‘A reflective and thinking body is constantly dancing its becoming.’

– Jean Luc Nancy

CAN I dance without moving? Seemed like an absurd question to ask myself as I lay in a hospital bed hours after my daughter was born. It was 40 degrees below zero and the wind was howling; my breath had frosted over on the windowpanes. No amount of insulation and heating could keep that bitter cold out. Pain pulsed its way through my body in much the same way – no painkiller or sedative seemed to keep it out.

It was a bright sunny afternoon (on what they said was the coldest day of the decade in Southern Ontario) when my daughter arrived, almost ten days overdue. An obstetric mishap had lead to a pelvic injury that left me unable to function normally. I was told to expect a poor quality of life: limited movement, trouble sitting and walking, loss of bladder control. Not easy things for a new mother to hear.

Once I knew that my baby was out of danger, the questions I asked myself were: Can I dance in my mind? Can I dance without moving? I let the questions be – they seemed absurd. Absurd, until I realized that the question was not being asked by my conscious mind. It was too preoccupied with seeking rational solutions to the terrible situation my baby and I were in. My body was seeking different answers. It just wanted to figure out how to dance without moving. I suppose my memories of wellness were deeply associated with dancing.

Dance with the mind? Well, dancers do it all the time – rehearse movements in our mind, go over that difficult sequence from rehearsals earlier in the day over and over again. Imagining the spin on the heel, the rhythm and beat still pulsing in the muscles, the stretch of the ligaments in our feet, the momentum in the body. What is it about the encoding of movement in dance that makes it different from all other movement? Choreographers call this process marking – walking through a defined or fixed set of movements in ‘your head’, building a set of cues to take you through an entire sequence.

Dance is demanding – not just physically, but cognitively as well. And this process of ‘marking’ which is often thought of as ‘lazy dancing’, where the dancer uses finger gestures to indicate a spin, or a leap, research shows a way of resolving conflict between the physical demand and the mental strain of executing a difficult sequence perfectly. Marking appears to significantly enhance integration of memory and complex movement.

Phenomenologists and neuro-scientists alike have been looking to dance to understand cognition and perception. The sense of the body is phenomenologically foregrounded in dance, and evidence is that this kind of foregrounding appears to also occur in illness and injury. What may appear to be self-evident – that dancing allows you to you know yourself as a body first – is opening up myriad possibilities for research in cognitive neuroscience. A compelling conversation in trans-disciplinary engagement, the exchange between dance and neuroscience, is exploring both the thinking behind the dancing as well as how dance and movement produces thought. As the limbs move, it appears; it is the brain that is dancing.

 

Neuroscientific studies have shown that the ability to simulate specific patterns of movement seen in dance engages very specific areas of the brain. For instance, the precuneus helps plot the path for movement, the posterior parietal complex helps translate these signals to motor commands, the subcortical circuits help update these commands and refine the motions, the cerebellum appears to function as a neural metronome. Spatial cognition – knowing where you are and where your limbs are as you move them, even as your eyes are closed, is possible because the brain is at all times creating an ‘articulated body representation’. It is becoming increasingly evident that even as your limbs move, it is also the brain that appears to be learning that state of being.

Much in the same way that one can still feel the rocking motion of the train in the body after the journey has ended, the body seems to have its own way of remembering movement. Even simple, involuntary movement records itself somewhere, some place and tells us that we live ‘as’ a body, rather than ‘in’ a body – an ‘embodied-ness’ of the self. Embodiment has been defined in many ways – cognitive and perceptual. But what it seemingly comes down to is how every physical action that needs our conscious attention – like riding a bike or driving a car – is something the body just seems to know how to do.

Where does this knowledge reside? And what role does it play in me knowing the world and myself? Whether it is Plato’s notion of our true self being trapped in our bodies, or the Cartesian idea of spirits in a machine – the essential unity of being continues to remain in a fractured space. And in highly rational and technified ways of being that we construct as ideals, the decisions our bodies make for us fail to be valued. Dancer and ethicist Betty Block thinks of embodied knowing as the ability to interact with a thought or experience holistically that includes neural elements, efforts, memory, language, perception and attunement – all of which are integrated throughout the body and not just in the brain. In her words: ‘I not only think or know something cognitively, I know it neurally. It is a complete memory – almost a complete re-enactment. This is the ability I use when I dance.’

 

The tendency to think of the body as an entity that we inhabit has also influenced medicine, where the body is thought of as a ‘scientific entity’ that can be tweaked in order to be fixed. At best, the body becomes the medium through which the mind discloses itself; hence the expression ‘psychosomatic illness’. What about the notion of the body and how it experiences its ‘beingness’ in the world informs the brain – allowing the brain to create representations of ‘being’?

In some sense, I suppose, these were the very questions my body seemed to be asking as it lay injured and immobile. Perhaps dance was the most intimate way through which I knew myself.

