The Neurocognition of Dance

Mind, Movement and Motor Skills

Bettina Bläsing, Martin Puttke, Thomas Schack, Bettina Bläsing, Martin Puttke, Thomas Schack, Bettina Bläsing, Martin Puttke, Thomas Schack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317536840
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Dance has always been an important aspect of all human cultures, and the study of human movement and action has become a topic of increasing relevance over the last decade, bringing dance into the focus of the cognitive sciences. Since the first edition of The Neurocognition of Dance was published, research into the cognitive science of dance has expanded extensively, with the number of scientific studies focusing on dance and dance-related topics in cognitive psychology growing significantly.

Featuring three new chapters addressing topics that have become highly relevant to the field in recent years – neuroaesthetics, entrainment, and choreographic cognition – as well as progress in teaching based on novel methods, this comprehensively revised and updated new edition of The Neurocognition of Dance is full of cutting-edge insights from scientists, researchers, and professionals from the world of dance.

Also now including online material such as links to video clips, colour images and hands-on material for practical application, this book is an essential companion for students and professionals from fields including dance, cognitive psychology, sport psychology and sport science, movement science, and cognitive robotics.

Part I
The dance perspective

1 Learning to dance means learning to think!

Martin Puttke (Translation by Jeremy Leslie-Spinks)

It all began 30 years ago, in 1978, with an accident. I had a student, a 16-year-old boy, artistically one of the most talented youngsters in the school, although the results of his physical assessment at the entrance audition had put him in the lowest class. During a break between classes, this boy and some of the others were playing about in the studio, enjoying the height of the jumps which, as dancers, they were able to achieve with the help of a springboard, never thinking that after a soaring flight through the air, a safe landing is extremely important. He landed wrongly, breaking his landing leg diagonally right across the shin, with extreme lateral dislocation of the fractured lower leg. There followed months of medical treatments and procedures, then weeks in plaster and finally the verdict of the doctors, which was the end of his dream of becoming a professional dancer.

At the time of the accident I was at the beginning of my teaching career, and had been away for several weeks. Faced with a problem of this type, I found myself at the limit of what I had been taught, even though I was every bit as motivated as these young ballet students. I had just returned home, bursting with knowledge from my studies at the Theatre Academy in Moscow. I remember visiting him in hospital, and asking him what he thought he would do in the future, to which I received the tearful answer: ‘The only thing I can do and want to do in my life is to dance! Nothing more or less. To dance!’. My reply was as carefree and inexperienced as his jump from the springboard had been. I said to him: ‘Then you will!’

During the next 4 to 5 years, he had to undergo two further operations; however at the end of this period he had also taken gold medals in two of the most significant international ballet competitions, Helsinki (1984) and Jackson, Mississippi (1986). In sporting terms, he would be described as a world champion twice over. He became an internationally celebrated star, one of the very few German dancers able to point to a worldwide career. He continued to dance until his 44th year; a very advanced age for a male dancer. How was this possible for a dancer, obviously hampered over long periods by serious physical limitation, and almost to the point where he could have been in a handicapped category, to achieve in the Olympics of dance?

It had already occurred to me during normal classes at the beginning of my teaching activity that a high percentage of dancers’ mistakes are not due to lack of ability or preparedness, but rather to a completely erroneous notion of the character and sequence of a movement which they are required to learn. One example is when the teacher demonstrates a movement with a 30-, 40- or 50-year-old body, after which the student attempts to repeat and reproduce this movement with the body of a 10-, 12-, 14- or 16-year-old. No attention is paid to the different starting points in terms of the physical, intellectual, characteristic and emotional development of this child or teenager. The child’s perception and understanding of a movement proceeds in ways that are completely different from those imagined and intended by the teacher. A child, in other words, is not a miniature version of an adult.

