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Dance Meaning and Motion A Study of Embo
Dance Meaning and Motion A Study of Embo
Dance, Meaning, and Motion
A Study of Embodied Perspective
Kristian Georgiev
“Only in the dance do I know how to tell the parable of the highest things....”
‐ Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
What do we see when we see dance? What do we feel when we dance? Who
are we when we are part of an enactment of dance? The phenomenon of dance
brings to the fore key ideas about the nature of human meaning‐making, the role of
our fundamentally corporeal actions in the world, and the foundational aspects of
our experiences. Dance, I contend, holds immense promise as an object for study as
well as a subject of study – that is, a source of insight in itself, shedding light on life,
movement, and meaning. In investigating dance thusly, I hope to show the
importance of perspective. One way to understand dance is as a study of perspective
– the perspectives of the dancers, of the audience, and of the choreographer; the
perspectives of an engaged party and of a detached observer; the perspectives from
under the skin and from outside, from within and from without. Specifically, I try to
place the insights given in scientific physiological accounts (typically third‐person)
as well as those of the phenomenological and experiential sort (first‐ and second‐
person) in the context of one another, integrating them into a framework based
upon the themes of movement, experience, and mind.
“Man has always danced”
This phrase, the title of an essay by Maxine Sheets‐Johnstone (2009), puts
dance forth as the first art. It allows us to view dance not just as a pan‐cultural
phenomenon, but one that is foundationally human. What about the nature of the
human form allows this? Unlike other arts, dance leaves no trace, no record. It is the
art that is contained completely and totally in the present. It is only fully present at
the moment of its creation. It gives you no manuscripts to store away, no paintings
to show in museums or to hang on walls, no lines of words to be printed and sold –
nothing but the fleeting moment manifest in its unfolding. Before man expressed
himself with pictures, before he had words to say, before he had letters to write on a
page, he had his body.
The nature of dance itself is written into the human form. The bipedal body is
an essential condition for dance – the dance of bees and the dance of leaves in the
wind notwithstanding. Bipedalism enables exceptionally high degrees of
biomechanical freedom. The possibilities for movement are simply more numerous.
Bipedal bodies have more unconstrained parts, parts that are freely moving or that
have the potential to move. Having but two appendages occupied in a basic standing
posture leaves the rest unencumbered with holding the weight of the body up.
These can move independent of the support of the bodily trunk, as in waving or
stretching one’s arms. Upright torsos are also positionally unconstrained in the fact
that they are partially self‐supporting. Torsos can twist and rotate; heads swivel and
angle; arms can swing and arc. Upright positionality also allows for degree of
freedom in the weighting, moving, and throwing of the legs, as in kicking or
wheeling one leg about. Quadrapedal animals can certainly move about in a variety
of gaits – the gallops and trots of a horse, for example – but they are physiologically
constrained by the ultimate need to support a horizontally elongated torso, a spinal
column that is directly tethered to the quadrapedal structure of movement.
A bipedal body structure hence allows for more degrees of freedom in the
expressive and sense as well. The human form allows for selection from a palette of
possibilities for movement. These possibilities are based upon the qualitatively
corporeal nature of dance, which in turn reflects the corporeal nature of our
understanding of the corporeal meaning we find in ourselves and others. An
examination of how the human form makes use of the quality of movement to create
meaningful forms shall be the aim of this paper.
Emotion in Motion
Examining the question of how meaning emerges from dance, we must turn
first to the question of how motion and emotion hang together. In traditional
cognitivist theories of mind (Fodor, 1975), theorists hold to the Cartesian notion
that an emotional state is separated physically and functionally from its expression
in the bodily form. In this view, emotions are regarded as internal states or
processes, wherein the environment is conceived of only insofar as providing
stimuli and receiving actions.
Griffiths and Scarantino (2008) propose an enactive, situated view of
emotion that offers a contrasting position: that “internal” bodily affect and
“external” expression are of the same piece. This springs from the insight that
emotion is, above all, for something. Emotion is to be defined in a social context; afer
all, humans are, by their nature, social animals. An emotion is, by this account, an act
of reconfiguration of a person’s relationship with his or her social environment. It
follows then, that an emotional expression might be weaker if not directed toward
this end. This, deemed the “audience effect”, is readily observable in cases of the
Duchenne smile, the configuration of the eyes and mouth deemed to an expression
of genuine happiness (as contrasted with a smile delivered only with the mouth).
