- July 6, 2026
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Jonathan - Studio research four notes
Jonathan - Studio research four, with neuroscientist Adrián Yoris, and dancers Gillie Kleiman and Katye Coe
DAY ONE
Sarah Garfinkel's definition of interoception:
Interoception is personal: a model of the internal world shaped by the context and the content of life experience.
GUIDO'S EXPLANATION OF ADRIÁN'S OPENING PAGE OF PRESENTATION
Left side of body cartoon - the left side is what we're reading interoceptively:
'Neural representation' is about different brain areas that process the interoceptive signal.
'Preconscious impact' is an interoceptive response that may not be felt directly.
'Nature of affluent signal' is about where the interoceptive sense is coming from.
Right side of body cartoon - the right side is about how we can respond to what we're reading:
'Accuracy' is the clarity of the signal.
'Insight' relates to the element of us judging where do certain signals come from and what do I trust or not trust.
'Appraisal' is the valence, is this a good or bad thing.
'Attribution' is to do with reflecting what might be causing the interoceptive experience.
ADRIÁN CONCLUSION OF PRESENTATION
Adrián:
I'm thinking how interoception can be a framework for what you're researching, not as a source of information, but as a dynamic process through which movement emerges.
IMAGINATION AND BODY IMAGE
Adrián:
In terms of dance you might ask are the limbs bigger?
SOMATIC SKILLS
Gillie:
I have a hunch that if you're someone who's done somatic practice then you have the possibility of an increased internal sense of what's happening.
Adrián:
Yes and we've looked at that also in terms of sports. Interoceptive neuroscientists are asking how much signal do we need in the body to be more aware of it?
Katye:
I'm thinking about the difference between when I'm practicing dancing or when, for instance, I'm in a meeting with other people like this: I'm aware I turn the volume up when I'm dancing; but when I make contact with you here I'm also tracking other things so I turn the internal sensation down.
Adrián:
Yes, there's a neuroscientist called Camilla North who's looking at that relationship between what we attend to internally and externally.
Katye:
The speed at which you can move between internal sensation and relationship externally when you dance is highly developed.
Adrián:
The switching on and off of the signal is a skill that you can learn.
Gillie:
I think different dance forms might privilege different aspects of this: somatic work privileges internal sensation, whereas other dance forms prioritise overriding that information in order to achieve something else.
Guido:
The classic example of that is ballet, where dancers have an increased pain threshold. It's the same with marathon runners, you have to dissociate to achieve what you're doing.
Adrián:
The more we exercise the better interoception we're going to have, and the more interoception we have the better performance we have during exercise. The brain is predicting priors and then reading them against the experience.
Katye:
Compared to the example of cycling or running though, in dance we're making much more unpredicable movements.
SOMATIC IMAGINATION
Bojana:
Some somatic practices are designated to repattern sequencing in order to prevent pain, but some are designated towards initiating movement from interoceptive bodily signals which don't exist in the neuroscientific model. I'm wondering to what extent can we account for this as something real, or what other mechanisms are happening when we imagine a feeling that is not thought possible to experience interoceptively, for instance to feel and move from the pancreas?
Adrián:
And answer to this could come from psychedelics where you have the experience of an expanded mind, and maybe dance also allows this expanded mind? Maybe dance can create this atmosphere within which a richer imagination can happen?
Katye:
I'm thinking of something I'm working on which is a bit like a learned sequence, because when you return again and again to a specific somatic sensation you do get a degree of accuracy through sensation which becomes real. It becomes then a motor truth. If I use that image it develops into a particular way of being with that sensation, which produces a particular kind of movement.
CHOREOGRAPHY AND INTEROCEPTIVE REGULATION
Adrián:
Perhaps choreography emerges from physiological regulation?
Guido:
For fatigue itself to be considered something that causes choreographic change, switches the usual approach to choreography.
Adrián:
Might a choreographic transition occur, for instance, when your heartrate is too high, and what would the coordinates be for that transition?
Katye:
I know when I'm improvising and I jump, there's only so much jumping I can do, so there has to be an awareness, pre-exhaustion, that allows me to pass into something else.
