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Thinking in action: thought made visible in contemporary dance

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Abstract

Contemporary dance—movement deliberately and systematically cultivated for its own sake—is examined in the light of the procedural and declarative view of long-term knowledge. We begin with a description of two settings in which new works of contemporary dance are created and performed. Although non-verbal, contemporary dance can be a language declared through movement and stillness of the body. Ideas for new movement material come from objects, events or imaginings that are spoken, seen, heard, imagined, or felt. Declared through movement, the idea becomes visible. Communication in dance involves general psychological processes such as direct visual perception of motion and force, motor simulation via mirror neurons, and implicit learning of movement vocabularies and grammars. Creating and performing dance appear to involve both procedural and declarative knowledge. The latter includes the role of episodic memory in performance and occasional labelling of movement phrases and sections in rehearsal. Procedural knowledge in dance is augmented by expressive nuance, feeling and communicative intent that is not characteristic of other movement-based procedural tasks. Having delineated lexical and grammatical components in dance, neural mechanisms are identified based on Ullman’s (Ullman in Cognition 92:231–270, 2004) alignment of lexical knowledge with declarative memory and mental grammar with procedural memory. We conclude with suggestions for experiments to test these assumptions that concern thought in action in composition, performance and appreciation of contemporary dance.

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Notes

  1. It is important to note that dance and music performed separately from each other and observed passively is a largely Western and relatively recent phenomenon (Cross 2003). The mechanisms discussed have been informed by our analysis of contemporary dance in a Western setting. As perceptual mechanisms they are likely to apply to a range of stylistic and cultural contexts.

  2. According to the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Brown 1993) language can refer to “a non verbal method of human communication, as gesture or facial expression, hand-signing, etc.; as a means of artistic expression, as dance, music, or painting”.

  3. Speculating, there is an intriguing possibility that a rule common to all forms of dance is for movement to be biomechanically possible. Experiments have demonstrated that biomechanically impossible motion reduces, for example, accurate pursuit of two-dimensional targets (Viviani et al. 1987), and recognition of emotion in point-light displays (Dittrich et al. 1996). Further experiments are needed to determine whether this is an example of slow, ungrammatical sequence learning, whether it relates to the role of acquired motor skills in action perception, or whether these two postulates are both correct and linked

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Australian Research Council through its Strategic Partnerships with Industry Research & Training (SPIRT) and Linkage research grant schemes (Grant Nos. C59930500 and LP0211991), MARCS Auditory Laboratories at the University of Western Sydney, the School of Dance at the Victorian College of the Arts, and industry partners the Australia Council, Ausdance, and the Australian Choreographic Centre. Our heartfelt thanks to the team at the Australian Choreographic Centre—Mark Gordon, Ruth Osborne, the Quantum Leap Choreographic Youth Ensemble, Eternity choreographers and composers, and film-maker Sue Healey; to Agnes Petocz, Shona Erskine, and John Sutton for discussions about art, thinking, and memory; and to Anna Smith, Stephen Malloch, and Rua Haszard Morris for assistance with motion tracking and analysis. Further information: http://www.ausdance.org.au/unspoken, http://www.ausdance.org.au/connections, http://marcs.uws.edu.au. Email: kj.stevens@uws.edu.au

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  1. MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney, Locked Bag 1797, South Penrith, NSW, 1797, Australia

    Catherine Stevens

  2. School of Dance, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, VIC, 3006, Australia

    Shirley McKechnie

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  1. Catherine Stevens
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  2. Shirley McKechnie
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Correspondence to Catherine Stevens.

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Communicated by John Sutton

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Stevens, C., McKechnie, S. Thinking in action: thought made visible in contemporary dance. Cogn Process 6, 243–252 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-005-0014-x

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