art and the mind || the mentality and matter of dance

National Art Education Association

The Mentality and Matter of DanceAuthor(s): Judith Lynne HannaSource: Art Education, Vol. 36, No. 2, Art and the Mind (Mar., 1983), pp. 42-46Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3192662 .

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The Mentality and Matter of

Dance Judith Lynne Hanna

The Dance Palette

T he word "dance" covers a va- riety of images and associations which have impeded the recog-

nition of dance as mental as well as physical and emotional behavior. Peo- ple refer to the dance of the waves, bird mating dances, and circus dancing animals. When children get excited, we hear "they are dancing for joy." These kinds of dances are somewhat auto- matic.

Waves and nonhumans respond to physical conditions of the environment. Furthermore, what other animals communicate in motor patterns, ethologists call ritual performances, fixed action patterns, or programmed action sequences (these appear with maturation and interaction with their own species in a natural setting). These animal dance-like displays are stereotyped, usually repetitive, and have been subject to natural selection for their com- municative values during evolution (i.e., animals with these displays are repro- ductively more successful). Nonhuman "dances" seem to involve immediate emotion and drive (for example, fear, hunger, well-being, aggression, reassur- ance, submission, sexual arousal) and autonomic rhythms. Each species has a unique repertoire of signs that is understood by its kind (species-specific); there may be interspecies communication among animals in the same habitat.

We see "dancing" chimpanzees, horses, dogs, bears, parrots, and ele- phants. However, humans teach (through operant conditioning) these

animals special movements within their biological possibilities. Bears thus learn to dance on cue; humans add music and modify it to the movements they have taught.

In a reflex response, young children rhythmically react to strong emotion; smiles burst, tears flow, and kinetic energy explodes. As do animals, young children display experienced emotion.

In addition to diverse definitions of dance, there are yet other reasons why the cognitive dimension of dance has been slighted. We feel our bodies: adrenalin and rapid heart beat from fear and anger, tears from sadness or ex- cessive laughter, and the giddiness of happiness. We move our bodies to go about our daily lives. And because we feel and move in these ways without conscious thought, we forget that the body can be a vehicle of conceptualiza- tion and symbolic emotion as well as immediate feeling and physicality. Because the instrument of human dance is the body unmediated by other material such as the artists's brush, paint, and canvas, people associate dance in its primary nature with physicality and emotion. We also have a heritage from Biblical and Greek times: the division of mind and body, in which the body supposedly undermined the integrity and purity of the intellect. Salome's dance and the associated dance of John the Baptist linked dance to eroticism, temptation, sin, and destruction. Later, within the Protestant ethic, dance, like play, was permitted only to children. Otherwise dance was the devil's handiwork. Plato and Lucian feared that common danc-

ing could arouse the passions and under- mine the state. Old proverbs such as "The greater the fool the better the dancer," "Never was a good dancer a good scholar," and "Good dancers have mostly better heels than heads," mark dance apart from mindful activi- ty. The philosopher Hegel did not in- clude dance in his list of essential arts; dance was relegated to leisure activities along with gardening. Later dance theorists such as Franqois Delsarte, Rudolf Laban, and Curt Sachs asserted that body movement and gesture reveal inner feelings. Psychologist Rudolf Arn- heim, some years ago, thought the be- ginning dancer in "the art of muscle sense" gives up "the safe control of reason and modesty in favor of an in- decent yielding to instinct." Dance critic Edwin Denby described dance intelligence as "how interesting to look at" the dancer "can make her body the whole time his is on the stage." Even some dancers are unaware of the inter- weaving of physicality, sensibility, and intelligence. Modern dance pioneer Mary Wigman did not want the audience to view dance from an intellectual point of view. Spectators, she urged, should empathize with the dancer's emotional experience of ecstasy. This attitude carried over to my study of audience perception of emotion in dance. Out of eight concerts, the modern dance concert had the lowest audience participation in filling out a survey. A spectator said, "I am just en- joying this performance and I don't want to spoil the joy of this by thinking."

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The concepts of dance that I have mentioned fall by the wayside in light of recent developments in linguistics and cognition (a field that includes perceiv- ing, thinking, conceptualizing, and re- membering). Influenced by these fields, a survey of literature relevant to dance, and my own observation of dance in the United States, Europe, Africa, Mexico, and the Caribbean, we can conceptualize dance in another way. This concep- tualization takes a holistic approach so that movement elements within the dance text are not divorced from the social, historical, and environmental context. (See appended "Dance Move- ment Categories" and "Dance Classifi- cation Considerations" which sum- marize an elaboration of the conceptu- alization. 1)

Dance and Cognition Dance can be usefully defined as human behavior composed, from the dancer's perspective, of purposeful, intentional- ly rhythmical, and culturally patterned sequences of nonverbal body movements other than ordinary motor activities, the motion having inherent and aesthetic value. This conceptualiza- tion warrants some comment.

