So You Dance? You Can Think!

We admit it. We're great fans of the television show So You Think You Can Dance. Who can resist all those dance styles, all that great choreography, all those wonderful young dancers! Aside from the sheer fun, we also find ourselves thinking back to a series of short columns we wrote for a local dance school newsletter some years ago. We find ourselves reminded that if you think you can dance, it is also often true that you dance so you can think.

We excerpt a couple of those columns here:

#1. What is dance? Look in any dictionary and you'll find it variously defined as a rhythmic movement, a pattern traced in space, an emotional expression, a disciplined technique. Yet, all these criteria have been called into question in our century -- or at least reconsidered. For Alwin Nikolais, the defining characteristic of dance is motion. "The dancer," he has said, "is a specialist in the sensitivity to, the perception and the skilled execution of motion." But not any motion. The difference between mere movement and real dance is the difference between seeing and observing or hearing and listening. Two people may walk down the street with a destination in mind, but only the one who is aware of her body and her surroundings is dancing. Dance is also awareness.

Attention to everyday locomotion certainly informs a great deal of modern dance. Peter Pucci, for example, has created dance from the motions involved in basketball playing (see left). Does this mean that athletes are dancers? They move and they are aware. We don't usually call them dancers, however, and for good reason. As Anna Halprin puts it, some kind of symbolic expression is as important to dance as motion and awareness. "Anybody's a dancer to me at any time," she has said, "when I am involved in communicating with that person through his movement." Of course, if conscious communication through motion is the hallmark of dance, then we better call painters like Jackson Pollock dancers too. In his drip paintings, Pollock placed the canvas on the floor and moved around it rhythmically, flinging paint as he went. Painting was, for him, an experience and an expression of the moving body. His paintings might even be considered dance notations!

Motion, awareness, communication: at the end of one millennium of dancing and the start of another it seems as if dance is no longer just for dancers, but for anyone sensitive to the meanings of human motion.

#2. Dancers exercise every one of the universal thinking skills we explore in Sparks of Genius, The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People (Houghton Mifflin: 1999). They observe the movements of people and things. They image, or mentally manipulate, what they have observed and experienced, seeing with the mind's eye the movements they wish to make, feeling the feel of these movements before they enact them. Dancers analogize, linking the human body to living forms and inanimate processes around them. They imitate or model the movements of these things. They abstract certain elements of these movements in order to simplify, to grasp the essential. Thinking dimensionally, they form patterns in space and through time. They play with these patterns, altering and improvising. Ultimately, dancers transform stories or pictures or sculptures or games or ideas into dance. They synthesize music, choreography, costume and setting into one coherent spectacle. But most of all and most specially, dancers empathize through role-playing. And in related fashion, they think with the body, exploring what they know about the world with muscle movements, visceral tensions, gut feelings, and emotions.

The physical logic of body thinking is not readily expressed in words or numbers -- but it supports a kind of language nonetheless. And though dancers speak this language in every dance they make, they are not the only ones fluent in the imaginative vocabulary of body thinking. People in all sorts of professions, from backhoe operators to puppeteers, from artists and historians to surgeons and scientists think with movements and tensions of the body...

And so do all the millions of people who enjoy watching So You Think You Can Dance! We observe, we image, we empathize, we intuit what the dancer means us to think. We may not be able to dance with the same skill as the young men and women on the show, but like the muppet Miss Piggy and her French, we sure do "hear" the language of dance. By setting the mind dancing, we also set it thinking!

© Michele & Robert Root-Bernstein 2009

Be sure to check out our posts on Martha Graham, Loie Fuller, and dancing scientific experiments, too!

References:

Alwin Nikolai and Anna Halprin, cited in Root-Bernstein & Root-Bernstein, 1999. Sparks of Genius, pp 39 and 41.

Photo of basketball dance: Michael O'Neill