- March 12, 2026
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(no subject)
FROM JONATHAN: SOME NOTES ON KRAKAUER MOTOR LEARNING PAPER 12TH MARCH 2026.
Here are some key concepts that seemed relevant to the Rethinking Choreography research (Guido you can maybe unpack these for us a bit, or point us towards other concepts I may have missed?):
Explicit or implicit learning (neuroscientists differ in opinion over whether motor learning of sequences is primarily implicit or explicit (cognitive); explicit contributions occur more in early learning and in more complex sequences; implicit learning that arises may simply be the automatization of an explicitly learned element order; practice leads to a reduction in the cognitive load associated with the task)
Faster and slower learning (slower learning lasts longer)
Improvements in performance (can also occur between practice sessions)
Higher level representation of sequence (abstract representation of sequence order forms as sequence is learned)
Continuous sequential actions (continuous single movements are comprised of sequential sub-elements)
Chunk structures (limit of number of individual movements that can be grouped into a single set; chunking begins with learning transitions between 2 movements; once learned the initial movement triggers the entire chunk; wrongly learned chunks that interrupt a run of optimum transitions remain despite long practice of improved version; chunking is currently understood as cognitive rather than motor learning)
Adaption (adaption as quicker then motor learning, but more transient)
Savings (adapting faster when meeting the same pertubation)
Sensory prediction (can alter future reactions if the expected consequence is different than expected)
Motor variability (even in a situation of perfect execution, this variability anticipates future error)
Retrograde interference (the learning of B interferes with the memory of previously adapting to A)
Interaction between two actions (second action updated to account for anticipated or observed spatial errors in the first action)
Generalization (examines the ability to transfer learned performance improvements to other effectors e.g., the other hand, or to novel but similar sequences: 'The finding that sequences can generalize provides evidence that representations of entire sequences are not movement-specific. This is not surprising given the evidence reviewed in the previous section indicating that the constituent chunks comprising a sequence are already likely to be representations of order rather than continuous motor actions.'
And here a a few questions that emerge for me in relation to this paper:
The motor learning experiments described here are mostly based on functional sports or craft-like movements (reaching etc.). What, if any, difference might occur in the context of movement that carries a sense of pleasure in pattern, rhythm or expressive meaning? Aesthetic aspects are seen here as connected to cognition rather than motor learning. What might this distinction mean in relation to the performance of sequenced movement in dance?
Do the arguments for or against explicit or implicit motor learning, impact our reflections on memorised or improvised approaches to dance sequences?
What's the difference for the dancer between motor adaptability and aesthetic adaptability and how might they be entangled when we dance?
Does the arrival at an abstract representation of order in the process of 'generalisation', suggest some connection to the 'feeling' of choreography as separate from movement?
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(no subject)
FROM JONATHAN: SOME NOTES FROM THE CONVERSATION WITH ADRIÁN YORIS 4TH FEBRUARY 2026.
Guido
We thought you'd be a good person to talk to for two reasons: dancers draw from somatic practice so are concerned with interoceptive experience, so I'd be interested to hear from a neuroscientific perspective as to what if anything you can feel; and that for me in the absence of an external musical rhythm that guides movement, dancers draw from internal rhythms.
Adrián
I can't help thinking about many things while Jonathan was introducing the topic. First of all the body has a choreography and everybody within movement has a specific choreography, we don't only have to think about dance.
A definition of the interoceptive: how the brain and body are connected and how that information is taken from the body. It makes me think of some studies in trauma for instance, where dance is used as a therapy to introduce changes at the level of memory. There's a connection between this research and how emotions are processed. How we are more accurate at detecting these signals in motion and use them in therapies.
One of the problems is how we measure interoceptive information. It has at least three sources of information: the heart, respiration and stomach. All of them come with methodological issues.
Bojana
I like when you make the link with emotions. This idea that everybody has a choreography also makes sense and it makes me think of social choreography. When I read your paper I wondered about whether hormones play a role? Dance is interested in pleasure hormones, and I wonder if dancers are imagining these affects?
Adrián
I should research on that to provide a proper answer, but stress hormones seem to affect interoceptive experience. However, they do this secretly, at a very slow pace. The stress hormones are particularly difficult to catch.
But you are not looking for a design at this point, it's a philosophical questioning at the moment.
Bojana
I like reading this in your paper that there is no robust evidence, which is bad news for the somaticians, but where are they getting the feelings from?
Adrián
The heart and respiration are connected by the autonomic system.
What happens when the signals are de-synchronised. This is interesting in terms of what a dancer feels in a repeating movement and so forth.
Guido
Normally you don't want to feel your interoceptive feelings, because you usually only do that when something is wrong.
Adrián
I've never found publications related to other organs than skin, heart, lungs, stomach.
However, my yoga practice that I do every week also asks that you tune into organs.
Bojana
The aesthetic expressions in somatic work are self-similar, to do with slowness and interior focus. It's eroded a sense of social liveness. It's become focussed on individuality. The interest in the motor paradigm is that it frees us from this introspection.
Adrián
Are you making a distinction between the anxiety of skilled dancing and the pleasure of 'just dancing'.
Guido
One interesting question for me is when the dancer intensively practices this somatic work over years, what are they becoming an expert in? Do they get better at perceiving their bodies, or do they get better at something else, for instance dual targeting their attention between themself and the outside world.
Adrián
I can share an image from cyclists: trained cyclists show the ability to be able to regulate exertion. During high demand those who have better experience in terms of regulating breathing have a better performance. This was related to the brain activity.
Jonathan
I think this does relate to dancers because dancers have used somatic practice to avoid injury by developing more efficient bodily use, which requires interoceptive sensitivity.
Adrián
I'm thinking also about pain. There's a gate theory of pain that says when the heart ejects blood to the blood stream there's a gate wherein nothing is felt even pain, but when blood pressure goes down is when most interoceptive information including pain is experienced. Also emotions showing in the face are related to this cycle.
Jonathan
Dancer talk about having a high pain threshold, so they're practicing to become more aware of interoceptive experience and at the same time blocking pain.
Bojana
I'd be interested in a dialogue between interoceptive understandings form dance and neuroscience.
Guido
I feel that aside from interoception as an experience, I'd like to understand these signals of breathing and heart as a source of felt choreography that provides a rhythm.
Jonathan
And the connection between interoception and sequencing.
Guido
The question is not whether somatic work changes something, it's whether it changes what was intended.
I feel like it might be good to talk to someone in meta-cognition (cognition about cognition as a mechanistic explanation to consciousness). For instance that what changes is not cognition, but how we deal with cognition.
Spinoza is still the groundwork for interoceptive research.
- February 16, 2026
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Lauren Scott
FROM HIP HOP ARTIST LAUREN SCOTT: AN INTERESTING OBSERVATION ABOUT IMPROVISED OR LEARNED SEQUENCES 16TH FEBRUARY 2026.
Lauren
I also think there’s a lot to be gained from exploring how a freestyler’s brain handles set choreography compared to stimulus-led improvisation. To me, the internal 'feel' and processing of these two tasks is drastically different. It would be worth looking into whether this subjective difference correlates with the activation of distinct neural pathways or levels of cognitive load.
- January 31, 2026
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From Jonathan
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.
- January 22, 2026
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(no subject)
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