In human evolution, the programmed action sequences characteristic of other animals tended to be replaced by actions in which social learning and individual choice played a more important role. Contrary to other animals and young children, more mature humans select action patterns. The basis for this contrast lies in the evolution of the human brain which expanded in size and became re- structured in specific components. Changes occurred in the cerebral cortex to allow greater memory storage, a high order of multiple, fine perceptual dis- crimination, coordination and integra- tion, hemispheric specialization, and novel classifications. In addition, human evolution led to increased dependency and socialization of off- spring. (See appended "Comparison of Dance and Nonverbal Communication of Other Animals.")

In contrast with other animals, humans can voluntarily express or with- hold an emotion. They can express an

emotion distanced in time and space from an immediate stimulus. Humans can choose rhythms with which to har- monize or counter. This occurs in dance no less than music, where the intellectual genius of Bach's themes and varia- tions is not questioned. In human body communication, psychologists have found that the contrast between emotion and cognition is not clear. Physical movements mentally associated with feeling may stimulate or sublimate a range of feelings. Dancers moving or interacting with each other may generate emotion, and they may express the emotion they feel while they are dancing. Dancers also have the capacity to communicate abstract concepts, to project experience extrinsic to themselves, to alter feeling and thought, and to create symbols and spheres for sending messages, as I will elaborate later.

With such potential choice, a dancer's purpose may be primarily to play with movement itself, to provide an emotional experience, or to conceptualize through movement. Renowned dancer Isadora Duncan said what has become an old bromide: "If I could tell you what I mean, there would be no point in dancing." Dance may convey information necessary to maintain a society's or group's cultural patterns, to help it attain its goals, to adapt to its environment, or to change. As a vehicle of con- ceptualization, dance may also convey the choreographer's or dancer's personal message. The moving visual images of dance may support or refute, through repetition, augmentation, or il- lustration, linguistic, or other forms of communication. In addition, dance may anticipate, coincide with, or substitute for other modes of sending and receiv- ing messages.

Dance can communicate information purposefully as well as offer an open channel that could be used. The Ubakala of Nigeria dance for pleasure. They send messages about celebration and harmonious social relations. But when the groups which are excluded from formal political bodies find their well-being threatened, they draw upon dance movement and clarifying song to express their grievances and propose

solutions. Culture refers to the values, beliefs,

norms, and rules shared by a group and learned through communication. Members of the group acquire cognitive or mental "maps" which enable them to act correctly and to interpret what they observe. Culture affects who dances what, why, how, when, where, with and for whom, and the audience role. Culture shapes the textual pattern of dance, that is, the cumulative set of rules or range of permissible gestures, locomotion, and posture with different body parts in time and space and with energy as well as the associated meaning. In addition, culture contributes to the contextual pattern, that is, the cata- lyst for dance, process of dance produc- tion, and impact of performance.

A people's basic cultural assumptions and orientations, the proscriptions and prescriptions, as well as the seeds of their destruction or alteration, may become locked into the dance mode of communication. This is one reason why totalitarian countries tightly control the arts. Effective communication, it should be noted, depends upon shared knowledge of dancer and audience and the interplay between skillful dance expression and sensitive perception.

The nonverbal body movements other than ordinary motor activities that dancers select are obviously relative to their particular culture. The typical human everyday movement is from an upright posture, requiring wakefulness and antigravitational effort, bipedal locomotion, and bimanualism. However, dancers can choose to climb vertically, climb quadrupedally, spring, leap, brachlate (move arm by arm) or knuckle walk in dance (see, for example, Stephanie Evanitsky's Aerodance Multigravitational Experiment Group). Motion has inherent value through its characteristics of life. Motion is being alive. It has an immediate "alerting-to- danger" potential for survival. Human growth in mastering the environment involves motion which often leads to sheer pleasure in doing or contemplating. As mastery increases, people may find aesthetic satisfaction in moving.

Aesthetics, in a cross-cultural perspec-

-w t.

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tive, refers to notions of appropriateness and competency held by the dancer's reference group which act as a back- group for self-evaluation and a guide to action. Audiences similarly have aesthetics.