Jonathan:
I transition from an active to a less active state, led by my physiological need, for instance tiredness, but I attribute it to a creative decision.
INTEROCEPTION AND PERFORMANCE
Katye:
The act of putting something in front of people takes me a bit to my edge spaces, away from the regulation of my movement and towards disregulation.
Bojana:
Could it be that performance blocks interoception? That the adrenaline and focus on external relationship with audience blocks it? Could it be that dance is more regulating in a studio or in a social situation?
Katye:
The studio is where I practice in order to develop the materials and awareness I’ll work with when I go into the situation of a performance. The situations where I perform are often short lived, whereas if I’m in a ballet I’m doing it often enough to know it, and then the transitions within the work are much more gentle. The notion of interoception as a creative gateway is much more akin to the situations I find myself in, where the irregulation of not knowing is bigger than the regulation of something repeated often.
Bojana:
There’s a time in the studio and a time onstage, and the time onstage is what Edward Said called ‘extreme occasion’. The training of interoception happens in the studio but not onstage.
Adrián:
In psychology when you’re faced by judgement there’s a fight or flight response driven by the release of adrenaline. Is the adrenaline more in performance or in the studio?
Katye:
Trauma is too much, too fast, too soon. In terms of dance, in the studio we slow things down, pause, pull things apart, feel something again, feel something differently. This suggest interoception as a way to practice experiencing more, but with appropriate distance.
DANCING AND INTEROCEPTIVE SIGNALS
Adrián:
The strength of the body signals is the first thing we look at, but in dance the experience of interoception seems less; less pain, tiredness etc.
Gillie:
In dance the choreography does some kind of remixing of the salience; for instance the choreography might demand that I feel my shoulder a lot.
Adrián:
Do you feel joy from that? Is the valence of the experience positive or could it become negative?
Katye:
I was thinking of this word cascade, when you’re turning up awareness of certain things and at the same time maybe turning down awareness of pain. I can dj the volume of the different things.
Adrián:
Can you fine tune those signals when you dance?
Katye:
Yes.
Guido:
Your interoceptive signals change all the time to help recognise things you’re doing that don’t help. What I feel Katye and Gillie are referring to is training the body to open up to the ambiguities of these bodily signals.
DAY TWO
Writing task for Gillie and Katye:
Write a reflective text describing what kinds of interoceptive experience you're aware of when you improvise, including things you recognise after they occur as well as things you focus deliberately on or introduce deliberately.
DANCING, CHOREOGRAPHY AND PAIN
Kayte:
I have hip pain and I'm aware that when I move I'm opening up new pathways. What I start to understand for myself in practice is that I'm shaping motor action specifically to avoid chronic pain, as the pain is shaping how I move through space. In some ways repatterning in response to pain feels very much like set material.
However, I'm asking myself how much pain should or shouldn't be included in this conversation about choreography because it gets a lot of bandwidth, but it feels like a different conversation.
Guido:
There is the idea that pain might determine choreographic decisions I make, but also our heart, our stomach, our blood pressure have rhythms and they structure whatever we do.
INTEROCEPTIVE REGULATION, DANCING AND EMOTION
In relation to Katye's statement from the previous day:
Katye:
I'm thinking of something I'm working on which is a bit like a learned sequence, because when you return again and again to a specific somatic sensation you do get a degree of accuracy through sensation which becomes real. It becomes then a motor truth. If I use that image it develops into a particular way of being with that sensation, which produces a particular kind of movement.
Gillie:
You're using the repetition of the somatic sensation to access a choreographic effect or as a choreographic tool. On the other hand you might start with a motor action which eventually accesses an interoceptive or emotional state.
Katye:
Is the tone of awareness biased towards one aspect, which temporarily blocks access to the other aspect? As you learn a skill you increase the possibility to give more attention to other aspects. The feelings were there, but the focus on technique temporarily hid them.
Guido:
The difference between technique and interpretation is exactly about the difference between affect expression and motor control.
