The classic model of the mind in cognitive sci-ence is as an information-processing system. Drawing on thedescriptive conventions of computer science, the informa-tion that is to be processed is represented as a series of sym-bols that are arranged, mediated and communicated througha variety of specialized languages. In mainstream cognitive sci-ence the body has often been treated as a foreign territory, se-questered through the use of computer simulations as proxiesfor the embodied mind. The Choreography and Cognitionproject brought together a team of neuroscientists and psy-chologists who were closely concerned with the ways in whichthe mind and body behave together. The project started witha Fellowship awarded to Wayne McGregor, a leading chore-ographer, who brought with him not only his own workingpractices but also the dancers of his company, Random Dance,as collaborators to work alongside the scientific team.

The leader of the scientific team, Rosaleen McCarthy, workswith clinical case studies of patients with neurological im-pairments that can cast light on the mechanisms of normalfunction. In this project, we had a specific interest in disordersin which patients lose the ability to coordinate their voluntarymovements: apraxia and ataxia. McCarthy proposed that weinvestigate the cognitive resources required in dance by usingdual task experiments, in which members of the dance com-

pany mentally rehearsed familiarmovement sequences while simul-taneously performing verbal, visualor spatial tasks that might share cog-nitive and brain resources with theirmental representations of dance. The results of these studiescast light on the nature of the dancers own mental processes,as well as giving them an opportunity to experience the men-tal effort that may be required when ataxic and apraxic pa-tients are planning movement.

The project was a central influence on AtaXia, a major newchoreographic work created by Wayne McGregor for the Ran-dom Dance company. McGregor is known for his skill in cre-ating innovative vocabularies of dance, exploring the extremesof motion in the human body. His choreography is already in-tensely collaborative, and the members of his company are re-cruited as much for the way they think as for their physicalskill. The focus on impaired physical coordination in neuro-logical disease is superficially paradoxical in a dance companyrenowned for its physical intelligence. In exploring the neu-rological condition of ataxia, McGregor expressed powerfulthemes of disconnection and incoherence. The staging ofAtaXia included Michael Gordons score Trance, in whichdriving electric bass is punctured by fractured dissonant tex-tures of strings and reeds, and video production by John War-wicker. We presented these performance and design elementsto audiences as outcomes of an investigative process includingnot only conversations with people suffering from ataxia, butalso scientific investigations, with photographs of discussionworkshops and experimental work presented as part of the re-hearsal process in the theater program.

Alan Wing and Kristen Hollandss work is concerned withthe fundamental questions of sensorimotor neuroscience-the many processes and mechanisms by which the brain andbody interact. Working with dancers provided an opportunityto explore the limits of skilled human performance, in whichthese systems have been tuned to a degree that allows the per-formance of unusually demanding experimental tasks. Wingand Hollands used highly accurate motion capture equipmentto explore the accuracy of dancers repetition of learned mo-

Public Domain LEONARDO, Vol. 39, No. 5, pp. 475477, 2006 475

Rosaleen McCarthy (senior lecturer), Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EB, U.K. E-mail: .

Alan Blackwell (senior lecturer), Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, 15 J JThomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0FD, U.K. E-mail: .

Scott deLahunta (researcher), Sarphatipark 26-3, 1072 PB Amsterdam, Netherlands. E-mail: .

Alan Wing (researcher), Behavioural Brain Sciences Centre, University of Birmingham,Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, U.K. E-mail: .

Kristen Hollands (kinesiologist), School of Health Sciences, University of Birmingham,Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, U.K. E-mail: .

Philip Barnard (research scientist), MRC Cognition and Brain Science Unit, 15 ChaucerRoad, Cambridge CB2 2EF, U.K. E-mail: .

Ian Nimmo-Smith (statistician), MRC Cognition and Brain Science Unit, 15 ChaucerRoad, Cambridge CB2 2EF, U.K. E-mail: .

Anthony Marcel (researcher), School of Psychology, University of Hertfordshire, CollegeLane, Hertfordshire AL10 9AB, U.K. E-mail: .

A B S T R A C T

The article describes a collaborative research projectbetween choreographer WayneMcGregor and a team ofneuroscientists and psycholo-gists concerned with therelationship between mind andbodily movement. The projectcomprised several areas ofresearch into the neurologicaland cognitive basis of move-ment. The article also discussesthe mutual benefits of collabora-tion between the dancers andscientists.

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Bodies Meet Minds: Choreography and Cognition

Rosaleen McCarthy, AlanBlackwell, Scott deLahunta,Alan Wing, Kristen Hollands, Philip Barnard,Ian Nimmo-Smith and Anthony Marcel

tions within a 3D reference space (Fig.1). The construction of bodily referencespaces is one of Wayne McGregors strate-gies for developing new improvisatorymaterial, so the members of RandomDance were ideal participants in an ex-periment of this kind. Wing and Hol-landss analysis of the data revealed thedimensionality of variability in the tra-jectories taken by the various body seg-ments. In general these trajectories couldbe summarized with just a few separatecomponents accounting for most of thevariability-and these principal compo-nents revealed strong similarities acrossdancers. The significance of finding sim-ilarities in the factors that contribute tokinematic variability lies in the fact thatthere are many different ways (combi-nations of joint angles and segment tra-jectories) to achieve the movement goal.Thus similarities are found despite dif-ferences in individual movement styles,anthropometrics and other goal-equiva-lent movement solutions.

