The following paper was presented at the Transformes International Symposium. Centre National de la Danse. Paris. 14-16 January 2005.

The indented material below was projected on large screen behind the speaker.

Presented by Scott deLahunta (sdela@ahk.nl)
Sunday morning 16 January 2005
Approx. Length 30 minutes

INTIMATE CONTACT

First screen:
Choreography and Cognition: a joint research project
http://www.choreocog.net

I am going to talk about a research project that grew out of an ongoing conversation with Wayne McGregor, a choreographer from London; a conversation about dance making that eventually led us to the idea that we could explore potential insights into this process by engaging directly with science researchers studying the processes of the brain or mind – things like cognition, perception, memory and movement control.

So we organised a series of meetings in November 2002 with scientists in England and in France to talk about this idea. In these meetings we purposefully did not show any video of Wayne’s work, but rather would just describe some of the improvisation tasks or problems he would give his dancers to solve as a way of generating sequences of movement. 

We just went to their labs and talked over coffee, asked each other questions, described, explained; in some cases we would look at some of the lab equipment – but it was just the first steps of finding an orientation to each others field of knowledge. 

By not showing any video, this was one way of reducing the amount of information we would all have to process together; because we knew nothing really about the professional knowledge contexts within which they worked, on a daily basis, nor they ours. We had to construct our references points from scratch; and we set this in motion by describing some of these improvisation tasks; a description that was not so hard to give. And even this we tailored by selecting examples of tasks, which we knew involved a degree of complex mental work in particular visualizing shapes in space.

Very positive reactions from both sides to these meetings in 2002 inspired us to continue. So we were able to raise money from a new funding scheme in England that made it possible to work more intensively with five of the scientists from our original meetings.

Second screen:
Main Phase: November 2003 through January 2004
Collaborators: Alan Wing, SyMoN (sensory motor neuroscience institute), University of Birmingham; Rosaleen McCarthy, Dept. of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge; Anthony Marcel, Cognition and Brain Science Unit, Cambridge; Phil Barnard, Cognition and Brain Science Unit, Cambridge; Alan Blackwell of Crucible/ Computer Lab, University of Cambridge

And this brings me to talking about the main phase of the project that took place over a three-month period from November 2003 to the end of January 2004. 

On 7 and 8 November, we met together in the rehearsal studios in London (and this is important because initially we met them in their spaces, their labs and offices) to watch Wayne and his dancers creating movement material partly based on new graphic visual scores by one of Wayne’s collaborators on his upcoming piece which was scheduled to premiere in June 2004.

Our schedule consisted of watching these making sessions in the morning and holding discussion sessions in the afternoon during which the scientists were invited to present responses and questions to what they had seen based on their individual areas of research. And then we had set aside two weeks in December and one week at the end of January when they could return to the studio to continue whatever line of questioning might have emerged for them; and the idea generally is that they would devise experiments to do this.

So this in a sense is what we were offering them – this space and time to work, on their work, with us. At the same time, Wayne and the dancers would be integrating some of their approaches (or ways of looking) into the creative process; because following this three month research period Random Dance, Wayne’s company, would start to make a new work of choreography that would premiere, as I just mentioned, in London in June 2004.

First Video Clip (1m 51sec): (1) ataxia performance clip; (2) leo doing motion capture in studio; (3) short stills of resulting graphs of data; (4) rehearsal studio; (5) roz mccarthy talking [see transcript below]; and (6) roz working with leo in lab.

“The question is when you are thinking about dance and yourself dancing what are you actually picturing in your head? Most people used to think about mental imagery as being like watching a film. It’s a picture in your head. But we now know from a lot of work that imagery isn’t purely visual.” Roz McCarthy – transcript from video clip.

Just to let you know that was Roz McCarthy talking in the videotape and I will get back to her later.

Think of experiments (and the instruments and tools that go along with them) as one of the means by which they organise this relationship between what they know – to what they see and what they think about what they are seeing. And experiments are often a way of producing an explicit representation of this knowledge as an artifact (say a graph and description) that has resonance with other artifacts in their knowledge context. These artifacts help to guide their interactions in their professional and of course personal world.

We tried to establish the conditions, for the work, so that each individual would leave feeling that they had gained (not just given) something of value. I thought of what we did in terms of ‘transactions’ making explicit this notion that something of value would be given and would be taken away. So, I was never sure if this could be called collaboration, and initially we called it “joint” research or shared research. Although since then I and others have referred to it as a collaboration, in the early days and in setting the project up we very carefully did not – to try to prevent confusion about what parts of the overall project everyone might be contributing to.

Began slide show of several images taken from the research period in the rehearsal studios and in the science labs. Continued reading while slide show playing.

Language was to a large degree the main means of facilitating this process; but we carefully established frames for looking/ watching and listening to each other. We were clear for example when we were in a dance studio, in a conference room around a table talking or in a science lab. It was not a problem (nor did we problematize it) that the dancers were experts in dancing and the scientists were experts in their domain. These became our assumptions / of different expertise having evolved in different communities of practice. Only one of the scientists, a psychologist from Cambridge, persisted in trying to break these assumptions down – not wanting to be called a scientist; referring to what Wayne was doing in rehearsal as ‘psychology’, etc.

To my mind the project could have benefited from this more, but collectively we didn’t find a way of making this a really productive tension within the project. Not enough time perhaps/ conditions were wrong, I don’t know – but this was a very interesting development and it did get lost some.

Intimate Contact.

Third screen: 
The cover image from the book Functional MRI: an introduction to methods by Jezzard, et al. showing cross section of brain. Read the following while this was on screen.

Although often our images of it are only the pictures we get from new scanning devices, brain science can be a very intimate probing. And it was an “intimate contact” that took place in the exchanges between the dancers and the scientists, as they explored together certain inner (hence intimate) processes of experience.

