performance
In research-led practice, new frameworks for thinking about dance now include the physical, biological, all the social sciences and many combinations of these disciplines (e.g. Bachner-Melman et al. 2005; Bond and Stinson 2000; Brown et al. 2006; Cross et al. 2006; Fensham and Gardner 2005). ‘These sciences must themselves increasingly deal with culture and cognition all at once: ques-tions about pleasure in movement, habit and skill, and kinaesthetic memory, for example, require neuroscientifi c, physiological, psychological, sociological, and anthropological investigation simultaneously’ (Sutton 2005).
Our interdisciplinary collaboration began with a psychologist on the team observing and learning about the subject matter and processes of contempo-rary dance. In the fi rst stages, quantitative and qualitative methods adapted from experimental psychology and the social sciences were applied to elicit and scrutinise the psychological processes integral in creating, performing and responding to contemporary dance (e.g. Stevens et al. 2003). The fl ow of information was predominantly one way. Dance practice generated a number of new works of art but was also in the service of psychological research.
With the acquisition of knowledge about contemporary dance, research-led practice becomes possible, concomitant with a fl ow of knowledge within and across disciplines involved in the collaboration. Ideas, knowledge and discoveries fl ow from basic research into practice, into the artform. Here are just a few illustra-tive examples and, in Figure 4.1, we illustrate our own practice–research–practice cycle across three different research projects over nine consecutive years.
Methods honed in examining audience response may be re-focused on stu-dents who are learning the craft of contemporary dance. Vincs et al. (2007) set out to address the question of how students learn to choreograph by looking at the underlying issue of how they view and construct meaning in dance. Rather than seeking to decipher the ‘meaning’ of students’ responses to dance works through qualitative means such as description and intertextual analysis, they measured students’ real-time responses to dance performances. The extent of agreement between observers’ levels of engagement with the dance was higher than would be expected if those levels were solely based on intertextual factors.
There was consistency in responses. While each observer brings their own experience, assumptions and expectations to any situation, there was remark-able similarity in peak responses across the group. In addition to intertextual meanings, older ideas of structural meaning in choreography – such as those of Langer (1953) and Humphrey (1959) – are far more prevalent and embed-ded in students’ understanding of dance than might have been anticipated.
Vincs et al. conclude that while the question remains whether students are
96 shirley mckechnie and catherine stevens
being taught to see dance in this way or the tendency is related to more general cultural norms and tropes regarding narrative in other media, the students see dance in surprisingly coherent and, it seems, schematic terms.
Respecting the aesthetic of a dance piece, techniques such as motion capture and continuous recording of response to live dance with PDAs (Stevens et al.
2008) enable the interlacing of experiment and performance. Pre-performance enactment is one example of the theatre as laboratory. In another example, we have simultaneously recorded the motion of a dancer while twenty audi-ence members used the portable Audiaudi-ence Response Facility (pARF) to rate
2. Practice-led research (research in dance): choreographers and dancers work collaboratively 2. creating new works. Outcomes: (a) exegeses and theses that document practice, process, 2. problems, solutions in the form of text, recordings, diaries, analyses, e-portfolios, reviews;
2. (b) new works that are performed, subjected to further analysis inside and outside the 2. research team, and that raise questions necessitating new basic research.
4. Communication: of (2) and (3) in many different formats – academic journal articles and 2. book chapters, conference papers for academics and artists, community feedback forums, 2. websites, blogs, magazines, newsletters and the popular press.
3. Basic and applied research (research about dance): building on collaboration in (1) and (2) turns investigative focus from choreographers and artists to audiences. Uses artworks developed in (2) as stimulus for experiments investigating audience response and effects of expertise, information session, and type of dance work. Experiments are conducted during live performances of Red Rain and Fine Line Terrain – art meets science, and audiences and dancers are both observers and the observed.
