Choreographing Empathy studies dance as a privileged site for understanding how bodies perceive, imagine and respond to other bodies. Susan Leigh Foster asks what happens when spectators watch movement: whether they internally echo it, kinesthetically feel it, imagine performing it, or construct a bodily relation to what they see. The book’s strength lies in treating empathy not as a vague moral sentiment, but as something historically and aesthetically produced through choreographic conventions. Dance does not merely express emotion; it trains modes of attention, sensation and identification. Foster’s argument matters because it gives precision to the politics of spectatorship. To watch a body move is never simply to look; it is to enter a field of possible bodily correspondences, distances, projections and resistances. The text is especially important for performance studies because it shows that empathy is not automatic or innocent. It is choreographed by style, technique, cultural expectation and historical imagination. Dance becomes a laboratory for thinking how bodies know other bodies without fully possessing them.