Bodies Meet Minds: Choreography and Cognition

Abstract

The article describes a collaborative research project between choreographer Wayne McGregor and a team of neuroscientists and psychologists concerned with the relationship between mind and bodily movement. The project comprised several areas of research into the neurological and cognitive basis of movement. The article also discusses the mutual benefits of collaboration between the dancers and scientists.

A parameterizable spatiotemporal representation of popular dance styles for humanoid dancing characters

“…Specifically, if the notches about two medians do not overlap in this display, the medians are, roughly, significantly different, at about a 95% confidence level." [32].…”

The Arts as a Venue for Developmental Science: Realizing a Latent Opportunity

“…Whereas humanist criticisms of psychological study of the arts have focused on their reductionist nature (Currie et al., ; Dickie, ), work that is based on a deep understanding of arts engagement itself does not do damage to the arts. Just as those who study language acquisition must have knowledge of linguistics, those who study arts must have more than a passing knowledge of the art form they are studying (e.g., McCarthy et al., ). In the same vein, researchers must understand what aspects of participation in a given art form may be intrinsically motivating to the practitioners, both to (qualitatively) capture the richness of the experience and to quantitatively ascertain (and methodologically control for) such motivation as a potentially vital “nonspecific factor” that may play a key role in the effects of arts on development.…”

Dance Becoming Knowledge: Designing a Digital “Body”

“…Initially another mode for enriching his studio practice, and for gaining information from science about dysfunction and perturbation in movement (13), the first contact with particular cognitive scientists in 2003 became an opportunity to develop nuanced and detailed descriptions of the choreographic thinking process.…”