Since we are language-oriented, and dance cannot speak for itself in article format, the linguistic analogy is helpful to explain how kinetic, emotional physicality is but one bank of the dance stream. The other bank is the dancer cutting concepts through imagery. Dance, please note, is more often like poetry with its ambiguity, multiple meanings, and latitude in form than dance is like prose. Mallarme viewed dancing as the "preeminently theatrical form of poetry." Of course, the flesh and blood of dance has more immediacy than the print or sonorous sound waves of poetry.

Cognition is in action whether the dancer's purpose is to work with the structure and style of movement, to visualize ideas, or to enact stories. What the dancer does is similar to a writer/ speaker who manipulates words (into sentences, paragraphs, and pages for style or presenting an analysis or story). General memory and sequencing skills are involved.

In a dance performance as in spoken and written language, we do not see the underlying structures, but merely the evidence of them. These structures are a kind of generative grammar, a set of rules specifying the manner in which movements can be meaningfully com- bined. Semantics refer to the meaning of words and their arrangement in language or to movements and their patterns in dance.

As with much linguistic behavior in which an individual creates sentences and responds to them without being conscious of how he or she does it, dance processes sometimes operate without the dancer's or spectator's awareness of their mechanics. Trained dancers have the ability to make and perform novel sequences of movement. Similarly, educated viewers may understand sequences they have never seen before. Once they understand the symbol-system and the particular idiom in dance, as in written language, they can recognize the innovative as well as the familiar. For example, we recognize ballet by its codified five basic positions with specific posture, arms, and feet; outward rotation of the hip joint; point- ed toes; moves and steps with the feet turned sideward and parallel to each

other, sustained leg extensions; phrases; and transitions. Within ballet such schools as the Kirov, Bournonville, or Balanchine are distinct. In what is called American modern dance, Martha Graham, Erik Hawkins, and Alwin Nikolais, for example, can each create a new dance that will be identified and understood. Generally speaking, one can recognize Graham by movements with percussive contractions and releases and a dramatic psychological story; Hawkins by tension-less lyrical vocabu- lary and thematic abstraction; and Nikolais by relatively balanced ar- rangements of human movement, sound, light, and visual and kinetic objects.

As in language, cognitive processes in dance undergird the communication of feelings and ideas through symbols. These may be realistic or abstract. In common with nonhumans, some human movements may have universally shared meanings, such as approaching, fleeing, attacking, jumping with joy, or droop- ing with sorrow; however, most are semantically culture-specific. Dance, I want to point out, can be symbolically representative even when a dancer in- tends no symbolic communication. Spectators can construe meaning and find associations in visual images the dancer presents.

I have discovered that there are at least six symbolic devices for conveying meaning that may be utilized in dance. Each device may be conventional (cus- tomary, shared legacy) or autographic (idiosyncratic or creative expression of a thing, event, or condition).

A concretization is a device that pro- duces the outward aspect of something. A war dance, for example, imitates or replicates advance and retreat tactics in a battle. An icon represents most pro- perties or formal characteristics of something and is responded to as if it were what it represents. An example is a possessed human being manifesting the supernatural through dancing and being treated with genuine awe by his or her social group. A stylization encom- passes somewhat arbitrary gestures or movements which are the result of con- vention. Illustrations are pointing to the heart as a sign of love or using dance to create abstract images within a conceptual structure of form as in many of George Balanchine's "pure" ballets. A metonym is a motional conceptualiza- tion of one thing representing another


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, "Whatever else dance is, however,

' its cognitive pro- | cesses are part of a larger domain of

knowing. When there is no link between thinking, feeling, and doing, there is no self- control. Without this, there is no human dance."

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of which it is a part or with which it is associated in the same frame of experience. A war dance as part of a battle is illustrative. A metaphor expresses one thought, experience, or phenome- non in place of another that it resembles to suggest an analogy between the two: one can dance the role of a leopard to denote the power of death. An actuali- zation is a portrayal of one or several of the dancer's usual roles. When Louis XIV danced the role of king, he was treated as king.

The devices for encapsulating meaning in dance seem to operate within one or more of seven spheres: the sociocul- tural event and/or situation, e.g., people may go to the ballet to be seen social- ly, dance-viewing being incidental; the total human body in action; the whole pattern of the performance; the se- quence of unfolding movement; specific movements; the intermesh of movements with other communication modes such as speech or costume; and dance movement as a vehicle for another medium like dance serving as a back- drop for a performer's poetry recitation. (See appended "Semantic Grid" which can be used as a multidimensional check-list to probe for meaning in movement.2)

As speakers can in language, dancers can embed symbols within one another, use opposites and inversions, situation-

al qualifiers, synonyms, neutralization, and interrelate movement with other symbol systems, for example, music, song, and costume. A symbol may have a patent meaning while its latent meaning may be contained in a constellation of symbols that reveal themselves as the dance unfolds. Dancers may express emotion recollected in tranquility, for instance, symbolically create an illusion of sadness. Of course, as mentioned earlier, the expressions of emotion may be other than apparent or illusory.