Fernández‐Dols and Ruiz‐Belda (1997) observe that professional bowlers rarely
smile after achieving a full, ten‐pin strike when facing away from their companions;
they smile much more often when facing their companions, even after knocking
down only a few pins.
Emotional expressions, then, are not the outpourings of an emotional state
that are merely observed by witnesses, they are integral to the very nature of the
emotive action – the action of a strategic move in a social context. If the reader is
familiar with child rearing, this squares with the everyday situation of
surreptitiously observing a baby who, after experiencing a trivial bump or fall,
begins to cry and, upon looking around and finding no adult around, calms
immediately and continues to play contentedly. The behavior of sulking is one of
seeking certain transactional benefits in a social relationship. In finding the
possibility of a beneficial transaction impossible, the emotive actor must rethink
whether or not his or her emotive actions are worth undertaking.
This, however, is not to say that an emotion is manifest only insofar as it is
perceived by someone else. This is not the position being argued here. As personal
experience can attest, that we can experience emotion and produce emotional
expression when alone is uncontested. However, the situationist approach to
emotion does not see such cases as pragmatically or functionally equivalent to the
cases in which it does not play itself out as a fundamentally social experience. The
goal of the situationist perspective can be seen as changing the framing of the
conversation about emotion. Rather than taking the case of a lone rock climber
hanging precariously on the edge of a precipice as the paradigmatic case of fear, the
situationist takes instead the case of a young child expressing distress when her
caretaker is near.
Furthermore, this perspective argues that emotive actions are not conceived
of or “cognitively processed” as propositional states. Under the traditional
cognitivist viewpoint, the contents of any mental state must be expressible in terms
of a propositional attitude: the thought that “A is F.” This view holds that all
productive thoughts must be systematically organized in this way. The situationist
perspective denies such a view, at least in most cases of thought. Even in complex
tasks, such as cooking a meal or navigating a busy street crossing, we use thought
and patterns of activity that are non‐conceptual and instead regulated by bodily
attunement, social norms, abilities, and situational context. In this view, the ability
to emote is not characterized primarily by the ability to make abstract theoretical
judgments and inferences, but by the ability to skillfully navigate a social situation
by using the range of actions given in an emotional state. An outrageous and
counterintuitive consequence of adopting the cognitivist view is the claim that
young infants and non‐human animals do not have real emotions to speak of.
The fact that emotion, and many aspects of cognitive sense‐making, are not
conceptual and abstract are laid out in Johnson’s (2007) Meaning of the Body. There,
he argues that even conceptual thoughts are, and must be, based in embodied
motion and the aesthetic characteristics of experience. This account is opposed to
that of Fodor and those like him. Johnson’s view is nonrepresentationalist and does
not divide mind and body. Under Johnson’s view, experience structures meaning in
that it has its foundations in dynamic organism‐environment couplings, situation‐
and goal‐dependent values, pragmatic concerns, social interaction, and embodied
feeling. These are lines of effect, causation, and interdependence that cross borders
of brain, body, and world. Note how Johnson’s outline readily confirms Griffiths and
Scarantino’s views of emotion as thoroughly action‐, goal‐, and interaction‐oriented.
Phenomenology, Experience, and Movement
Phenomenology, I contend, has a particular perspective to lend that can
enrich our study of human experience. At its core, the phenomenological tradition of
Husserl, Merleau‐Ponty, Sartre, and Heidegger, European thinkers of the 20th
century, examine the nature of experience, rather than metaphysical claims. While
analytic philosophy of mind has traditionally been thought of as the most germane
to the cognitive sciences – guiding debates about the issues of dualism,
reductionism, and functionalism – phenomenology’s project is quite different. It
pushes such issues aside, for they tend to become highly technical and abstract,
losing sight of the subject of study: experience itself. Phenomenology’s goal is to
establish a firm basis for considerations on the way things are experienced rather
than concerns that may obscure and confuse this. Issues of how or whether the
brain causes consciousness, how or whether sensory information is processed and
represented, and mechanisms of how motions are created are not the objects of
study, for they do not have a certain characteristic presence for the person doing the
experiencing. Phenomenologists neither expressly affirm nor deny such claims. The
phenomenological project is a first‐person description of experience in terms of how
it has or creates meaning for the perceiver (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008).
Phenomenology has had a tenuous relationship with the cognitive sciences,
particularly in light of the mid‐20th century cognitivist schools of thought that
conceived of the person in the behavioral and mind sciences as an information‐
processing device, rather than fundamentally a creature that makes meaning
(Bruner, 1990). However, phenomenological perspectives are now enjoying
somewhat of a surge in interest and relevance due to the recent embodied and
enactive turn of theorists such as Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor
Rosch (1999), Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi (2008) and Alva Noë (2004, 2012).