Dance forms that emphasise a difference between dance and choreography, tend also to differentiate between technique and interpretation. Ballet is a good example of this.
CHOREOGRAPHY AND OFFLOADING
Gillie:
With William Forsythe he worked with a process of offloading by overloading.
Katye:
When I have to work with too much to attend to I perform my best, because it offloads the self-conscious, and you might say even the self.
- June 26, 2026
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Jonathan - notes from Studio research 3
Jonathan - notes from Studio research 3
MEMORY AND RETRIEVAL
"Memory is context and the richer the context the easier it becomes to retrieve all the elements of the materials."
Guido Orgs
"It strikes me that remembering the right thing is part of the process and in itself a creative process. Remembering is not just going back to something as it was, but a creative process in its own right.""
Guido Orgs
"Maybe all practice is a form of retrieval, but which remains adaptive to changing context and so is always anyway moving forwards? This is different from the perspective that sees retrieval as a form of looking back that traps us into set ways."
Jonathan Burrows
TASK 1
Retrieval
What is the context that allows the retrieval of what you are doing?
Can you describe this context in detail and including internal and external factors? Body; state; mental and emotional state; adrenaline; expectation, detail of movement, groove; flow; music; clothes; shoes; (or not) place; time of day; other people; memory; understanding of style; story; image; cultural understanding/ lineage/ ancestory/cultural authority etc.
Suba Subramainiam
Retrieving a Jathi I have known for many years:
(A Jathi is a structured combination of footwork and gestures set to a rhythmic pattern in Bharatanatyam dance.)
"This is one of the bits of Bharatanatyam that I know I know. It starts in my head, with reciting the Jathi over and over to catch the rhythm; I even slip into the introductory pattern that never appears in the movement material itself, a sort of prelude that strangely my body goes to. That preparatory moment feels important. Slowly the reciting becomes something more textured, not just rhythm but groove in the way it's said. I'm finding where the intonations are that then translate into the body when I move.
As I recite I am transported back to the hall where I first learned it; my teacher’s voice, the crack of stick on stick. I feel a bit like I'm in two spaces at the same time. Inside the memory there is not only my own training, but even as part of this process of research here with the people here, an awareness that the lineage is old and much longer, and of the privilege to know and practice it, albeit infrequently.
My body automatically moves into a state of readiness. It just drops into Araimandi (the core posture of Bharatanatyam), lifting through the spine and widening across the chest. I notice the alignments, the symmetry (perhaps because I am analysing now instead of simply focussing on the counts and doing the Jathi), yet it all feels instantly “correct”. It's like it just waits in my muscles.
As the feet start to work, the groove of the Tala begins to flow through me. I’m realising that I am remembering the Jathi like a song and then I start moving to that song…weight shifting, accents of the song in the movements. There is a sense of being carried by the form as much as doing it. It all feels very engrained in the body. I start to become more aware of where I am looking and my gaze changes to being more focused. This happens even in the marking of the Jathi, not just in the doing of it.
It all feels very natural, yet alien to the way I seem to move when I dance these days, where I'm much freer in social situations and the gaze and focus so different. It’s much more about the “collective effervescence” in a club dancing together to house music, which is my go-to dancing these days. I miss the Bharatanatyam being part of my “dance practice”, whatever that actually means…
It feels very nostalgic, makes me want to go to a class and practice these Jathis within a group and feel each other’s energies and presence. The nostalgia is manyfold: the slight yearning for that younger fitter body that could do the Jathi over and over again; nostalgia for the immersive nature of the whole culture of Bharatanatyam classes; but also just being with my teacher and learning to that level again. There is a bit of pride and a deep gratitude. Pride that my body still remembers. That despite distance and change, the groove, the structure, the flow of this Jathi is still accessible to me.
The more I do the Jathi the more my own variations begin to creep in. I'm aware of fragments I once developed for choreographic tasks. They arrive almost as strongly as the taught material and I have to work quite hard to strip them away, to dig back to the original phrase as I first received and learned it.
