Creativity and Cognition in Contemporary Dance
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The
introduction recalls
the beginnings of two Australian Research Council-funded projects, whereby "Unspoken
Knowledges" (1999-2001) investigated the choreographic thinking that goes
into the creation of highly evolved movement, and "Conceiving Connections"
(2002-2004) traced audience responses to innovative work. The shaping of a
team of investigators
is paralleled by the gathering of visual "memory" via digital recording,
prompting thoughts on the "use" of art, and on the making of a
specific work (Red Rain, 1999) seen here in early and later incarnations.
In
the style of a lecture-demonstration, this chapter maps some distinctive features
of classical ballet versus contemporary dance. Its emphasis is on the illumination
and enjoyment offered by the different styles, and on the assumptions and ideals
embedded in each form. What cultural history lies behind the pointed foot of
classical ballet, as against the relaxed or “natural” or aggressive
feet of contemporary dance?
"Wherever
humans are, there is dance, music-making and music listening". Why are
these gestures in sound and movement so important to us? Is muse-icality "an
essential part of our humanity"? This chapter discusses communicative
initiatives between parents and infants, and explores how gesture in space
may be related to gesture in the fourth dimension – that of time. Evolutionary
perspectives are drawn on, and considered as contributing to the "mirroring"
or sympathetic motor response by which we internalise visual experience as
part
of our affect attunement and empathy.
Proposes
Malloch’s chapter as a challenge to "the insularity and complacency
of much mainstream psychology" where Cartesian dualisms still hold sway.
The question still remains – what is it about humans that makes it so important
that they be born already equipped with the need for interpersonal, sympathetic
communication? A surprisingly inclusive and unsettling answer is proposed.
To
see a choreographer’s discarded ideas may be as revealing as having access
to a writer’s first drafts – partly because the early stages of
thought sometimes show the mind working with unusual vividness and freedom.
In extracts from Sue Healey’s Not Entirely Human (2000) and
Anna Smith’s Red Rain (1999), we watch dance-makers thinking
not in words but through a language of movement and mass, of pauses in space
and time, advances, realignments, where choreography creates consciousness
in forms that can hardly be translated into words.
Being the "bodyminds" we are, however, such forms are part of everyone’s
experience: from the beginning, archaeology seems to show, the shaping of the
human body and the production of thought have been co-active and intertwined,
making art the imaginary sphere in which we practise what we have done, or
might do in the future, or can conceive, though we cannot put it into practice.
By such means our everyday selves are enlarged.
"The
sciences of the embodied mind…increasingly deal with culture and cognition
all at once: questions about pleasure in movement, habit and skill, and kinaesthetic
memory, for example, require neuroscientific, physiological, psychological,
sociological, and anthropological investigation simultaneously." Chapter 4
looks at the interplay of cognitive and motor systems in dance, sport, and
ordinary routinized activities, and at recent ideas about the "extended
mind" and "distributed
cognition".
This
chapter provides a
richly illustrated account by the choreographer of the evolution of a six-part
work, the Niche Series (2002-3), where body and imagination are articulated
through various performing terrains, "a theatrical world of potent spaces".
Healey meditates on Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1994),
on new experiments in forming and sustaining a dance company, and on the shifting
relationships between screendance and live performance.
"A
world of dancing energies and transient impermanent forms."
For a modern choreographer in the Australia of the sixties, the sense of aloneness could be acute. This chapter starts from the convergence of artists and social forces that gave rise to new creative possibilities. A talent for harnessing the creativity of like-minded individuals is seen as an extension of processes whereby dance works may be collaboratively formed and emerge as if 'self-organised': this in turn is placed in the context of recent evolutionary theories and ecological analogies. The emergence of order from complex adaptive systems is considered from the perspectives of the biologist, the philosopher, the artist, and given focus through detail recorded during the "Unspoken Knowledges" project.
In
recent years, film, video, and computer software have been used to generate
new movement-styles and to put a particular aesthetic "in the air".
The impact of new technology on the conceptual and practical activities of
Australian choreographers turned out to be the single most important focus
of a series of interviews conducted in 2003 as part of the "Conceiving
Connections" research.