These researchers and thinkers seek insight not just into how mechanisms give rise
to the living body, but also into how the lived body makes meaning. Theories of
embodiment, after all, must have their foundations in this lived body, not just in
explanatory accounts of morphologies, physiologies, or mechanisms. If we leave
experience behind, we leave behind our existence as creatures with not just feelings,
motivations, and thoughts, but felt feelings, motivations and thoughts. In this light,
we must consider movement as an experienced, meaningful phenomenon, alongside
study of it as a measured, externally observed phenomenon. Before we recognize
and conceive of ourselves as creatures of a taxonomically recognizable morphology
composed of such and such parts, we experience ourselves as animate creatures,
dynamically motivated and attuned to the world around us. We move in ways that
create “synergies of meaningful movement” (Sheets‐Johnstone, 2010b) – that is,
movement that is both meaningful to us and to others.
When we bracket our experience in the light of phenomenological practice,
we adopt a definition of movement that transcends a simple “change in position.”
We turn instead the quality of the felt experience of movement. Sheets‐Johnstone
(1980; 1999) aims to describe the quality of these felt experiences of self‐movement
through four qualities: tensional, linear, amplitudinal, and projectional. At the risk of
becoming bogged down in philosophical details, I shall briefly summarize her
description of each of them. But, as we must keep in mind, our interest in these
accounts extends beyond an appreciation of them in themselves. Our discussion of
them must include an appreciation of phenomenological accounts as the necessary
counterpoint to a physical, analytic account of movement, which we shall turn to
later.
The four qualities enumerated above (tensional, linear, areal, projectional)
are separable only analytically, and form a complex, holistic relationship with each
other that inheres in any experience of movement. She describes these qualities as
creating a dynamic of “virtual force” that is distinct from components of actual
biomechanical force. Tensional quality has to do with the felt and experiential effort
in movement. It makes itself manifest to us by the dynamic of the movement itself,
not in the muscular contractions that constitute its causal sequence. The linear
quality of felt movement can be described as both the linear design of the body as it
moves and the linear pattern of the body as it moves. The linear pattern is a result of
the direction in which the moving body is projecting itself. The amplitudinal quality
of movement is understood as the felt expansiveness and contractiveness of the
body as it creates the felt space of movement, and thus, the magnitude of the
movement. The projectional quality has to do with the manner in which we release
this force or energy – abrupt, sustained, ballistic, etc. Linear and amplitudinal
qualities constitute the spatial aspects of movement while the projectional and
tensional qualities constitute its temporal aspects.
By her account, the form of dance does not exist in a particular place and
time. But this, again, is a conflation of the dynamics of movement with a description
of the change in position of objects. The dynamic qualities of movement create their
own space, time, and force, aspects that give it its distinctive qualitative character.
Sheets‐Johnstone first conceived of these in relation to dance, so they were
initially examined in relation to the experience of dancing. The virtual force of
tensional quality and its contrast with actual force is exemplified in the following
quotation: “For example, in going from an upright position into a ‘hinge’ position to
the floor – flexing the knees so that the body tilts diagonally backwards until the
shoulders touch the floor – the dancer exerts a great amount of force; yet, the
apparent force of the movement is not necessarily great. The body may appear to
‘sink,’ the movement may appear almost effortless.” With reference to linear quality,
“For example, the leg and torso may be held in a vertical position while the arms
move sequentially up and down. The linear design of the body is the total
directionality configuration of the moving force: the ‘constant’ verticality, and the
‘variable’ curvilinearity.” A dance’s amplitudinal and areal quality through, for
example, a diagonally sweeping outstretch of the limbs, gives rise to an experience
of the movements’ expansive and open size (Sheets‐Johnstone, 1980)
Note that these experiential bases give weight and meaning to the visual
forms that the choreographed and executed dance creates, forms and shapes bigger
than and more than the simple movement of a body on a stage. As a visual
phenomenon, dance may be seen as a study of movement or of objects in motion.
Only by taking the former viewpoint, and appreciating the qualitative dynamics of
the experiential side of the movement we see do the qualities described herein
make themselves perceptually present to us.