Physically, the retrieval of the movement also reminds me of the various other body alignments I learned after learning it from my teacher all those years ago. I start to wonder if what I'm remembering in my body is a culmination of what was taught to me as the “original” and also what I've learned since and which remains in my body now, which changes the way I dance the Jathi."
HABITUS
Why do the sequences from an old piece feel completely unknown at first and then suddenly very familiar? How much is it to do with all contexts being present - other people, sound, setting, performance - and how do those external elements connect to internal motor sequences?
During the process of retrieving 7 different pieces of work made over 23 years for a retrospective in Vienna, I realised I was passing through a series of similar stages with each piece, particularly the ones I hadn't done for a few years: first of all looking at the score and video and feeling it like an alien thing, completely incomprehensible; then a slow process of mental figuring out, combined with slow retrieval of still present physical memory, usually tethered to a particular kind of chanted rhythm in the mind; then at a sudden moment the larger work becoming something that felt not only owned, but seemed again to define me. I observed this moment of synthesis was happening when external elements came together to complete the context; my collaborator Matteo, music, objects, place; even bodily alignment and position. The most interesting example was the performanc Cheap Lecture, where I'd rehearsed hard to remaster the rhythmic precision of rapidly chanted words in relation to music, but was still struggling. Finally, however, I rehearsed it with the Keynote projections present throughout the piece, holding the projection pointer in my right hand and using my thumb to click rhythmically through 140 or so slides timed exactly to the spoken words. Immediately my thumb was involved the rhythmic precision of the words returned. I discussed this with Guido Orgs and he said it's like the example the neuroscientist John Krakauer gives, where you can't remember your pin number until you type; the sequence is only a sequence of actions and you can't retrieve it until you action it (which is what Ingold says in relation to 'whistling the tune is rembering it'). Guido added, "Memory is context and the richer the context the easier it becomes to retrieve all the elements of the materials.
"Habitus is defined by Bourdieu as 'structuring structures': it's not fixed and is always larger than the individual; It's social and learned body to body. In contemporaneity the authority was replaced by 10,000 hours; you have to put in the hours and that creates the habitus. The anthropologist Greg Downey's use of the word 'Baroque' reflects the excess of habitus. Because of Bourdieu's 'structuring structures', Downey wants to argue that it's more than imitating the movement, it's also imitating all the other aspects that make up the context. However, in our research we're trying to respect the motor aspects equal to the other contextual elements, partly in response to the refusal of somatic work to include motor aspects."
Bojana Cvejić
"In reading the Greg Downey essay, I think there are at least two ways of understanding that happen when one learns and extensively practices movement sequences, and I’m not sure I’m always clear about which one he’s talking.
There’s an understanding that relates to the movement sequences themselves, how the movement feels, familiarity but also forgetting and remembering as you have described when working on your retrospective.
There’s another kind of understanding which relates to the names of specific actions sequences, the meanings they might have as in subha’s practices or the imagery (e. g. robot/puppet) that Lauren seems to be working with.
I’m not sure I fully understand what downey means by habitus, but my impression is that he’s trying to link skill and practice to culture more broadly which resonates also with Ingold (skill is more than just tacit motor knowledge).
If I understand correctly then downey tries to bridge the gap between tacit knowledge and culture via imitation and common coding theory. In other words, understanding of capoeira as a cultural practice somehow automatically arises through practicing capoeira (i.e. doing rather than talking).
My point is that this is asking too much from imitation learning and from mirror neurons, understanding of what movements mean does not automatically result in becoming part of a culture. If I take daily yoga classes in my local gym with a PT I will gain a lot of knowledge and understanding of yoga practice, but that knowledge will arguably be quite different from yoga if I had practiced it in its original cultural context.
The paper that I shared makes a similar distinction with respect to specific actions. Actions can be understood and described as visual events with meanings, I can know a labour HipHop or classical indian dance without having e er practiced it - this also relates to the distinction between our top left and top right quadrants.
