not that it’s a bad word; it’s that it’s become an art-world filler word, a linguistic shortcut that suggests artistic depth without demanding specificity. This overuse manifests in several ways:
1. Loss of Precision
If embody can describe both a student imitating a swaying tree and a priestess entering trance to channel an ancestral spirit, the word’s meaning becomes so broad it loses usefulness. Without qualifiers, it’s impossible to know which is intended.
Example:
A choreographer says, “In this section, I want you to embody freedom.”
Does this mean:Move freely within the set choreography?
Portray the idea of freedom symbolically?
Access a personal memory of freedom and let it inform the movement?
Enter a ritual state where you become the spirit of freedom?
The instruction sounds profound but is functionally ambiguous, leaving dancers to guess which layer is meant.
2. Inflated Rhetoric
Sometimes embody is used to make ordinary actions sound elevated. In marketing copy or artist statements, it becomes a kind of performance jargon.
Example:
“Our work embodies the themes of resilience and love.”
In practice, this might mean that the choreography happens to explore those themes, but the claim of “embodiment” lends it a veneer of conceptual depth without explaining the how. The word becomes a decorative flourish rather than a meaningful description of process.
3. Cross-Cultural Slippage
In many non-Western traditions, embodiment is not metaphorical, it’s ontological. To “embody” a deity, ancestor, or spirit is to make them present in the here and now, often in ways the community understands as real and sacred. When this language is imported into contemporary arts contexts without its cultural framework, it can flatten and misrepresent what’s actually happening.
Example:
In Balinese dance, certain characters, such as Rangda (the demon queen) or Barong (the protective spirit), are understood to carry real spiritual presence when performed in temple ceremonies. When a contemporary choreographer outside Bali uses “embodying Rangda” to describe a purely theatrical portrayal with no ritual context, the term detaches from its original cosmological weight. What in Bali might involve ritual preparation, offerings, and community belief becomes, in this transplanted context, a dramatic character study. The word “embody” in this case collapses the difference between sacred invocation and theatrical interpretation.
4. Pedagogical Confusion
In teaching environments, embody can create a false sense of instruction. Students are told to “embody the music” or “embody your character,” but without concrete tools, the feedback loop is vague. A student may mimic an outer form but never develop the inner connectivity or somatic integration implied by the term.
Example:
A Kathak student is told to “embody Radha’s longing.” Without guidance, they might just elongate their gestures or soften their eyes, but that is still acting out longing, not letting it arise from an integrated emotional and physical state. The feedback has rhetorical weight but no actionable clarity.
5. Dilution Through Trendiness
Words in the arts often go through trend cycles. Liminal, interrogate, resilience, and now embody are all examples. As they become fashionable, they appear in grant applications, festival blurbs, workshop titles, and panel discussions whether or not they truly apply. Over time, the word’s impact diminishes; it becomes part of the arts’ background noise.
Example:
A festival programme might list five different performances all claiming to “embody resistance.” The phrase sounds urgent, but without detail, it tells us little about what makes each work distinct or how resistance actually manifests in the body.
In all of these cases, the problem is not that embody is wrong; it’s that it’s under-specified. A word that should open up a world of nuance instead becomes a convenient way to avoid describing the complexity of process. Ironically, this undermines the very depth that artists hope the term will convey.
Towards a More Precise Vocabulary
Instead of reaching automatically for embody, artists and educators can consider what they actually mean and choose words that convey it more accurately. Some possibilities:
Express – To make visible or audible through artistic means.
Depict – To represent visually or through movement.
Inhabit – To take on the qualities of a character, image, or idea from within.
Channel – To allow something (energy, emotion, entity) to move through you.
Integrate – To internalise a movement or quality until it is part of your own physical repertoire.
Manifest – To bring something into tangible form or presence.
Personify – To give human qualities to an abstract concept or to act as its representative.
Each of these has a slightly different emphasis, and using them with care can create far richer conversations about process and performance.
The Embodiment Spectrum: A Framework for Artistic Conversations
To make embody useful again, we can map it along a spectrum that distinguishes its different depths and modes. This spectrum can be used in choreography discussions, teaching, dramaturgy, or cross-disciplinary collaborations.
This spectrum does two things:
It allows for clarity: instead of saying “embody the wind,” a teacher might say, “Work at level 2 — physicalise the wind’s force through your whole spine.”
It respects context: when a ritual practitioner says “embody,” we can understand whether they mean integration (level 3) or ontological transformation (level 5).
Why This Matters
Language shapes not only how we talk about art but how we make it. When embody becomes a vague, all-purpose term, we lose the ability to articulate the nuances of physical and creative process. Worse, we risk flattening the difference between mimetic performance and sacred transformation, between symbolic gesture and lived memory.
Precision is not the enemy of poetry. In fact, when we are clear about whether we are depicting, inhabiting, integrating, or channeling, we make more space for the mystery of art to actually be experienced, not just name-dropped.
If we want our artistic conversations to have both rigor and soul, we need to treat embody as a precious word, one we use with intention, backed by clarity, and always situated in the context from which we borrow it.