As a child develops, the ability to symbolize extends his or her knowledge of the world. The competence to substitute a form for some content occurs roughly towards the end of the second year when the child moves beyond im- mediately present stimuli to think about an object when it is not present. Sym- bolizing soon becomes the core of an individual's social relations.

I mentioned the need to distinguish among different uses of the term dance to better understand why the mentality of dance has gone unrecognized. Another contrast is relevant: the choreographer; or improvisor within a style, and the dancer. Sometimes they are one and the same. Choreographing set dances and improvising within a style require a knowledge (usually tacit) of rela- tional rules for using movement with ap- propriate meanings. These rules are usually left hemisphere brain functions, emphasizing digital, analytical, and se- quential information processing. Dance imitation, merely dancing, depends on learning a set pattern, which is a right hemisphere function, involving analogic and spatial abilities. When a dancer does more than replicate a choreographed dance and interprets-re-creates-it, this process draws upon left hemisphere functions. Sensitivity to rhythm involves both halves of the brain. Dancers can perform with the intention of cutting concepts in space or with the responsive- ness of the "dancing" bear. Principal and soloist dancers usually advance beyond the ranks of the corps de ballet because of technical and interpretative abilities. Of course, there is also a dis- tinction between what linguists call competence (internalized rules for dancing) and performance (what someone does on the basis of knowing such rules).

Dancers differ in their awareness of cognitive processes in dance and in the emphasis they place on thinking. The following comments are illustrative:

Tanaquil LeClercq, one of New York City Ballet's first principals, and former wife of George Balanchine, the company's choreographer, said, "The thinking doesn't get you through any- thing. . . When Jerry Robbins did Age of Anxiety, I read Age of Anxiety, the Auden poem, and I can't say that it helped me for one damn moment. One was poetry, and one was Bernstein and Robbins and sweat."3 Principal of New York City Ballet, Peter Martins ex- plained his position as a dancer (he is also a choreographer): "As a rule, I prefer not to look at too much or do any reading.. . I try not to get too analytical, because the role can lose its spon- taneity and its flavor."4

On the other hand, Anatole Vilzak, graduate of the Imperial Ballet School and premier danseur for the Ballet Russe, believes that the dancer "must go to the library, read, study, look even at pictures. They are very good for learning. You must know what you are going to represent in every ballet, know before you ever do it, maybe one year, maybe five or six months before. To dance, you must learn, you must think, you must have your opinion about something. ... And after, you ask, 'Am I right?' "5 Renowned dancer with American Ballet Theater, IgorYouske- vitch, describes two types of roles for dancers that require different cognitive approaches. In the story ballet the dancer must know the character and period. In the abstract type of ballet the dancer frequently has to figure it out on his or her own. "You take the cue from what type of steps the choreographer gives you. That is a certain indication that you're lyrical or dramatic or whatever. Then of course the music gives you a certain feel. Taking the steps, the feel of the music, and then your relationship to people onstage, what you are sup- posed to do when, and what they are doing while you are doing it, you can build up your own story."6 Antoinette Sibley, principal dancer of the Royal Ballet, had a mathematical interest in dance. "I was very good at maths; I loved solving things I couldn't do, and trying to make my body do the steps was really a mathematical sort of exercise. It was only when I got to be about four- teen that I realized it was acting. I could actually act through these steps that I'd now made my body do. An arabesque wasn't necessarily an arabesque. It could be a hundred different languages; it


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could be 'I love you' or 'I'm sad' or 'I'm exhilarated.' Then I loved it."7 Alicia Alonso, former ballerina of American Ballet Theatre and founder of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, said, "I think every- thing you dance, every style of ballet you dance, contributes to enrich the other ones, each to the other. Because the more different things you dance, the more ballets you learn, the more you read, the more you search, the more you understand."8

The fact that dance has cognitive dimensions does not preclude what phil- osophers call the aesthetic response, although the cerebral is active here, too. Whatever else dance is, however, its cognitive processes are part of a larger domain of knowing. When there is no link between thinking, feeling, and doing, there is no self-control. Without this, there is no human dance. If people can learn to identify dance style with its grammar, semantics, and context, this analytical skill can extend their general knowledge and provide a deeper emotional response to visual images. Skills of leadership and social interaction are learned through choreographing for others and producing theatrical performances.