Embodied cognition accounts of knowledge acquisition sometimes have a tendency to blur the distinction between conceptual/declarative understanding and motoric/procedural understanding. It is one thing to say that initially the brain can only makes sense of the world by interacting with it, but it’s another thing to say that all knowledge acquired is embodied knowledge, or that all understanding has to be embodied, I don’t think the latter is possible. it’s perfectly possible to be a medieval historian without ever having lived in the middle ages."
Guido Orgs email
"For analytic and pragmatist philosophy, theory would be present as atmosphere, what the eye cannot decry, culture.
It seems to me, and this is my educated guess or a working hypothesis: dancing culture is a precondition for a more deep learning; it provides belief without conceptual knowledge, people imitate and attach belief to the imitation because the context is conducive and facilitates learning; this doesn't exclude the possibility of learning a sequence outside the context it is embedded in, and best learnt, and as you say Guido, abstraction in decoding must happen somewhere in the brain. The sense of meaning can be transmitted through a context without that the dancer can explain it discursively. The declarative is somewhat metalinguistic, it requires reflection that the master has. Like Wittgenstein's open concept of language game, we speak language and implicitly apply its rules without being able to name the rules. That's what habitus relies upon, language games."
Bojana Cvejić
"Some aspect of habitus must be shared."
Bojana Cvejić
Talking online to anthropologist Greg Downey in Sydney:
"Habitus to me becomes a kind of restrictive thing, it ends discussions where they should begin, it's become an end point. I'm happy with a more vague explanation; the habitis theory gets straight to the answer, but I'd rather stay with the question. The idea that habitus is a monolithic thing is ridiculous, there's a much more interesting alchemy with a person's singular ability to resonate with another person's skills."
"I think about habitus as a place not a concept. When I hear Salsa my body fires up; it's not about the choreography it's to do with everything that surrounds the dance. To me that never happens in modern dance. Breaking things down is contrary to that enmeshment that defines habitus. If you're in this mode of tearing down you can't get there."
"I think the dancing out of your skin experience is an extraordinary part of dancing. It's not captured by this retrieval model. You don't walk up to it you leap to it out of the context. It's like being danced."
"I think there are different ways of getting to movements and recording them: are you seeing this from the outside as though in a mirror?; or from the feeling on the inside? As an anthropologist I'm inherently suspicious of single theories where I think a lot is happening. There are probably multiple ways to recall motions. It would make sense also if there was also a degeneracy, so quite a bit of structural redundancy. Even the move you know, you have to learn it again to refine it."
"It strikes me that remembering the right thing is part of the process and in itself a creative process. Remembering is not just going back to something as it was, but a creative process in its own right.""
Guido Orgs
"Embodied cognition accounts of knowledge acquisition sometimes have a tendency to blur the distinction between conceptual/declarative understanding and motoric/procedural understanding. It's one thing to say that initially the brain can only makes sense of the world by interacting with it, but it’s another thing to say that all knowledge acquired is embodied knowledge, or that all understanding has to be embodied, I don’t think the latter is possible. it’s perfectly possible to be a medieval historian without ever having lived in the middle ages."
Guido Orgs
IMITATION
"Imitation can be a way in and as a beginner it makes sense, but being an individual is also valued; there's a concept in hip hop called 'biting', which describes inappropriate copying of another person's style."
Lauren Scott
"What I see is that imitation is a creative act as well."
Guido Orgs
MIRROR NEURONS
The arguments in the Greg Downey 'Practice without theory' paper rely heavily on mirror neuron research, and as such are subject to the same questions and criticisms, for example:
1) At what level of neural motor control does imitation take place? Do people imitate movements or movement intentions? In order to copy movements from another person some kind of abstraction needs to happen because bodies are different, so even imitation of very simple movements can’t be completely 'without theory', the brain must make some assumptions or predictions about what to translate from another person.
2) Action imitation is different from action understanding. Contrary to what early accounts of imitation suggest, being able to perform an action does not mean that I understand what that action means. Similarly, I don’t need to perform an action in order to understand. The conceptual meaning of actions is processed distinctly from the motor properties.
" The discovery of mirror neurons in the 1990s was an accident where monkeys were wired up to test their motor skills in taking a nut, but the monkey's neurons fired just watching the handler place the nut."