Chrissie Parrot discusses her own career, her company, her encounters with
Magnetic Motion-Capture, and the ways in which the principles of time and space
as traditionally understood are being redefined by technology.
306
participants in metropolitan and regional venues observed a forty-minute dance
work – Red Rain – and recorded their responses via a carefully
constructed questionnaire (ART: the Audience Response Tool). Not surprisingly,
the groups responded both cognitively and affectively. However, the impact
of dance experience and of pre-performance information was less considerable
than personal reflection on the work, and active shaping and interpreting the
experience of it. Through a series of analyses, empirical evidence is seen
to part-confirm and part-dislodge anecdotal accounts. Further directions to
be explored, and possible new directions for arts educators, are indicated.
The
Australian Choreographic Centre, Canberra, assumed its present form in 1996,
since when it has supported more than 30 Choreographic Fellows, over 80 Artists-in-residence,
and hundreds of individual artists and young people participating in its various
programmes. An extraordinary range of artistic and social initiatives has been
encouraged – from experienced choreographers honing their skills, to
the furthering of tertiary students’ dance-interests, to finding short-term
employment within the Centre for young people who need time out, from home
or school maybe. The chapter reflects upon the shift away from small-scale
local practice to big public events and flagship companies. ACC, through
its education programmes, its transmission of heritage works, and its directly
"social" interventions
with young people in particular, has offered an alternative model of "applied"
creativity.
As
a species, humans seem to prefer horizontal and vertical lines to oblique ones.
Is this because the brain is better at detecting them? And would the same be
true of our readiness to perceive human faces and the motion-characteristics
of humans and animals? Evolutionary pressures may explain the preferences in
what our brains have best learnt to perceive.
But if so, similar considerations may apply to our favouring some artistic
preferences over others, even though in these cases the evolutionary advantages
may be much harder to detect. A series of challenging cases is examined, from
"destabilizing" artwork,
to popular film and the likelihood that closely matched audiences will articulate
widely different reactions to a comparatively straightforward episode.
The
life and work of the English physicist Michael Faraday (1791-1867) are drawn
on to provide "a window into the mind of a creative scientific genius".
Instead of a "struggle" with Nature, the scientist might better
be understood as engaged in play, serious play – a metaphor that leads
deep into the science of the 19th century. This chapter discusses ways in which
both scientific and artistic thought are relational and dynamic, implying a
context within time as well as space. The role of surprise is given
particular and intriguing prominence, as is that of spontaneous pattern in
natural behaviours: "an emergent synchrony predicated upon voluntary
repetitive movement, co-ordinated first by physical principles, and later increasingly
entrained by goals and purposes".
Rich
in gesture, expression and affect, contemporary dance is a heightened form
of non-verbal communication. This chapter aims to demonstrate the need for
new and diverse methods to investigate the complex processes underpinning creation,
performance and reception of new dance-work. In our effort to capture the temporal,
spatial, visceral and affective characteristics of human creativity, action,
and movement perception, methods to date are summarized. The second part of
the chapter describes new interdisciplinary possibilities for analysis of these
domains.
Video
material as well as journal entries document a nine-month project led by choreographer
Anna Smith and seven highly experienced professional dancers. Both sources
present a rare glimpse of artists in action as they conceive, develop, reject,
and refine movement material for a new work. The interactive working of choreographer
and dancers is recorded as they share ideas both in words and in movement.
A professional dance-watcher asks some difficult questions. For instance, where might professional
dance be headed in Australia? Have the present working conditions for choreographers starved them of opportunity and imaginative potential? What responsibility do choreographers have towards their audiences?
The research-projects examined in the present book have applied dynamical
systems theory to choreographic practice in the making of new work. But professional
dance-making in Australia is not in the practitioners’ hands alone;
it is strongly influenced by policy, and the arts are "exceptionally
dependent upon a multi-level system of Government support". This chapter
considers some of the complexities this blend of individual purpose and structural
control involves; it discusses the view that the arts are a good "investment",
and asks how a clearer understanding of dance and its current predicaments
might enhance our comprehension of human cognition and of the environments
within which art can hope to flourish.
The
Appendices for Thinking in Four Dimensions is available as a free
download.
The
bibliography for Thinking in Four Dimensions is available as a free download.
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