Audience experiments raise questions about the best method for capturing unspoken knowledge of dance experts. These questions lead to new basic research and the develop-ment of the portable Audience Response Facility (pARF) to measure continuous responses; eye movement methods to record involuntary indices of attention and cogni-tion; and motion capture to aid interpretation of continuous ratings of emotion from audience. New technology and methods are implemented initially in the laboratory, then in the dance studio with dance students as participants, and finally during live perfor-mance with the simultaneous recording of dancer motion and continuous audience ratings of engagement or emotion (see also Calvo-Merino et al.2005; McCarthy et al.
2006).
1. Multidisciplinary team: accrues a range of experiences, approaches and methods. Team 2. members familiarise themselves with different discipline approaches, questions and 2. language.
5. Research-led practice (research for dance): artists, industry, students begin to implement, 2. explore, validate or refute experimental findings in the studio or in performance, for 2. example pre-performance information, action observation, mere exposure and perceptual 2. fluency, and conducting experiments that involve audience and artists as part of a perfor-2. mance.
Figure 4.1 Retrospective description outlining the stages in our nine-year multidisciplinary practice–research–practice cycle.
knowledge unspoken 97 emotion expressed during the dance performance. The performance consisted of three conditions – movement only, music only and movement plus music.
We are currently analysing the effects of the absence and presence of music on dancer motion and continuous audience response. Informal reactions from audience members involved in this study suggested that they enjoyed the combination of performance and experiment and the tangible nexus of art and science.
Choreographer Wayne McGregor is working closely with cognitive sci-entists in the UK – software tools for recording and communicating dance gestures have been developed as well as conceptual and practical explorations of movement, brain and mind (McCarthy et al. 2006). With this research-led practice inspired perhaps by the ‘decade of the brain’, McGregor draws on new basic research to maximise innovation and relevance.
A ‘virtual heritage ‘ (Haseman 2006) or digital archive of Siobhan Davies’
dance works is in development incorporating innovative techniques for archiv-ing, searcharchiv-ing, retrieving and describing choreographic material (http://
www.siobhandavies.com/index.php/parent/67/item/481). The content and organisation of material is being designed to convey an understanding of the process and practice of Davies’ work. It will contain fi lmed performances, stills, reviews, academic writing, analytic commentaries and newly commis-sioned writing. This enterprise draws on research in information retrieval, next generation search technology, digital media and design; Davies’ works become available for analysis from many perspectives including sonics, dance analysis and cultural theory.
In Australia, Sue Healey’s latest work The Curiosities (2008) has palpable infl uences from science, medicine and technology. Adams (2006) introduced a counselling psychologist to his studio collaborations to facilitate and provoke a new ensemble dance piece. Problems presented by technology and the tension between hiding and revealing technology wizardry also pose research ques-tions. For example, Quartet (http://www.quartetproject.net/space/start) is a real-time dance, music and new media performance that explores how the science of movement can be translated through four performers – a dancer, a musician, a motion-controlled robotic camera and a 3D virtual dancer – to an audience. Questions raised by this complex, hybrid ensemble include how much to explain or expose the technology and how best to work with and extend the capacity of observers’ (and performers’) perceptual and cognitive limits.
conclusion
These are just a handful of examples of basic research outcomes fl owing back to the artform of dance. Neuroscience, cognitive science and the social sciences
98 shirley mckechnie and catherine stevens
are richer for the questions and challenges for theory and method posed by the unspoken knowledge of contemporary dance. With the right combination of time, resources, personnel, energy and vision there are exciting possibilities for fi ndings from the natural and behavioural sciences stimulating new ideas and outcomes in practice. The kind of research discussed here can rarely be done within a dance company short of funds or time, or where the commercial context depends on box-office returns. Universities can provide the appropri-ate time for deep investigation, impetus for the training and development of new research leaders in dance and performing arts, and facilities for the crea-tion and evolucrea-tion of new works of art and signifi cant research discoveries.