In the months and early years that followed – that is exactly what I did. I danced without moving, sometimes through the night. I would rehearse every gesture, pivot on the heel, curve of the torso, from every pallavi and ashtapadi in Odissi that I had learnt. I rehearsed the exercises and the stretches, the eye movements and the torso deflections, the jumps and complex combinations embedded in my feet. All the while I lay still, and most of the time under a great deal of pain. I woke up, sometimes, perspiring from the effort. It made no physical sense to anyone but me, and at times not even to me, to my thinking self, that there was such effort involved in imagining movement.

 

Recent advances in neuroscience are beginning to show that imagining movement can take as long and as much effort as executing it. Italian neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolati and his group discovered a group of neurons in monkeys that become active when they watch another monkey perform a particular action. They called these ‘mirror neurons’ and proposed that they might in some way bridge perception and action. Although these new discoveries should be approached with some caution, this group has shown that observing movement activates the same muscle groups and motor circuits in the brain as actually executing the movements. Perhaps then, observing movement can in fact be tiring? Could it be that the intense way in which I remembered and imagined movement led me to being tired? And more importantly, was remembering movement leading to a remembered wellness? Does this make dancers’ brains different?

 

All dancers will know when a movement ‘feels right’. What is exceptional about the conditions under which movement is produced in dance is that range of parameters that she works with to produce movement – rhythm, music, flow, patterns, space, speed, direction. These variations in the production of movement also happen within an immediate context of community and the other. The teacher you learn from, the partners you dance with, an audience that watches you – each dyadic relationship exchanging and experiencing a narrative, an emotion, and an aesthetic.

If it is through the physical, the kinetic, the material, the temporal and spatial, along with their symbolic representations that we know the world and ourselves, then dance encompasses all this. Dance generates a type of kinetic energy as I move, those remembered positions a type of potential energy waiting to be released. My foot, a prime apparatus of movement, generates this kinetic energy employing spatial and temporal properties of the body. It is also an embodiment of feeling in the sense that the foot positions and pathways I repeat render what scholar Sreenath Nair calls the ‘collective ceremony of the bodily recollections’, throughout my being.

Dance, because of its use of the body, is perhaps the single most complex form of movement that we engage in – move the whole body to an external timekeeper (rhythm or beat), convey meaning through gesture, communicate with oneself and the audience consistently. If we know ourselves because we think, the question is what are we thinking about while dancing. Ideally, we are not thinking about the motor production, but something more global – qualities, feeling, phrasing or intentions.

The body has been central to Indian discourse. In Indian movement systems, the body has been unequivocally acknowledged as the only medium to access the body. This is not a circular statement in a context where access to the body is mediated through all means other than the body itself. The ways in which practice helps the very functioning of the corporeal logic and the perceptual demand of the body in performance has been embedded into these forms.

In our context, with such an extensive history and varied traditions of embodied practice, an investigation that moves beyond the discourse of dance as a socially contextualized art form is called for. Moving the focus to what our practices teach us about the lived body rather than the socially constructed body (which much of dance history puts at the centre of the discourse on dance), will possibly open up a new dialectic in practice.

 

A deep engagement with traditional movement arts reveals that we have ways of talking of embodiment in non-dualist terms, which Merleau-Ponty opens up the possibility of doing in the West. His contention that meaning and communication are fundamentally embodied practices or capacities is also echoed in the consideration of the practice of dance. Philosopher Alva Noe argues that perception is not something we know, but something we do. In this phenomenological approach to neuroscience, dance accords the possibility to understand movement and the ways in which movement shapes consciousness.

As we explore the nature and meaning of dance and what it means to emotions and bodily consciousness, we open up the possibility of shifting the ground on which we dance. The way we engage with teaching or learning dance, for instance. Moving away from an authoritarian, imitative model to one that is rooted in inquiry and process.

Dance is increasingly finding its way into traditional bastions of scientific research. In a technique called bodystorming (as opposed to ‘brainstorming’) molecular biologist David Odde and dancer/choreographer Carl Flink have found ways to model molecular movement within cells using dancers bodies. This form of modelling, ‘low-tech’ as it might seem, allows for an immediate visualization of movement within cells that would have taken a computer model months to reveal. Dancers and their ability to work with representational and non-representational movement, allows for the testing of hypotheses in ways that was not imagined before by scientists. Research based on this method is not conclusive, but generative. Scientists have an advantage in this situation that they do not in other conditions: they can ask the dancers if the rules of movement ‘feel right’. Dance is allowing scientists to see the invisible.

 

Movement and practice embed in us a bodily schema that connects the unseen to the seen, the real and unreal, the physical and the abstract. Dance is perhaps one of the most basic ways in which we can connect with the notion that abstraction can be a physical process, just as neuroscience is telling us that thought and mind are rooted in the physical. Movement is ‘presentness’ – it can only happen now. As I discover how and where its memory resides in me, I get closer to finding my answer to Why Dance?

Dance for its own sake, for finding the ultimate way of engaging with the body in its being, beyond performance, beyond being watched. Towards a way of being truly present to ourselves.

Fifteen years after the injury, as I watch my daughter fluidly dance those very same Odissi pallavis, I know – we dance, even as we are still.