FROM JONATHAN: SOME NOTES FROM THE CONVERSATION ABOUT METAPHOR 8TH JANUARY 2026.

Bojana

I terms of the use of metaphor in dance and science, it's clear cognitive science has a take on metaphor (Lackoff and Johnson 'Metaphors we live by').

Guido

Lackoff and Johnson is about how embodied cognition is grounded in the body (up and down etc.), which is different from the way that metaphors are a way of explaining and understanding science (often dependent on current technology), so do we do one or both?

Bojana

Is it important to determine which of the approaches is doing what, somatic work is creating poetry deliberately and fiction, so how do we discern these two registers and we'd benefit more from the literal and park aside the deliberately figurative as poetry.

Guido

The usefulness of a metaphor from a scientific sense, does it obscure or reveal something? The metaphor 'mind as computer' reveals in terms of rhythms and neuros firing, but the problem is that what gets obscured is that computers don't have an incentive to live; the disembodied sense, the difference between software and hardware, which doesn't work in terms of the human body. In terms of bringing together dancers and neuroscientists, the scientists will say they're not interested in the metaphors, but you just have to find a way to talk about it. They're not much in a practice of reflecting.

Guido

'The Idea of the Brain' Matthew Cobb, maps out metaphors of the brain.

Bojana

There's a mistrust of language amongst dancers so they're covering up for that by becoming creative about language.

Guido

I think we've stumbled on a commonality, as neuroscientists are also sceptical of language as they believe in numbers.

Guido

When I have dance researchers present they enjoy the clarity of literal description of experiment, a decisiveness in the scientific use of language that doesn't happen in dance. But I try to make clear it's not about truth, it's just about what appears in that moment to be possible to state. You need to set that frame before you start.

Bojana

So the demonstration of proof is acceptable for dancers so they accept them as facts, but not as truths.

Guido

There are rabbit holes that are useful to go down. Things we need to agree upon before we walk into a situation. Can we reveal everything that goes on in our bodies? Probably not.

Bojana

We have to have a minimum of facts that inform a framework within which we enter a conversation.

Bojana

Sporadically somatic issues arose in previous research, but we fended it off. We somehow shared a sceptical approach.

Jonathan

And maybe this sceptical approach is something we can share between science and somatics, so we're not searching for truths.

FROM JONATHAN: NOTES FROM THE MEETING WITH KATJA KORNYSHEVA 30TH JANUARY 2026.

Re-reading the notes I managed to take I'm aware of a few subtly new perspectives that jump out for me:

• Katja's image of the gesture as not monolithic but rather flexible to conditions (this seems to echo Ingold).

• Guido's comment that 'movement is also an act of sequencing, and sequencing may always be an act of moving', which I think challenges common views of movement in dance.

• Katja's observation that learned movements embrace low level synergies as well as more sequenced manifestations (I have an image here of more faint impulses of motor memory when I dance, which offers a bridge between fixed phrases and the impulses of improvisation).

• Kayja's interest in the possibility of a link between interoceptive experience and the pre-ordering of movement.

• Her distinction between bodily space and navigational space.

Anyway here's what I caught and forgive me if I've misquoted or misheard either of you!

CONVERSATION:

Katja

I'm coming from a musicians point of view if anything.

Competitive queuing paper potentially suggests that the gesture is not monolithic, but that they're built in a modular way allowing for flexibility, and at the last minute. During the final hundreds of milliseconds before movement you have two things occurring, the sequence and at the same time the timing or rhythmic element, they're in parallel but not integrated, so they can flexibly move around before the movement is initiated. Once the movement is initiated there's less flexibility. At present we're not yet able to find an adequate representation of this moment just before.

Bojana

How dancers articulate these boundaries between conscious and non-conscious. Because of the shift of the motor paradigm we wanted to question this. For some practitioners they feel the need to hold onto the idea of spontaneity.

For me what's new in what you're saying is the positionality in the moment before the movement is made.

Guido

To bring neuroscience knowledge into dance practice. What dance lacks is a working definition of how it works and how we're talking about it. For dancers there's a separation between dance and choreography. A lot of problems arise when you put dance into a medical context, like Parkinson's, and it makes a huge difference whether you use spontaneous or learned movement.

Your work brings together memory, sequencing and motor control, and so brings together the choreographic and motor control aspects, which makes your work and perspective very relevant here. It indicates that movement is also an act of sequencing, and sequencing may always be an act of moving.

Katja

I didn't know this distinction between dance and choreography. I'm thinking carefully what we mean by a learnt repertoire, from really low level synergies to more sequencing of these synergies, which may or may not become a synergy themself.

Are you also looking at medical applications or clinical applications?

Bojana

What is perhaps unusual is that Jonathan suggested a panoply of different dance forms.

For some people what we propose is confronting, in terms of the difference between improvisation and choreography.

Katja

I haven't made a link to interoceptive experience, but that could be related to the pre-ordering of movement. (Robert Hylton 'the bit before' and 'polysomatic' practice.

Guido

We're not doing any experiments, it's about data from conversations. I do see us producing a number of conceptual papers on motor control and sequencing which don't currently exist in dance neuroscience.

Katja

I've been integrating in anecdotal form about how this affects practice, particularly in relation to music, but I've never had the bandwidth to talk to musicians properly and initiate that dialogue. I don't have intention to produce academic papers in this space, but it's an act of engagement that matters and something that serves as general outreach in a cross-sector way. A lot of what my lab does is technological and around surgical skills, like stroke rehab etc., but art is missing currently, so I'd be interested from that perspective. If you think more than that would be useful I'd be happy to explore.

We have worked with the Royal College of Music about breakdown of skills from a clinical perspective. I'd be interested in understanding.

Bojana

The difference between how Jonathan and Matteo move in Both Sitting Duet.

Guido

The question of what can a dancer be aware of. Dancers from somatic practice often imagine they're able to experience more interoceptive information than they'r capable of. At one point does conscious behaviour come in?

Katja

There's unpublished data where people have secondary tasks to perform and there are still markers of pre-conscious decision making. I'm happy to comment on this, but we're lacking experiments that look only at that.

Bojana

When you use the word representations what do you mean?

Katja

They're distributed across the brain, so it's a super fuzzy term. For me we have a pragmatic definition which is there is information in brain patterns which differentiate between the two.

One idea is if it's in the hypocampus it's distributed laterally, in intrinsic rather than bodily space. It's more akin to navigation than body memory.

There's a lot of pushback as these ideas contradict previous models.

Bojana

Would one say a temporary alignment that's not always located in the same place?

Katja

It can be quite consistent in terms of patterns, but they're not always located in the same place.

Bojana

In terms of memory we observed how performing sequences for some is visual and for some is like music.

Katja

In dance there's a much stronger aspect of navigation than in music.

Guido

But you could say it's always a path through space whether it's temporal or spatial.