Practice leading research that in turn leads to basic research and subsequently informs the artform provides stimulating and conceptually – and methodo-logically – rich contexts for interdisciplinary training. The practice–research–
practice cycle also engages universities with communities and cultural, creative and knowledge industries of the twenty-fi rst Century.
acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Australian Research Council through its Strategic Partnerships with Industry Research & Training (SPIRT) and Linkage Project (C59930500, LP0211991, LP0562687) and Infrastructure (LE0347784, LE0668448) schemes, the School of Dance at the Victorian College of the Arts, and industry partners the Australia Council for the Arts Dance Board, Australian Dance Council – Ausdance, QL2 Centre for Youth Dance (formerly the Australian Choreographic Centre), and the ACT Cultural Facilities Corporation. For discussions that helped clarify these ideas, we thank Scott deLaHunta, Margie Medlin, Sue Healey, Ruth Osborne, Garth Paine, Kim Vincs, Mark Gordon, Roger Dean and Hazel Smith. Further information may be obtained from Kate Stevens, e-mail:
[email protected], websites: http://www.ausdance.org.au/unspoken;
http://www. ausdance.org.au/connections; http://marcs.uws.edu.au and search ‘intention’.
note
1. Phenotype refers to the observable physical or biochemical characteristics of an organism resulting from the combined action of genotype (i.e. genetic make-up or genome) and environmental infl uences.
knowledge unspoken 99
bibliography
Adams, N. (2006), ‘INCARNA: Investigating Spatial Realization in Choreography’. Unpublished doctoral dissertation and DVD, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
Anderson, J. R. (1983), The Architecture of Cognition, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Bachner-Melman, R., C. Dina, A. H. Zohar, N. Constantini, E. Lerer, S.
Hoch, S. Sella, L. Nemanov, I. Gritsenko, P. Lichtenberg, R. Granot and R. P. Ebstein (2005), ‘AVPRla and SLC6A4 gene polymorphisms are asso-ciated with creative dance performance’, PLoS Genet, 1 (3), e42.
Banes, S. (1994), Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism, Hanover, NH and London: Wesleyan University Press.
Barrett, E. (2007), ‘The exegesis as meme’, in E. Barrett and B. Bolt (eds), Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, London: I. B.
Tauris, pp. 159–63.
Bond, K. E. and S. W. Stinson (2000/1), ‘I feel like I’m going to take off:
young people’s experiences of the superordinary in dance’, Dance Research Journal, 32, 52–87.
Brown, S., M. J. Martinez and L. M. Parsons (2006), ‘The neural basis of human dance’, Cerebral Cortex, 16, 1157–67.
Calvo-Merino, B., D. E. Glaser, J. Grezes, R. W. Passingham and P. Haggard (2005), ‘Action observation and acquired motor skills: an fMRI study with expert dancers’, Cerebral Cortex, 15, 1243–9.
Carter, A. (ed.) (1998), The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, London:
Routledge.
Carter, A. (2007), ‘Practicing dance history: refl ections on the shared processes of dance historians and dance makers’, Proceedings: Re-Thinking Practice and Theory, International Symposium on Dance Research, Society of Dance History Scholars, Thirtieth Annual Conference, pp. 126–30.
Castiello, U. (2003), ‘Understanding other people’s actions: intention and attention’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 29, 416–30.
Clark, A. (1997), Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cohen, S. J. (ed.) (1965), The Modern Dance: Seven Statements of Belief, New York: Wesleyan University Press.
Cross, E. S., A. F.de C. Hamilton and S. T. Grafton (2006), ‘Building a motor simulation de novo: observation of dance by dancers’, NeuroImage, 31, 1257–67.
Damasio, A. R. (1999), The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, London: Heinemann.
100 shirley mckechnie and catherine stevens Dawkins, R. (1989), The Selfi sh Gene, London: Oxford Paperbacks.
Dean, R. T., M. Whitelaw, H. Smith and D. Worrall (2006), ‘The mirage of real-time algorithmic synaesthesia: some compositional mechanisms and research agendas in computer music and sonifi cation’, Contemporary Music Review, 25, 311–26.
Dennett, D. C. (1995), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life, New York: Simon & Schuster.