I have always been fascinated to watch divers jump from the 10 metre board, carrying out the most complicated twists and turns without ever having had the opportunity to learn these actions under real conditions because of the extremely high risk of injury. The question arises: How is this possible? I discovered that the athletes undergo an intensive regime of mental training in advance, working over and over again with film sequences until the movement is perfect in their heads, both in point of technique and as regards the given time limit. Thus it was that I began to work with the injured dancer on cogitation (analysis, or mental control) and the concrete pictorial objectification (mental image, or mental representation) of a movement or a movement sequence in an incredibly time-consuming process of tackling the movement mentally, until a specific quality had been achieved. Only at this point did I allow him to reproduce and execute the movement (sensorimotor representation). (The terms ‘mental control’, ‘mental representation’ and ‘sensorimotor representation’ can be referred to in the cognitive architecture of dance movement model: see Chapter 6.) As a rule, the dancer was made to start the process of working on a dance sequence by lying on the floor, to eliminate the sensation of body weight (I subsequently discovered this to be the decisive moment from the point of view of the neurologist). He had to close his eyes for a given period of time, then give me the verbal feedback on his picture of the movement until the required quality had been achieved. We then worked on the movement in a standing position. With verbal corrections from me, and the corresponding verbal feedback from the dancer, the sequence acquired yet more quality. For anyone familiar with the daily working routine in a ballet studio, this was an apparently unnatural procedure. The speed of the movement sequence was then increased, until it could be executed within the time limits required by the music, after which I allowed the dancer to mark the sequence with maximum economy of movement, at the same time picking up and correcting any potential mistakes of impulse or the preparation of steps. There followed a short warm-up phase, then finally I allowed the dancer to execute the movement under real conditions, i.e., with music, dealing with approximate real spatial requirements and the corresponding investment of strength and attack.

The quality of movement execution was convincing, and in many respects improved. The process of learning the most complicated movement sequences, normally requiring weeks, months or sometimes even longer, had been carried by this technique of ‘doing nothing’ (which is to say, not dancing) to a whole new level. This ‘ideokinetic training’ bore no relationship to the usual excessive physical training of ballet dancers. One could undertake conditioning, relative to the physical shape of the dancer, in a relaxed and well balanced manner, as the dancer always knew precisely what he had to do. This was my first confrontation with the interrelation between dance and thought; the mental representation of a movement sequence in the brain, and its physical reproduction. It seemed to me essential in this process that the dancer should not start the movement-learning process from the standpoint of his own coenaesthesis, but should instead work consciously to influence the movement through step-by-step mental correction, gradually developing the quality. The actual development of the physical execution of the step starts at a much higher level, which is to say that the concept of the movement is already clear in the head, before the dancer has even taken a step. It then needs to be conditioned and repeated often enough for it to become automatic (see also Chapter 6). The principle of ‘learning by doing’ in dance has acquired an entirely new meaning. If I prepare the movement mentally in advance, the body finds it much easier to respond with the appropriate technical and aesthetic form, or to satisfy the relevant artistic and interpretive demands. If we eliminate this process, the body is faced with an exhausting, and normally (depending on talent) a very long process of searching and feeling. Not infrequently, this path might lead to a dead end.

Dance is in the first place an artistic, rather than a sporting, activity. This is, however, dependent on optimal mastery of the technical challenge, the artistic and interpretive requirements, and the demands made on the body as an instrument of artistic expression. The less the dancer is subject to physical and technical difficulties or insufficiencies, the greater is his artistic freedom in the performance and interpretation of dance. The dancer can only work freely with his body in artistic performance when he no longer fears the danger (particularly in some of the unbelievably difficult contemporary choreographies) of landing any moment on his nose or on his behind. The unbelievable quality of his long-term memory capacity for movement sequences (see also Chapter 9) becomes clear, when we realise what actually happens onstage under performance conditions. Not only must his body function at optimum efficiency, but he also has to manage the tempo changes emanating from a live orchestra, which can throw his carefully memorised program completely out of kilter. The careful work of many weeks, precisely defining movement in space and time, can be rendered meaningless in a fraction of a second. Contact with the partner or with other dancers brings further unpredictability to the performance, as they too react in their own way and without warning to unrehearsed occurrences onstage during the dance. Often enough, the presence of hundreds of spectators and the awareness of their expectations can force the dancers into a condition of psychological stress which can only be described as borderline. All of this happens under the strict condition that a creative or interpretive event of absolute emotional conviction has to be projected ‘over the footlights’. Any ostensibly technical demonstration or visible correction would destroy the artistic expression. This places emotional, mental and physical loads of the highest intensity on the dancer, loads that as a rule are found only at the limits within which we function.