In dance, the dancers create meaning in their movement through
manipulation and execution of these experiences. The affective, emotional qualities
of a dance are derived from the perception of an emotion as “expressed bodily
feelings that course through the body in dynamic ways…[They] both move through
the body and move the body to move” (Sheets‐Johnstone, 2011; original italics). A
dance may have meaning relative to a narrative of a dance performance with a given
story (as in Swan Lake), or this or that movement might have certain connotative or
denotative aspects, but it is the dance’s qualitative kinetic dynamics that
communicate the emotional meaning of the movements to the audience. While the
dancer may not, in any sense, be feeling emotional feelings, and may not expressly
emote, the form of the dance creates an affective aura of its own – it may be somber,
bouncy, explosive, smooth, sharp, attenuated, etc. – an aura which may be
characterized in terms of the qualities outlines above. The kinetic form, in this way,
is congruent with the emotion, because it reflects the experiential dynamics of an
affective state, an “inner life”, or with the “appearance of feeling”, relatable by the
viewer. The visual and experiential form is not something that the dancer moves
through, it is something that moves through her. This form is beautifully defined as a
“kinesthetic melody.” It is both a kinetic and kinesthetic reality – a felt bodily
dynamic for the dancer and a visual bodily dynamic for the audience.
Sheets‐Johnstone takes as a case study a famous dance choreographed by
Martha Graham called Lamentation (Graham, 1976 – a video of a performance is
accessible via the reference) (See Fig. 1), a daring and moving piece that elucidates
the relationship between kinetic form and emotion. It is described as a “moving
sculpture of grief.” The dancer, however, is not enveloped in a lamentation, but,
through form, is elaborating its experiential dynamic quality through movement.
The movement dynamics “echo” – but do not replicate or represent in any direct
way – “the bodily pangs of grief, the keening, wailing cries of a body that grieves, the
felt spasms and warpings of a body in pain.” Graham (1976) tells us a moving story
of being approached after a performance by a woman who had clearly cried after
seeing the performance, the first time she had grieved for her recently killed son.
The woman said the performance allowed her to see that her grief was “honorable”
and “universal.” The clothing worm during the piece is a large tube of material, a
form that warps and shapes with the movements, “as though you were stretching
inside your own skin.” In viewing it, we perceive, in a visceral way, the inner
experience of a body in grief. The dance, via the experienced kinesthetic form of the
dancer and the perceived kinesthetic form by the audience, manifests the emotional
act of lamentation.
The emotion is perceptually present in the kinetic form for the audience. It is
not inferred, but is rather directly perceived as identical to the emotion. Note the
correspondence the enactive view of emotions described above, and the lack of
distinction between the manifestation of the emotion and its expression through the
form of the dance. The emotion is not most manifest as a private state of grief – it is
most powerfully and most viscerally felt and understood in its expression, as the
story of the grieving woman attests.
Figure 1: A photograph of a dancer performing Martha Graham’s Lamentation.
(Retrieved from http://asp.apgrd.ox.ac.uk/events/images/lamentation.jpg)
Intersubjective Perception
Under the view of emotions and motion developed here, the dynamics of
emotion rests on the fundamental tenet that an emotional expression is not simply a
display of emotion, but is the emotion itself. Rescuing emotion from the Cartesian
separation of internal state and external display, we can gain some perspective on
how it is that our intersubjective, interpersonal interactions occur. Ordinary
experience gives to us to unmistakable perception that, during a personal
encounter, we perceive a whole, thinking, feeling, person, rather than a purely
apparent mechanism behind which an unknowable mind lurks.
This view can be developed using Husserl’s (1973) phenomenological
account of “horizon”. When we perceive an object, we sense more than just its
appearance. Our sense of the totality of an object of our experience rests on the
object’s “horizon” of interactional possibilities. These possibilities are perceptually
present in the experience. What actually appears, combined with the salient
possibilities for our interactions with it, about it, and in relation to it, forms its
perceptual presence to us.
This can be related to Alva Noë’s account of presence explored in Varieties of
Presence (2012). An coin lying on a table does not appear elliptical to us even though
the distribution of light that is hitting out retinas forms an ellipse. We use the
practical knowledge of the range of sensorimotor possibilities in order to perceive it
as round. I know that if I move in a certain way, the coin’s projection onto my visual
field will change. Knowledge of my sensorimotor relationship to it constitutes my
total perception of it as a complete object. In addition, my relation to it must be
based on a pragmatic grasp of its possibilities toward some end. The coin does not
simply appear as present in terms of every single possibility for interaction – it
appears in terms of the range of action as related to some end or goal I have. Thus,
the coin appears, in various cases, as something I can throw, inspect, or exchange for
a pack of gum.
