Thinking with the Body

Thinking with the Body David Kirsh (kirsh@ucsd.edu) Dept of Cognitive Science University of California, San Diego Abstract To explore the question of physical thinking – using the body as an instrument of cognition – we collected extensive video and interview data on the creative process of a noted choreographer and his company as they made a new dance. A striking case of physical thinking is found in the phenomenon of marking. Marking refers to dancing a phrase in a less than complete manner. Dancers mark to save energy. But they also mark to explore the tempo of a phrase, or its movement sequence, or the intention behind it. Because of its representational nature, marking can serve as a vehicle for thought. Importantly, this vehicle is less complex than the version of the same phrase danced ‘full-out’. After providing evidence for distinguishing different types of marking, three ways of understanding marking as a form of thought are considered: marking as a gestural language for encoding aspects of a target movement, marking as a method of priming neural systems involved in the target movement, and marking as a method for improving the precision of mentally projecting aspects of the target. Keywords: Marking; multimodality; thinking, embodied cognition, ethnography. 1. Introduction This paper explores how dancers and choreographers use their bodies to think about dance phrases. My specific focus is a technique called ‘marking’. Marking refers to dancing a phrase in a less than complete manner. See fig. 1 for an example of hand marking, a form that is far smaller than the more typical method of marking that involves modeling a phrase with the whole body. Marking is part of the practice of dance, pervasive in all phases of creation, practice, rehearsal, and reflection. Virtually all English speaking dancers know the term, though few, if any, scholarly articles exist that describe the process or give instructions on how to do it. 1 When dancers mark a phrase, they use their body’s movement and form as a representational vehicle. They do not recreate the full dance phrase they normally perform; instead, they create a simplified or abstracted version – a model. Dancers mark to save energy, to avoid strenuous movement such as jumps, and sometimes to review or explore specific aspects of a phrase, such as tempo, movement sequence, or underlying intention, without the mental complexity involved in creating the phrase ‘full-out’. Marking is not the only way dancers ‘mentally’ explore phrases. Many imagine themselves performing a phrase. Some of the professional dancers we studied reported visualizing their phrase in bed before going to sleep, others reporting mentally reviewing their phrases while traveling on the tube on their way home. Our evidence suggests that marking, however, gives more insight than mental rehearsal: by physically executing a synoptic version of the whole phrase – by creating a simplified version externally – dancers are able to understand the shape, dynamics, emotion, and spatial elements of a phrase better than through imagination alone. They use marking as an anchor and vehicle for thought. It is this idea – that a body in motion can serve as an anchor and vehicle of thought – that is explored in this paper. It is a highly general claim. It has been said that gesture can facilitate thought, [Golden Meadow 05]; that physically simulating a process can help a thinker understand a process [Collins et al 91], and that mental rehearsal is improved by overt physical movement. [Coffman 90] Why? What extra can physical action or physical structure offer to imagination? The answer, I suggest, is that creating an external structure connected to a thought – whether that external structure be a gesture, dance form, or linguistic structure – is part of an interactive strategy of bootstrapping thought by providing an anchor for mental projection. [Hutchins, 05, Kirsh 09, 10]. Marking a phrase provides the scaffold to mentally project more detailed structure than could otherwise be held in mind. It is part of an interactive strategy for augmenting cognition. By marking, dancers harness their bodies to drive thought deeper than through mental simulation and unaided thinking alone. Hand Marking Fig 1a Fig 1b In Fig 1a an Irish river dancer is caught in mid move. In 1b, the same move is marked using just the hands. River dancing is a type of step dancing where the arms are keep still. Typically, river dancers mark steps and positions using one hand for the movement and the other for the floor. Most marking involves modeling phrases with the whole body, and not just the hands. Search by professional librarians of dance in the UK and US has yet to turn up scholarly articles on the practice of marking.