There is a need for independent scientific research into the psychology and physiology of the dancer, because education for professional classical and modern dancers (especially for dance in the theatre) takes place during the most complicated phase of human life. It starts in childhood. It continues into puberty, the most difficult phase of human physical and mental and emotional development. The body, simultaneously at the mercy of all these influences, is being instrumentalised. It ends with the first stages of adulthood, usually at 18 years old: self-discovery and a whole new set of rules at the same moment! The body is trained to become an instrument, which in the interpretation of a rôle can also be seen as an object. A very complicated interrelationship arises between the person of the artist (subject) and the body as the instrument of artistic expression (object). This very particular subject–object relationship creates a particular interface between dance and cognitive science that would require an interdisciplinary collaboration of psychology, neuroscience, biology and philosophy, among other disciplines, to be understood. Anyone who recalls the errors and confusions of their own puberty will certainly understand how hard it must be in this profession to satisfy the simultaneous demands of normal academic school, training for a career, and one’s own sudden coming of age, and to bring it all into proportion. There is no other profession, or at any rate none that I can think of after long consideration, which demands such a complex interaction of body and mind at such a high level. A profession which, however, compared with other artistic professions or indeed professions in general, receives so little public recognition.

Let us look briefly at the school of classical dance, in which somehow or other the finished product must be produced. It has passed through many stages in the course of its history. The significant beginning took place in the course of the last century in St. Petersburg and later in Leningrad, when the legendary Agrippina Vaganova filtered out from among the prodigious quantity of existing steps from Italian, French and Russian styles and techniques, the decisive material for the training of professional dancers and combined it into a system. Her revolutionary achievement lay in the reduction and simplification of the overwhelming mass of material to its essentials. This system is still working today, and can form the basis for dance training in our time. The resulting canon of movements rests basically on an understanding of the body as an instrument of artistic expression, which has freed itself from certain norms and restrictions of normal human movement ranges. In other words: Normally we move forwards; to move backwards can sometimes leave us looking at least clumsy, if not indeed handicapped. Our anatomy only allows free movement, and a significantly larger volume of movement, in forward direction, while in retrograde movement the hip joint somewhat restricts movement. The British cyberneticist Kevin Warwick described the problem almost wistfully, when he referred to the human body as ‘extremely limited in its capabilities’, and wished to be able to ‘rebuild myself.’

In dance the physical structure of the body and sometimes even the normal rules of physics appear not infrequently to have been dissolved. The body is equipped by means of the particular training of classical dance, and the spectrum of its movement, and thereby also its expressive possibilities are significantly expanded. Particularly in contemporary choreography, the body is frequently expected to display a facility for self-transformation which carries every organic sequence of movement to absurd extremes. Part of the basis for this results from classical dance training, in the course of which, for example, the body is trained to execute a specific movement sequence either forwards or backwards, with one leg and then with the other, without the slightest alteration to the sequence structure. One example of this would be the element battement tendu, which starts forwards or backwards, with the right and the left leg: four variations on the one same tiny piece of choreography. Parity is thus inculcated for both legs, as is the ability to execute steps in different spatial directions, an indispensable prerequisite for the dance of any choreogra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword to the second edition
• Foreword to the first edition
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Moving towards a multidisciplinary neurocognitive science of dance
• PART I The dance perspective
• PART II The science perspective
• PART III Neurocognitive studies of dance
• Author index
• Subject index