Ellis, S. K. (2005), ‘Indelible: A Movement Based Practice Led Inquiry into Memory, Remembering and Representation’. Unpublished doctoral disser-tation and DVD, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
Fensham, R. and S. Gardner (2005), ‘Dance classes, youth cultures and public health’, Youth Studies Australia, 24, 14–20.
Finke, R. A., T. B. Ward and S. M. Smith (1996), Creative Cognition: Theory, Research, and Applications, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Glass, R. (2005), ‘Observer response to contemporary dance’, in R. Grove, C.
Stevens and S. McKechnie (eds), Thinking in Four Dimensions: Creativity and Cognition in Contemporary Dance, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, pp. 107–21.
Glass, R. (2006), ‘The Audience Response Tool (ART): The Impact of Choreographic Intention, Information, and Dance Expertise on Psychological Reactions to Contemporary Dance’. Unpublished doc-toral dissertation, MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney.
Grau, A. (2007), ‘Dance, anthropology and research through practice’, Proceedings, Society of Dance History Scholars, Thirtieth Annual Conference, pp. 87–92.
Grèzes, J. and J. Decety (2001), ‘Functional anatomy of execution, mental simulation, observation, and verb generation of actions: a meta-analysis’, Human Brain Mapping, 12, 1–19.
Grove, R. (2001), ‘Unspoken knowledges’, Critical Review, 41, 1–10.
Grove, R. (2005), ‘Show me what you just did’, in R. Grove, C. Stevens and S.
McKechnie (eds), Thinking in Four Dimensions: Creativity and Cognition in Contemporary Dance, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, pp. 37–49.
Hagendoorn, I. (2004), ‘Some speculative hypotheses about the nature and perception of dance and choreography’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 11, 79–110.
Hanna, J. L. (1979), To Dance is Human: A Theory of Nonverbal Communication, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hanna, J. L. (1988), Dance, Sex and Gender: Signs of Identity, Dominance, Defi ance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Haseman, B. (2006), ‘A manifesto for performative research’, Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, 118, 98–106.
knowledge unspoken 101 Healey, S. (Choreographer/Director) (2008), The Curiosities, performance,
installation, dance and fi lm with Lisa Griffiths, Rachelle Hickson and Nalina Wait; composer Darrin Verhagen; digital animator Adnan Lalani;
digital artist Adam Synnott; designer Paul Matthews. iO Myers Studio, Kensington, August.
Heylighen, F. (2001), ‘The science of self-organization and adaptivity’, Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, Oxford: EOLSS Publishers.
Humphrey, D. (1959), The Art of Making Dances, Princeton, NJ: Princeton Book Company.
Kauffman, S. (1995), ‘Order for free’, in J. Brockman (ed.), The Third Culture, New York: Simon & Schuster, pp. 334–43.
Langer, S. K. (1953), Feeling and Form, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
McAuley, G. (1996), ‘Drama, theatre, performance: the changing research par-adigm’, in M. M. Stoljar (ed.), Creative Investigations, Canberra: Australian Academy of the Humanities, pp. 47–61.
McCarthy, R., A. Blackwell, S. deLahunta, A. Wing, K. Hollands, P. Barnard, I. Nimmo-Smith and A. Marcel (2006), ‘Bodies meet minds: choreography and cognition’, Leonardo, 39, 475–8.
McKechnie, S. (1996), ‘Choreography as research’, in M. M. Stoljar (ed.), Creative Investigations, Canberra: Australian Academy of the Humanities, pp. 31–45.
McKechnie, S. (2005), ‘Dancing memes, minds and designs’, in R. Grove, C.
Stevens and S. McKechnie (eds), Thinking in Four Dimensions: Creativity and Cognition in Contemporary Dance, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, pp. 81–94.
McKechnie, S. (2007), ‘Thinking bodies, dancing minds’, Brolga: An Australian Journal about Dance, 27, 38–46.
McKechnie, S. and R. Grove (2000), ‘Thinking bodies’, Brolga: An Australian Journal about Dance, 12, 7–14.