Ratcliffe (2007) suggests that we can use Husserl’s account of the horizon as
a basis for our understanding of other people’s movements and actions. What shows
up for us is not an outer indicator of a person’s hidden state, but is rather the entire
presence of an emotion (or intention, motive, belief). Our sense is composed not just
of what is immediately sensorily available, but is rather the associated horizon of
experiential and practical possibilities for interaction. Among the possibilities
offered by a person’s facial expression, gesture, or action are the possibilities for
communication and interaction. Emotions are understood if not through this
interaction, then in terms of it.
This view falls in line with a line of thinkers in the philosophical and
psychological tradition of enactive perception. A dirt path does not simply appear as
there, but shows up for as in terms of the range of interactions we have with it
towards an end – it appears as walkable. In Noë’s account, the coin appears as
graspable. A chair appears as sittable. This relates to the Gibsonian tradition of
affordances – of perceiving objects in terms of the possibilities they afford for action.
In perceiving the meaning in interpersonal interaction, it must be clarified that we
do not view others in terms of tools (at least in conventional cases). We view people
as more then mere automata; they are fellow loci of experience. Thus, we
understand others’ movement as meaningful in terms of the their potential to share
experiences with us.
Cole (2001) gives details of patients who suffer from Möbius syndrome, a
congenital neurological syndrome that results from underdevelopment of the VI and
VII cranial nerves, which mediate eye movement and facial expression, respectively.
Cole describes patients who become passive, depressed, and generally cut off from
the richness of social life because they cannot participate in the expression‐ and
affect‐based give and take of interpersonal communication and understanding. It is
also shown that people who suffer from Möbius syndrome experience a reduced
ability to feel the emotions themselves – their inability to motorologically engage
and express deteriorates the experiential totality of the felt emotion. Without the
reinforcement of the full range of motor responses and interactions we receive from
others, these individuals have a limited grasp of the emotional meaning.
In this way, we do not “mind‐read” in passive observation, but we “body‐
read” in terms of dynamic, active interaction in order to understand one another.
Our perception of an emotion in dance is an active phenomenon in this way. We
understand the movement in dance in terms of the range of experiential possibilities
it affords us for action on our part. This interaction need not actually take place, but
the movement of the forms onstage is observed in terms of possibilities for it. The
emotional expression in the kinetic form of the dance makes the emotion fully
present for us, because it is based upon our own experiential, skillful, and active
knowledge of it.
Noë and Forsythe (2009) discuss the experience of understanding a piece of
artwork by Robert Lazzarinni – the form of a gun that’s been warped in such a way
as to make it appear as if seen from a different perspective than the one that it is
being seen from (See Fig. 2). The art itself tempts one with the possibilities of seeing
it clearly if one moves in a specific way. The art, though a static sculpture, is a
choreographic object, one that requires active participation in order to be
understood and comprehended. They take this piece art to be a paradigmatic case of
perception. Viewing dance in these terms, the choreographic bodies onstage are but
one piece of the puzzle; the other is the choreographic, active understanding we
bring to the encounter.
Figure 2: Part of Robert Lazzarini’s “guns, knives, brass knuckles” exhibition.
A photograph, of course, does not do it justice. (Retrieved from
http://blog.honeyee.com/kaws/upload/R0020342‐thumb‐540x720.jpg)
Perspectives into the Physical and Behavioral Form
In examining the experiential and phenomenological nature of meaning in
our movement experience, in ourselves and in others, we gain an insight that is
descriptive and not analytically explanatory. How is it that we can visually perceive
beauty, meaning, or emotion in the form of a moving body on stage? How does the
living body create meaningful movement? How do accounts and perspectives of this
explanatory sort square with the experiential and lived account that we’ve
examined?
Bläsing et al. (2012) and Bläsing, Puttke, and Schack (2010) give an account
of how certain neurocognitive and biomechanical mechanisms enable and structure
dance. Dance relies on numerous task‐specific faculties that come into play in a
variety of other physical disciplines, such as the martial arts and athletics – limb
coordination, balance, strength, endurance, etc. Dance, however, also relies upon an
understanding of the performative and aesthetic qualities of the movement one
undertakes.
It is worth noting here that the optimization strategies and tests of skill used
in many of these empirical studies apply primarily to ballet, whose ideals of beauty
and ability are founded on graceful movement; a minimum of wasted movement;
feats of agility, endurance, finesse, and strength. Indeed, many of these studies use
ballet dancers as their primary subjects of study. Thus, ballet may itself be more
amenable to a more orthodox consideration of dancers and performances as objects
(morphologies) in motion. Modern dance, however, finds its truest expression into
expression of the form of movement described earlier, which cannot be described in
terms of biomechanical motion or raw technical ability. It is, as a consequence of this
and several other important principles, much less structured than ballet.
