Sources of Embodied Creativity: Interactivity and Ideation in Contact Improvisation

Abstract

Drawing on a micro-phenomenological paradigm, we discuss Contact Improvisation (CI), where dancers explore potentials of intercorporeal weight sharing, kinesthesia, touch, and momentum. Our aim is to typologically discuss creativity related skills and the rich spectrum of creative resources CI dancers use. This spectrum begins with relatively idea-driven creation and ends with interactivity-centered, fully emergent creation: (1) Ideation internal to the mind, the focus of traditional creativity research, is either restricted to semi-independent dancing or remains schematic and thus open to dynamic specification under the partner’s influence. (2) Most frequently, CI creativity occurs in tightly coupled behavior and is radically emergent. This means that interpersonal synergies emerge without anybody’s prior design or planned coordination. The creative feat is interpersonally “distributed” over cascades of cross-scaffolding. Our micro-genetic data validate notions from dynamic systems theory such as interpersonal self-organization, although we criticize the theory for failing to explain where precisely this leaves skilled intentionality on the individuals’ part. Our answer is that dancers produce a stream of momentary micro-intentions that say “yes, and”, or “no, but” to short-lived micro-affordances, which allows both individuals to skillfully continue, elaborate, tweak, or redirect the collective movement dynamics. Both dancers can invite emergence as part of their playful exploration, while simultaneously bringing to bear global constraints, such as dance scores, and guide the collective dynamics with a set of specialized skills we shall term emergence management.

Dimensions of Musical Creativity

“…It is easy to imagine group members engaged in free improvisation or taking turns to produce subtle expressive nuances while repeating the main theme, collaboratively changing tempo, accents, and beats, and developing melodic, harmonic, and timbric mutations. Expert improvisers, indeed, are known to transform performance into a process of mutual discovery and negotiation, where different motor, communicative, and imaginative parameters are dynamically generated, assembled, hybridized, and re-deployed to serve novel functions and guide their activity through known and unknown (musical) territories (see Murray, 1998 ; Doffman, 2009 ; Duby, 2018 ; Kimmel and Rogler, 2018 ; Kimmel et al, 2018 ; van der Schyff, 2019 ).…”

“…Before we begin, it should be noted that several authors who work in embodied and enactive cognitive science, as well as ecological dynamics and distributed cognition, have written on creative processes (see e.g., Hristovski et al, 2011 ; Vallee-Tourangeau and Vallee-Tourangeau, 2014 ; Vallee-Tourangeau et al, 2016 ; Kimmel et al, 2018 ; Torrance and Schumann, 2019 ). However, as Malinin (2019) argues “there is [still] minimal evidence of embodied cognition approaches in creativity research or pedagogical practices for teaching creativity skills.” This paper, therefore, builds on this scholarship to provide additional grounding to such lines of research, stimulating a dialogue between different perspectives on creativity in music and beyond.…”

Eye gaze as a means of giving and seeking information during musical interaction

“…Some researchers argue that shared intentions, as defined by cognitivists, may not be needed for musicians to coordinate their performance in this way, because coordination can arise independently of such top-down control as musicians engage in cycles of small-scale responses to the joint output ( Schiavio & Høffding, 2015 ). Evidence of coordinated improvised performance in the absence of preplanned structures has been observed in both music ( Canonne & Garnier, 2015 ) and dance domains ( Kimmel, Hristova, & Kussmaul, 2018 ), suggesting that emergent coordination can indeed occur in artistic contexts.…”

A Perspective on Implementing Movement Sonification to Influence Movement (and Eventually Cognitive) Creativity

“…For example, a variety of actions can be performed in a school gym, but a ball on the ground and a goal create intentionality for most children to perform a kicking action. Creative movement however emerges overtime and from a transformational process, involving search, exploration and discovery of novel, and functionally efficient actions ( Hristovski et al, 2009 ; for an example in dance improvisation, see Kimmel et al, 2018 ; Rudd et al, 2020 ). Hypothetically, humans have both opportunities and capacities to perform different creative movements to achieve the same or different goals.…”