In keeping with industrialization and the factory system of segmenting activities, dance in the United States is more apart from other activities of human life rather than interwoven with them as in many other parts of the world. Therefore dance training can ex- ist as an intellectual enterprise in its own right. In English classes students learn spelling, grammar, composition writing, speech, and reading comprehension. Similarly in dance class students work on technique (exercises and steps and then phrases in the dance form), cre- ating dances, producing and perform- ing, and viewing and analyzing dances (live or on film or videotape). Although dance has been studied more for its intrinsic value, there is a trend toward ex- amining its extrinsic (contextual) impor- tance and the relationship between the intrinsic and extrinsic. Thus attention is being given to the function of dance for the individual and group and the dynamics of culture and society which affect the development of dance forms.

And just as the social sciences, humanities, and sciences draw upon what is learned in English classes to advance our knowledge of, for example, history, government, chemistry, and

physics, dance could be a resource to conceptualize values, beliefs, ideas, and feelings about them-a multisensory transformation of the verbal, numerical, and two-dimensional visual into moving images that involve the entire person, mind and body.9 It is also likely that individual creativity in dance making and doing transfers to other realms of intellectual life.10 The nondance disciplines, of course, provide the choreographer and interpretative dancer with grist for their mill.

If readers are surprised to discover the sophisticated mentality of matter involved in dance, they are not alone. Dance as a discipline is new compared to other arts. The first college program was established in 1926. There are now 241 undergraduate degree programs, and a handful of doctoral level programs. Most of the dance literature ad- dresses the physicality and philosophy of movement, chronology of dancers and companies, dance schools, and dancers' personal reflections. The ra- tionale for arts in education has been at the level of faith. We read, "Many edu- cators, as well as persons directly con- cerned with the arts, share the convic- tion that the arts are a means for ex- pressing and interpreting human behavior and experience." Only recently have attempts been made to spell out the intuitive about dance in keeping with the theory and research findings on human behavior from the evolutionary, linguistic, social, and cultural tendrils of knowledge. See, for example, To Dance is Human. When this knowledge becomes more broadly disseminated, support for dance education will expand and dance education itself will further develop its curricula"1 and instruction methods for a wider age-range. Dance doing (technique, performance, im- provisation, and composition) and perception of dance (movement elements, meanings, and patterns) will intertwine with history, philosophy, sociology, an- thropology, dance criticism, and visual imagery in recognition of the interplay between the kinesthetic, emotional, and cognitive aspects of dance as a com- municative art. a

Judith Lynne Hanna is Associate Re- search Scholar, Center for Family, Housing and the Community, College of Human Ecology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland.

Notes

0 Hanna, 1983. 1 Hanna, 1979a. 2 Hanna, 1979b. 3 Newman, 1981:156. 4 Ibid:352-353. 5 Ibid:21. 6 Ibid:57-58. 7 Ibid:246. 8 Ibid:71. 9 For illustrations see Blatt and Cunningham 1981 and Gilbert 1977. 10 See Montagu, 1981. 11 A potentially useful project is being carried out in New York City by The Arts Con- nection under Elizabeth Zimmer's direction. The National Endowment for the Humani- ties sponsored curriculum development program "Investigating Human Culture Through the History and Criticism of Dance" aims to enable students to understand the cultural and social history of dance, analyze movement, learn the principles and priorities of critics, and explore the impact of film and video on dance preservation and scholarship.

References

Blatt, Gloria T., and Jean Cunningham, It's Your Movement: Expressive Movement Activities for the Language Arts Class- room, New York: Teachers College, 1981.

Gilbert, Anne Green, Teaching the Three Rs Through Movement Experiences: A Handbook for Teachers, Minneapolis: Burgess, 1977.

Haberman, Martin and Tobie Meisel, eds., Dance: An Art in Academe, New York: Teachers College Press, 1970.

Hanna, Judith Lynne, To Dance is Human: A Theory of Nonverbal Communica- tion, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979a; "Toward Semantic Analysis of Movement Behavior: Concepts and Problems," Semiotica, Vol. 25, No. 1-2, 1979b, pp. 77-110; The Performer- Audience Connection: Emotion and Metaphor in Dance and Society, 1983, Austin: University of Texas Press- recommended for publication.

Kamarck, Edward, ed., "Growth of Dance in America," Arts in Society, Vol. 13, No. 3, 1976.

Montagu, Ashley, Growing Young, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1981.

Newman, Barbara, Striking a Balance: Dancers Talk About Dancing, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1982.

Remer, Jane, Changing Schools Through the Arts: The Power of an Idea, New York: McGraw Hill, 1982.

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art and the mind || the mentality and matter of dance

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