Nevertheless, this is a simplistic reduction of the aesthetic principles that are
inherent in both schools of dance. But an appreciation of this fact leads to the
conclusion of the nonidentity between physical bodies in motion and the aesthetic
meaning that is created through that motion. One is not describable in terms of nor
is it reducible to the other (Sheets‐Johnstone, 1979).
Jola, Ehrenberg, and Haggard (2011) report that, with increased proficiency
in dance, somatosensory function appears to improve in physical training. Expert
dancers, therefore, should be more reliant on proprioception than on vision.
Empirical studies by Golomer and Dupui (2000) show that this shift occurs: in
dynamic equilibrium tasks, dancers perform better than controls, and do so with a
higher reliance on proprioceptive information. Ramsay and Riddoch (2001) show
that dancers also perform better than controls in tasks where they were asked to
match their placement of their limbs relative to a picture when only proprioception
was used. These results may indicate that dance training enhances the task‐relevant
faculties associated with it in posture and balance.
The apparent effortless motion of dancers relates to the optimization of
motor synergies and reducing energy cost in muscle tension. They are thus more
capable of accurate reproduction of the shape and projection of certain trajectories
(Wilson, Lim, & Kwon, 2004). Bläsing et al. (2012) report that dance training has the
potential to influence basic functions of neurocognitive motor control, posture, and
equilibrium control. Building upon these, dancers develop and apply these abilities
in an explicit and extremely deliberate way in order to communicate the meaning
present in the choreographed dance or in the improvised dance they create.
The cognitive mechanisms that underlie the learning and memory of
performing dance, in the view proposed in Bläsing, et al. (2012) exist as “coded in
human memory.” Dancers are able to “encode” longer spans of dance or nonsense
movement (Smyth & Pendleton, 1990). These authors also propose a model for
spatial and movement memory wherein the goal for a spatial memory is a target in
space, while for movement memory it is a certain configuration of body parts,
indicating something of an distinction between the two. Dancers tend to remember
movement in a variety of ways, including “marking” sequences of body movement
with hand gestures, which serves as a cue for recall, as well as verbal description
and recitation. Long‐term memory of dance is also sensitive to experiential effects.
Bläsing, Puttke, and Schack (2010) indicate that the sorting of functional movement
sequences based on relevance to the execution of a specific dance showed expertise
effects, with expert dancers doing significantly better than controls or experienced
amateurs.
It is also shown in Bläsing, Puttke, and Schack (2010) that dancers have a
better sense of how a certain image of a movement structure relates to the
proprioceptive sense of motion as executed. The theoretical explanation presented
is that dancers have a better sense of recruiting and simulating motor
representations of action sequences.
Bläsing, et al. (2012) conceive of and interpret empirical data from
experiments in terms of an implicit theoretical framework of dance. This is
expressed in Bläsing, Puttke, and Schack (2010) as primarily a theory of mental
representation that occurs in the brain. This is echoed in Hagendoorn (2004): “All
our actions, perceptions, and feelings, are mediate and controlled by the brain.”
According to this view, separate from the sensorimotor planning and execution
mechanisms, as well as separate from upper‐level cognitive and emotional control,
there is a separate motor memory that functions at least somewhat autonomously.
The planning, memorization, sequencing, and so on of a string of dance is a separate
affair from the bodily instantiation of those cognitive mechanisms. This framework,
based as it is on a seemingly Cartesian separation of perception, storage, planning
and action, of internal and external, merely cognitive and bodily mechanisms
squares neither with the embodied, enactive view posited by Johnson, Scarantino
and Griffiths or Noë, for example; nor, importantly, does it seem to us congruent
with the phenomenological experience of dance described above.
Let us contrast this view by a competing one offered by Maxine Sheets‐
Johnstone (2011). She argues that kinesthetic memory – like kinesthesia itself – is,
and can never be, a purely cognitive mechanism. Using the work of a father of
modern neuropsychology, Aleksandr Luria (1973), she makes her case. Luria
considers sequences to be “kinetic/kinesthetic melodies.” Using writing as an
example, he explains that, at first, writing consists in memorizing the graphic form
of each letter. It takes place through an isolated sequence of motor impulses, each
responsible for only one element of the graphic structure. However, with practice,
this process is radically altered, no longer requiring the memorization of individual
motor commands, becoming one continuous kinetic melody. This melody consists in
(1) kinesthetic afferentation, (2) spatial coordination that come from the visual and
vestibular systems, and the system of cutaneous kinesthetic sensation, (3) a chain of
consecutve movements, and (4) a motor task, dictated by a conscious intention.