Philip Barnard carries out researchinto the way that different cognitive sub-systems interact to integrate linguistic,physical, emotional and other processes.In this project, Scott deLahunta, TonyMarcel and Barnard investigated the waythat dancers construct and interpret newvocabularies of dance-the aspect ofMcGregors work that so regularly drawscomment from critics. Using video re-cordings of the dancers improvising newphrases, members of the company wereasked to break these phrases down intotemporal units of coherent movementthat might provide the basic elements forthe creative work of choreography. Twoforms of result emerged from this work.The first involved the development ofnew statistical representations by statisti-cian Ian Nimmo-Smith to capture varia-tion in what the dancer-observers saw inthe movement sequences (Fig. 2). Thesereveal and capture what is seen in waysthat contrast markedly with more con-ventional dance notations. Secondly, the results point toward the potential of tool-supported observation to stimulatemodes of thinking about and analyzingmovement with or without verbal articu-lation, and suggest the possibility ofcloser interaction among the watching,analyzing and making of dances.

Tony Marcel conducted a series ofstructured interviews to probe levels of introspection and awareness duringthe creative process. This involved eachdancer receiving a new set of instructionsfrom the choreographer for generationof movement, followed immediately by

architecture and music notation. He wasintrigued by the notebooks that all mem-bers of Random Dance carry in the re-hearsal studio (mandated by McGregor).By exploring the notebooks and McGre-gors own archive of sketches and previ-ous choreographic work, Blackwell wasable to throw some light on the questionof why choreographers, uniquely amongperformance artists, still have no uni-versal working notation. Based on hisanalysis, two software prototypes were developed as explorations of Scott de-

interviews with Marcel. The aim was tosee if the dancers could characterize orarticulate what they were aware of andunaware of in generation and problem-solving in dance creation. The interviewsalso sought to capture the overall phe-nomenology experienced and preferredby generating dancers. Alan Blackwellstudies situations in which words are notenough to explore our ideas. He studiesthe notations and representations thatare used in many different kinds of de-sign work, from software engineering to

476 McCarthy et al., Bodies Meet Minds

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Fig. 1. Using high-accuracy motion capture apparatus to measure memory for joint positionsin dancers. (Photo Scott deLahunta)

Fig. 2. Visualization of varying interpretations in phrasing of visually presented dancesequences. ( Ian Nimmo-Smith)

Lahuntas future design concept of achoreographic sketchbook that canhelp overcome the limitations of penciland paper when imagining new dance.

While some of the outputs of the proj-ect are more immediately visible thanothers (such as AtaXia), the practice ofcollaborative research was beneficial toall parties. It was useful for the scientiststo spend time with the dancers in con-text, in the studio (Fig. 3) rather thanwithin the more sanitized setting of thelaboratory. McGregor and RandomDance also had a period of intensive ex-posure to the latest ideas about brain,mind and movement. Preliminary find-ings from the scientific studies were re-

for the continuance of informal interac-tions and a means by which all of the sci-entific work can be communicated to thedancers. It is tempting to speculate thata longer period of joint work might haveproduced even more exciting results as aconsequence of our interdisciplinaryworking methods.

Bibliography

deLahunta, Scott. Choreography and Cognition: AJoint Research Project, in Joo Pedro Fris, PedroAndrade and J. Frederico Marques, eds., Art and Sci-ence: Proceedings of the XVIII Congress of the InternationalAssociation of Empirical Aesthetics (Lisbon: IAEA, 2004)pp. 169173.

deLahunta, Scott. Separate Spaces: Some Cognitive Di-mensions of Movement, Species of Spaces, a DIFFU-SION eBook Series (London: Proboscis, 2004).

deLahunta, Scott; McGregor, Wayne; and Blackwell,Alan. Transactables, in Ric Allsopp and KevinMount, eds., On the Page, special issue, PerformanceResearch 9, No. 2, pp. 6772 (2004).

deLahunta, Scott, and Barnard, Philip. Whats in aPhrase?, Tanz im Kopf/Dance and Cognition, JohannesBirringer and Josephine Fenger, eds., Jahrbuch derGesellschaft fr Tanzforschung (Yearbook of the Ger-man Dance Research Society) 15 (Mnster, Germany:LIT Verlag, 2005) pp. 253266.

deLahunta, Scott; Barnard, Philip, et al. Densitiesof Agreement, Dance Theatre Journal 21, No. 3 (Au-tumn 2005) pp. 1723.

Hale, Catherine. The Science of Making Dances,Dance Gazette, No. 2 (2004) pp. 1619.

Hollands, Kristen; Wing, Alan; and Daffertshofer,Andreas. Principal Components Analysis of Con-temporary Dance Kinematics, Proceedings of the 3rdIEEE EMBSS UK & RI PostGraduate Conference in Bio-medical Engineering and Medical Physics, University ofSouthampton, 911 August 2004.

Hollands, Kristen; Wing, Alan; and Daffertshofer, An-dreas. Principal Components in ContemporaryDance Movements, paper delivered at Society forNeuroscience Conference, San Diego, CA, U.S.A.,2327 October 2004.

Roy, Sanjay. AtaXia, Contemporary, No. 65 (2004)pp. 3437.

layed to the participants, including thedancers, in round-table discussions im-mediately after data had been collected.This process led to an exhilarating anddynamic interplay of ideas and a free cre-ative exchange that was of benefit to andenjoyed by all. As a result of this project,the scientists have been able to bringback many valuable findings to their owndomains. However, the time required forscientific data analysis has necessarilybeen longer than the time-scale of theproject, and some work has consequentlybeen less easy to integrate fully within theoverall interdisciplinary enterprise. TheChoreography and Cognition web site provides a focus

McCarthy et al., Bodies Meet Minds 477

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Fig. 3. Research in the rehearsal studio with Random Dance Company. (Photo JamesLeach)