Martindale, C. (1990), The Clockwork Muse: The Predictability of Artistic Change, New York: Basic Books.
Monro, G. and J. Pressing (1998), ‘Sound visualization using embedding: the art and science of auditory autocorrelation’, Computer Music Journal, 22, 20–34.
Schippers, H. (2007), ‘The marriage of art and academia – challenges and opportunities for music research in practice-based environments’, Dutch Journal for Music Theory, 12, 34–40.
Smalley, R. (1996), ‘The art and science of musical performance and its implications for research’, in M. M. Stoljar (ed.), Creative Investigations, Canberra: Australian Academy of the Humanities, pp. 23–30.
Smith, A. (1999), ‘Daily journal, 22 July 1999’, Unspoken Knowledges Research Project (cited September 2008), available from: http://www.aus-dance.org.au/unspoken/.
102 shirley mckechnie and catherine stevens
Stevens, C. (2005), ‘Trans-disciplinary approaches to research into creation, performance, and appreciation of contemporary dance’, in R. Grove, C.
Stevens and S. McKechnie (eds), Thinking in Four Dimensions: Creativity and Cognition in Contemporary Dance, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, pp. 156–70.
Stevens, C. and M. J. Gallagher (2004), ‘The development of mental models for auditory events: relational complexity and discrimination of pitch and duration’, British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 22, 569–83.
Stevens, C., C. Kroos, S. Halovic, J. Chen, E. Schubert, S. Wang, K. Vincs, J.
Tardieu and G. Paine (2008), ‘Analysis of contemporary dance movement in the presence and absence of a musical soundscape’, in Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC10), Adelaide, SA: Causal Productions.
Stevens, C. and S. McKechnie (2005), ‘Thinking in action: thought made visible in contemporary dance’, Cognitive Processing, 6, 243–52.
Stevens, C., S. Malloch and S. McKechnie (2001), ‘Moving mind: the cog-nitive psychology of contemporary dance’, Brolga: An Australian Journal about Dance, 15, 55–67.
Stevens, C., S. Malloch, S. McKechnie and N. Steven (2003), ‘Choreographic cognition: the time-course and phenomenology of creating a dance’, Pragmatics and Cognition, 11, 299–329.
Stevens, C., H. Winskel, S. Healey, C. Howell, L.-M. Vidal, C. Latimer, and J. Milne-Home (2007), ‘The dancing brain: the effect of expertise on visual attention while viewing Australian contemporary dance’, in R. Solomon and J. Solomon (eds), Proceedings of the 17th Annual Meeting of the International Association for Dance Medicine and Science, Canberra, pp. 309–14.
Strand, D. (1998), Research in the Creative Arts, Canberra: Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs (cited September 2008), available from: http://dest.gov.au/archive/highered/eippubs/
eip98-6/eip98-6.pdf.
Sutton, J. (2005), ‘Moving and thinking together in dance’, in R. Grove, C.
Stevens and S. McKechnie (eds), Thinking in Four Dimensions: Creativity and Cognition in Contemporary Dance, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, pp. 50–6.
Szpunar, K. K., E. G. Schellenberg and P. Pliner (2004), ‘Liking and memory for musical stimuli as a function of exposure’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30, 370–81.
Thelen, E. (1995), ‘Time-scale dynamics and the development of an embod-ied cognition’, in R. F. Port and T. van Gelder (eds), Mind as Motion:
Explorations of the Dynamics of Cognition, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 69–100.
Vincs, K., E. Schubert and C. Stevens (2007), ‘Engagement and the “gem”
knowledge unspoken 103 moment: how do dance students view and respond to dance in real time?’, in R. Solomon and J. Solomon (eds), Proceedings of the 17th Annual Meeting of the International Association for Dance Medicine & Science, Canberra, pp. 230–4.
Zajonc, R. B. (1968), ‘Attitudinal effects of mere exposure’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Monograph Supplement, 9: Part 2.
chapter 5