Voluntary movement, as a melody is, then, an orchestration by many different brain
systems, as well as bodily mechanisms tied to the world.
Sheets‐Johnstone argues that kinesthetic/kinetic melodies are not separated
in our minds, but are inscribed in our bodies as dynamic patterns of movement.
These melodies typically flow by themselves, in that they flow through us, rather
than requiring a certain attentive, isolated focus. Riding a bike, typing one’s
shoelaces, or running upstairs, provide key examples of such a process. The learning
of a dance are not instantiated, acquired, executed, and remembered in the brain as
isolated commands which are only obeyed by the body. They are “in‐the‐flesh
kinematic experiences.”
Dances are remembered in terms of the qualitative dynamics, the
experiential properties of tension, linearity, amplitude, and projection, outlined
earlier. These dynamic properties do not constitute the movement structure, but
run though it to create the dance. The dance, in its unfolding in attunement to this
kinetic form, creates its own space and time, rather than simply occurring in space
and time that inform the dance’s execution every step of the way. Citing an account
given by Merce Cunningham, the famous dancer, on learning a dance sequence, he
explains that the movement sequence became embodied, until it is worn “like a suit
of clothes.” Certainly, the motor cortex is involved; this is uncontested. But it is not
the motor cortex that is being attended to. What is happening in the motor cortex in
the process of learning the movement sequence is contingent on how the dancer
chooses move – that is, according to an attunement to the movement’s particular
qualitative dynamics that constitute the choreography. The meaning, in other
words, is present “externally,” that is, in the embodied expression of the qualities of
the dance, but lived through the body, like a well‐fitting suit of clothes.
Dance Observation and the Mirror Hypothesis
As explained above in the sections dealing with the observed meaning of the
kinetic form and intersubjective nature of understanding movement, spectators of
the dance are themselves actively involved in the creation of meaning in the dance
performance.
The discovery of the mirror neuron system gave neurophysiological
grounding the idea of movement perception understanding based on shared
experience. Calvo‐Merino, et al. (2009) gives some support to this, specifically in the
realm of dance. In their experiment, groups of experienced ballet and capoeira
dancers watched videos of dance performances of both types of performances while
being recorded under fMRI. There was increased activity in the areas supposed to
be part of the mirror system in dancers while watching the dance that they were
trained in, suggesting that the observed quality of observing others is based on one’s
own capabilities.
It has been argued in the mirror neuron literature, especially by Vittorio
Gallese and Feldman (1998) that the mirror system is a system for simulation – one
that has its basis in “mentally simulating” observed actions. This is based on the
observed fact that mirror neurons fire both during the execution of a specific action
and during observation of the same action. Thus, he argues, mentally simulating the
other person’s actions allows us a glimpse of a private mental state by inferring it on
the basis of one’s own. However, this neither squares with phenomenological
experience, nor with observed empirical phenomena (Ratcliffe, 2007). As explained
above, in observing a meaningful emotional expression of a person, for example we
observe the totality it, not simply an outpouring of the person’s radically private
mental state. We experience others as agents without awareness of first perceiving
them, then explicitly adopting their perspective or point of view by using one’s own
mind as a model. But this still leaves open the possibility of an implicit sort of
simulation. However, Gallagher (2007) points out that mirror neurons fire only 30‐
100 milliseconds after visual stimulation: “What is, even in neurological terms, a
short amount of time between activation of the visual cortex and activation of the
pre‐motor cortex, raises the question of where precisely to draw the line between
the act of perception and something that would count as a simulation. Even if it is
possible to draw a line between activation of the visual cortex and activation of the
pre‐motor cortex, this does not mean that this line distinguishes, on either a
functional or phenomenological level between perception and simulation as a step‐
wise process.” This step‐wise conception is, according to Gallese, an essential part of
the process. Based upon these considerations, there simply no time or place for the
discrete and complex operation of mental simulation. The theory of explicit
simulation also falls into a Cartesian separation of a radically private, internal mind
(both in the case of the “simulator” and the “simulated”) as distinct from outward
behavior,
This does not, however, discount the validity of mirror neurons. On the
contrary, they might help constitute the bridge between self and other. If we think of
perception as an enactive process, we might think of the mirror system as part of
active, direct perceptual process. We directly perceive, and do not infer, the meaning
of an action or gesture and its distinctive properties as an intentional behavior.