Today’s science of the mind let’s call it cognitive science – recognizes that our perceptions, thoughts, and actions depend on internal transformations. We don’t just directly perceive and act in our world, which is what Roz McCarthy was talking about in the last clip. “Information is obtained by sense organs, but our ability to comprehend the information, to recognize it is something we have experienced before, and to choose an appropriate response depends on a complex interplay of processes.” That’s quoting from the textbook Cognitive Neuroscience: the Biology of the Mind by Gazzaniga, Ivry, Mangun (2002)

The scientists we worked with were all trained on this cognitive side of things meaning they see the mind as an information processor; and to them imagery and representation isn’t just visual (as you heard Roz say); it is the interaction between multiple sensory input systems and internal processes. 

This means the scientists were curious about what the dancers were kind of doing/ thinking at the same time. What they were doing/ thinking and how. And they, the scientists, were thinking about this – and coming up with processes (these experiments) for finding out more about what could not be seen immediately via simple observation.

So we continued through December and January as they returned to the studio in London to carry out these experiments. During this time what they were looking for and how they were looking was frequently described or explained sometimes formally often informally. Sometimes this was done with the aid of a graph or visualization. These experiments they devised, the experience of doing the experiments (repetitions, controls and collection) and this context of curiosity about each other accompanied by the explanations, visualizations and descriptions were all part of what became transacted in this exchange.

Second Video Clip (2m 21sec): (1) rehearsal studio (creating phrase for parsing); (2) amanda parsing in front of computer screen; (3) short still of resulting parsing graphs; (4) phil barnard talking [see transcript below]; and (5) ataxia performance clip.

“That is partly what I am trying to get at with this notion that people look at dance with a particular kind of schematic lens. Because I don’t look at it in the way that you do. I don’t have your vocabulary, I don’t have your knowledge of what is or isn’t coherent. I mean I have precious little ‘folk’ knowledge (layperson) of what’s going on.” Phil Barnard – transcript from video clip.

“So, if seeing in a particular way or becoming aware either of features or of ways of thinking about it analytically. I think it would be just interesting to know what it is that that tells both the dancer and the choreographer about what it is that they do.” Phil Barnard – transcript from video clip.

I’m going to describe just one of the experiments; and its one which has not really had any concrete published results or had any follow-up – two of the others have. But it’s the one which maybe best illustrates some of what I have been trying to talk about.

Roz McCarthy, the woman you saw in the video, is a Cognitive Neuropsychologist working within the University of Cambridge. She has expertise in the area of cognitive representations, in particular with individuals who have experienced a loss of brain function in this area through some sort of accident. So, they have lost the ability to look at and name certain things around them. They may recognise these things but they may not be able to name them, as these are different processes in the brain. So they know but they cannot say.

Fourth screen:
A scanned image of the Stroop test showing three columns as described below.

A simple example of how this sort of disruption of processes happens even without dysfunction can be demonstrated; using what is known as the Stroop effect discovered by a psychologist in the 1930s. Now look at the left column and say the colors out loud as you see them going down the page. And now the middle and say the colors again. And NOW try the right column, saying the colors. Notice that it takes you much longer to say the color. It’s as if you have to inhibit the automatic tendency to read the word. And you could time yourself for how long it takes you to complete the task now and how long it takes you to learn to do it better. What is going on your mind in terms of where (like the map of the brain which region) and how the information is being processed (along which pathways) is Roz’s territory of expertise.

Roz was interested in exploring what she referred to as the “cognitive toolkit" of each of the dancers in order to better understand and perhaps shed light on the communication between choreographer and dancer. In order to do this she set up some simple dual task experiments with the dancers using imagined movement. Dual task experiments assume that if one does two things at once there is a general loss of efficiency in cognitive terms and a specific loss if there is an overlap in the tools required; the Stroop Effect is a sort of Dual Task experiment.

Third Video Clip (3m 11sec): (1) roz and kham doing dual task experiment; (2) rehearsal studio clip; (3) kristen hollands talking [see transcript below]; (4) laila  in motion capture setup; and (5) ataxia performance clip.

“We made you do it without vision, we made you do it backwards, we made you do it slower, faster. We made you flip the references points over so that it was a mirror representation, and we made you do it while you were counting backwards and forwards sometimes in French and sometimes in English.” (laughter) “And you coped remarkably well. It was very good. And that was the first collection session when we came down to London.” Kristen Hollands – transcript from video clip

By asking the dancers to imagine a short known movement sequence and timing them without any interference and then asking them to imagine the same phrase while performing varying tasks, e.g. haptic/ spatial like this one, she began to put together a picture of how individually they may process information related to movement.

At the same time as she is gathering information about these individual cognitive pathways she is also sharing with them how she is doing it. How she is looking inside. INTIMATE CONTACT. This was not an objective scientific undertaking. These relationships were unstable, both groups in unknown territory. Familiar within the group, unknown in the event of coming together. And this was a durational event – a sequence of interactions one building on the other over a limited period of time – an event that has disappeared, in some senses, with the same degree of traceless-ness as any live performance.

Fourth and final screen (return to the first):
Choreography and Cognition: a joint research project
http://www.choreocog.net

You can read more about it on this website including an on-line experiment (the site includes many of the images shown during this talk, links to a network of related activities and scientist’s labs, etc.)

END/ END / END/ END

Thanks to:

To Claire Rousier, Centre National de la Danse for the invitation to present at the conference. To Wayne McGregor and all the collaborating scientists. And a special thanks to the dancers of Random Dance: Claire Cunningham, Laila Diallo, Fred Gehrig, Khamlane Halsackda, Odette Hughes, Léo Lerus, Ngoc Anh Nguyen, Matthias Sperling, Hilary Stainsby, Amanda Weaver.