Visible Thought: Communication and the Performing Arts: An Experimental Psychologists' View of Contemporary Dance

Since 1999, we have collaborated with choreographers, dancers, dance writers, and dance industry partners to investigate the cognitive processes implicated in creating, performing and responding to contemporary dance. In contemporary dance, the major medium is movement deliberately and systematically cultivated for its own sake with the aim of achieving a work of art. As the sole experimental and cognitive psychologist on the team I took time in the initial stages to observe the creative process in the studio - a kind of ethological approach. My colleagues in dance and I read in each other's discipline area. To apply the experimental method to phenomena that were often rapid and hidden, the first stage was one of problem finding. Interestingly, the creative processes that I observed between choreographer and dancers in the studio as they created new works shared features with scientific discovery and the scientific method - problem finding and problem solving, analogical thinking, and use of multimodal imagery. Our first joint paper was a case study; research questions and more experimental approaches began to emerge.

The team leader of the project had come to dance and choreography after a time as a laboratory research assistant. She had a predilection for explanation and the scientific method. Influenced by Dynamical Systems Theory, she applied concepts from that theory to the dynamical group processes in the dance studio. At the same, and seeking behaviour that was observable, quantifiable, replicable, I used motion capture techniques to track movement of a choreographer as she created new phrases of movement in an effort to recover the physical dynamics of the movement (velocity depicted as phase planes).

The interdisciplinary team of researchers was extremely productive with research outcomes ranging from new award-wining Australian dance works, a film, a documentary, an electronic book, numerous articles in arts and social science journals, to a psychometric instrument for measuring audience response (the Audience Response Tool - ART, Glass, 2005) and a device for recording on-line continuous responses to live performance. Communication in dance is non-verbal, largely un-notated, unspoken. It is transferred between dancers (and to audience) through movement, stillness, force - through sculpted patterns of space and time. By contrast, reporting the results of research into the phenomenon involves written language. Other media, such as digital video and e-books, assist in the communication of ideas about knowledge that is visible yet not spoken, distributed and embodied.