Sheets‐Johnstone (2011) expands on how mirror neurons come into play in
observing action, specifically in the appreciation of meaning in dance. Her
examination asks foundational questions about the nature of the system. The mirror
neuron system, she argues, is the neurological correlate of the corporeal‐kinetic
tactile‐kinesthetic invariants. Mirror neurons would not exist were it not for a
reason for this common ground between the actions of humans. But, she asks, where
do mirror neurons come from? What are they based in, developmentally?
This is premised with the controversial idea that we are not born with mirror
neurons. The literature on this topic is highly speculative, and conclusive evidence
has not been given confirming or denying this idea. However, Heyes (2009) gives
some credence to the idea. She argues that although the argument that the imitative
capacities of newborns presupposes that mirror neurons exists at birth is logically
sound, there isn’t conclusive evidence that this is the case. Reviews indicate that
human infants only reliably reproduce one movement – tongue protrusion, which
may be due to non‐specific arousal mechanisms, not imitation.
Sheets‐Johnstone argues instead that the mirror system is based in the
kinesthetic experiences of one’s own moving body from one’s own movement
experiences. In effect, mirroring is mirroring of another’s body based on the
possible movements of one’s own body. Her argument is that the meaning of
corporeal dynamics, as related to others’ bodies, provides the bedrock for the
mirror neuron system to develop. Questions arise from the workings of a developing
mirror system, and, argues Sheets‐Johnstone, the answers point to the felt quality of
kinetic experience. Before, and more fundamental than, the mirror system, is the
meaning of movement. We feel and have felt our tongues in our mouths before we
stick them out in response to an experimenter. She argues that the mirror system is
a developmental descendant of the neuromuscular system, that develops on the
experiential basis of learning our bodies and learning to move ourselves.
I am not expressly endorsing her controversial hypothesis here, but instead
offering it for consideration as a question of how physiological systems of import to
making meaning out of the work find their ground in the meaning itself. That is, if
attunement to meaning structures in the environment, be they based in other
people or not, is a lived, developed phenomenon, this begs the question: through
which means does it come to be? I surely do not have answer at this point.
The mirror neuron literature is highly speculative, and outrageous claims
abound further research, both of the empirical experimental sort and of clarifying
conceptual sort, must be done in order to give credence to any one conclusive place
for the mirror system to rest in a framework of action and perception.
The mirror system has been lauded in the literature as a neurological link
between action and perception (Gallese & Feldman, 1998; Hagendoorn, 2004).
However, in our examination, we’ve seen that, not only is perception an enactive
process (Noë 2004; 2012), but that movement is a basis for lived experience, that
we understand others and ourselves through it, and that we establish our lived,
embodied relationship to the world through it. Why do we seek the basis for the
validity, function, or primacy of the body in the brain, instead of the other way
around? Evolutionary, developmentally, and experientially, before the brain was
about anything else, it was about the body.
Conclusions and Reflections on Perspective
In my examination of dance, I hope to have shed light on the natures of the
first‐person, second‐person, and third‐person perspectives. Phenomenology and the
mind sciences have much to lend to one another as compatriots in the research
programme of understanding human experience. Varela’s (1996) programme of
“neurophenomenology”, for example, has its goal in the formal joining of the two
methodologies, based on the fact that they depend on each other for full illumination
of the mystery conscious experience. The system proposed by Varela rests on the
principle of mutual constraints: without the naturalistic perspective we would not
have any explanatory insight into the mechanisms of the human form; without
phenomenology, first‐hand experience would either vanish or it would become a
mysterious riddle – its descriptive nature places limits on the kinds of claims that
can be made on empirical grounds. Neither purely empirical work, nor purely
theoretical principles, will help us fully understand the nature of human experience.
There is, at the heart of such a united framework, an appreciation of the fact that
there is a circularity in the cognitive sciences: the study of mental phenomena of an
experiencing is always done by an experiencing person.
My examination of dance has also touched on the enactive, pragmatic nature
of human experience, the relation of emotions to expression, on the nature of our
intersubjective understanding, on the relationship of movement to other life
processes, and on the aesthetic principles of movement. At the foundation of this
examination is the body – its lived and living qualities, its animate and dynamic
relationship to the self and others, and its embedded connection to the world.
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