The next time you feel tempted to say “embody,” pause and ask:
What exactly do I mean here?
What is the depth of transformation I’m pointing to?
Am I speaking about representation, integration, lived knowledge, or actual ontological change?
If we can do that, embody will stop being an empty buzzword and return to being what it should be: a word that honours the deep and varied ways the body can give life to ideas, memories, and presences.
First things first: I think your essay raises an important point about embody. You’re right that embody has a certain mystique that attracts overuse, and I agree that part of its power comes from pointing toward something more than just representation. Where I struggle, though, is when that “more” gets treated as if it were literal fact rather than metaphor. I share your concern that we need more clarity, and I admire the care with which you’ve tried to unpack the term across different traditions. But I’d like to offer a slightly different angle.
For me, the trouble begins when poetic descriptions are taken literally. You describe “lived knowledge” stored in the body, “ontological transformation” in ritual dance, or “collective memory” made present through performance. These are all evocative images — and I understand why they’re attractive ways of talking — but I don’t think they hold up if we treat them as actual mechanisms.
Take somatic “memory.” It’s true that we carry habits of posture, breath, and affect shaped by repetition and experience. But that isn’t memory in the sense of something we can call upon at will. What we’re really talking about is conditioning, not remembering. The science here is pretty clear: what’s often called “muscle memory” is really about physiological adaptation. Muscles retain myonuclei that allow them to retrain faster after disuse. That’s not grief, devotion, or resistance hiding in the tissue; it’s conditioning. Fascia, too, can show patterns of chronic tension, but that reflects mechanical loading over time, not stored stories. To frame it as “knowledge stored in the body” risks blurring metaphor into fact.
The same applies to ontological transformation. When a dancer “becomes” a deity in ritual, what’s happening is not a literal change of state but a sociocultural one: the community interprets the performance through a shared belief system. That you allude to those outside of those cultural contexts ‘misrepresenting’ what happens is evidence enough that there the transformation is in perception, not ontology. “Metaphysical hospitality” is a lovely phrase, but if taken literally, it obscures more than it clarifies.
The notion of “collective memory” has the same problem. Memory is always personal and subjective, even if it is shaped by cultural forces. What’s often called collective memory is better described as shared narratives or conditioning that individuals draw on. To reify it into an external force that exists beyond individuals is, again, to confuse metaphor with reality.
And then there’s the example of Radha. To say that one can “embody Radha’s longing” as if we had access to Radha’s inner world seems to me a category mistake. Radha is a mythological/literary figure, not a subject whose lived states we can inhabit. What we can do is represent her qualities symbolically, through gesture, style, or codified expression. The same would apply if one needed to embody the ten-headed Ravana or the fiery-tailed Hanuman. There is simply no mechanism by which one could ‘embody’ a character outside of one’s experience without study, imagination, interpretation, and with the proper guidance, representation.
Here’s where I think we both agree completely: the looseness of embody as it’s commonly used is the core issue. A choreographer says “embody freedom” — but do they mean move loosely, portray freedom symbolically, recall a personal experience of freedom, or enter a ritual state? Without clarity, the instruction is hollow. Where I diverge slightly is in thinking that we don’t need to multiply categories of embodiment to fix this. We can cut through the fog by making the word much simpler.
The key distinction, I think, is between methodology and outcome. A performer’s internal process, their feelings, memories, imaginings, may be meaningful to them, but those are private and unverifiable. No teacher or audience member can know if such states are really there. What is perceivable, and therefore what matters in the context of performance, is the outcome. Does the movement, gesture, or voice make the intended quality convincingly perceptible? That’s the only level at which embodiment can be judged.
I often think of this in terms of cooking. Imagine being told that to make a family recipe taste better, you should think about your grandmother while preparing it. That sentiment may enrich your personal experience, but the flavour still depends on tangible actions: the ingredients, the preparation, the timing. The grandmother matters to you, but she has no direct effect on the dish. In the same way, a performer’s feelings may help their process, but the audience only experiences the outcome. (By the way, grandmother or not, my cooking is terrible!)
So here’s my proposal: let’s define embody in the simplest possible way. To embody something is to make it perceivable in a convincing way. Not to store it in fascia, not to transform into it, not to draw on a collective memory, but to give it a body, perceptibly, in action.
This doesn’t strip the mystery from art. Quite the opposite. By keeping embody grounded in the observable, we give ourselves firmer ground for dialogue: teachers can give clearer guidance, performers can know what’s being asked of them, and audiences can articulate what they perceive. Private processes remain private, as they should, but our language about performance becomes more precise.
In this sense, I find myself very much aligned with the spirit of your essay: that language matters, and that careless use of words diminishes our ability to articulate nuance. My only difference is that I don’t think we need to stretch embody into a spectrum of hidden depths. Its power lies in its simplicity: to embody is to make something visible, audible, or tangible in a way that convinces others within its context.
So my response is not a rejection but an invitation. Let’s keep the word, but let’s use it with care, not as a placeholder for mystery, but as a way of honouring the simple, remarkable fact that through action, the body can make ideas perceptible to others.