Guido Orgs
COLLECTIVE DOING
"The cipher is sometimes about more than the individual"
Lauren Scott
- June 18, 2026
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Re: Summary Movement Quadrants
Thank you so much Guido I will add this now to the website and we will announce the website in the next C-DaRE Newsletter. Lily will also put out links on C-DaRE social media, and I'll send you the link again to share yourselves and any short descriptive text we use to publicise it. Meanwhile anything you want to add as we go along would be welcome. It's designed to allow a fruitful overlap of parallel questions and discoveries, and we don't need to sum stuff up yet.
Jonathan
On Thu, 18 Jun 2026 at 08:36, Guido Orgs <guido.orgs@ucl.ac.uk> wrote:Altered a few typos, use this one :)
Guido Orgs | Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience | Movement & Performance Group Leader | Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
Email: guido.orgs@ucl.ac.uk
NEUROLIVE project
Here, history happens. Find out more about our bicentenary.
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Hi Jonathan, Hi Bojana,
See below a short summary of the quadrants for the website!
Best Guido
Movement Sequencing in Dance
Dancing begins with learning new or remembering known movement sequences, alone or together with others. Learning and remembering movement sequences involves both explicit and implicit processes. Historically, the acquisition of motor skills has been viewed as progressing from an initially explicit, slow, deliberate, conscious and effortful stage to an implicit, fast, automatic, unconscious and effortless state (Fitts and Posner, 1967). Many motor skills that we possess appear to follow this pattern: once learnt, cycling does not seem to require many cognitive resources to be performed successfully. In fact, paying explicit attention to the act of cycling may even disrupt fluent performance. However, more recent evidence in motor control research suggests that explicit processes remain important even for the skills of highly over-learnt actions and skills. Similarly, even learning a new skill equally involves implicit processing from the outset and is by no means entirely explicit (Krakauer et al., 2019).
The knowledge that is acquired in the process of motor learning is procedural sensorimotor knowledge and relates to howa movement is performed. This contrasts with declarative, conceptual knowledge that can be expressed and transmitted through language. Procedural knowledge differs from declarative knowledge in that it cannot be easily verbalised. I cannot teach someone how to swim by explaining it. To learn how to swim you have to try yourself. In contrast the knowledge of what swimming isconstitutes declarative knowledge that can be described, transmitted and understood through language alone.
However, embodied cognition accounts of language acquisition have long argued that even seemingly “pure” conceptual knowledge is grounded in our bodily experience. That may well be true, but humans do possess representations of movements that are not necessarily tied to having performed these movements, but to their visual experience and conceptual knowledge. Knowledge about what movements mean can be transmitted without being able to perform these movement. One can become a historian of the middle ages without ever having lived in the middle ages.
We can apply these two dimensions of knowledge (procedural/declarative) and knowledge acquisition (explicit/implicit) to the learning and remembering of movement sequences and to dance (see diagram above). Traditional accounts of motor learning locate skill learning as transition from the top right to the bottom right quadrant. Learning a new dance form involves a slow deliberate process in which new movements become automatised and exit awareness. However, learning a new form also builds new conceptual knowledge (top left quadrant). Learning a new dance form may include names for specific steps or movement qualities [STANCE? MAYBE AN EXAMPLE FROM POPPING HERE?]. Explicit conceptual knowledge is acquired together with implicit procedural knowledge about how to perform new movements.
From an anthropological perspective, skill learning and transmission involve not only sensorimotor processes but are embedded in a cultural context that is primarily conceptual/declarative, a specific set of beliefs, rules and values. In dance practice, this knowledge might cover how to engage with teachers or aesthetic dimensions about what is deemed beautiful and what isn’t. Though in principle declarative, this knowledge may not necessary be explicit or easily accessible to the person holding it (bottom left quadrant).
Overall, dancing involves knowledge from all four quadrants. Dancers always use and acquire knowledge across all four quadrants when they practice a known form and when they learn or teach a new form. This puts into question a traditional distinction between dance as a purely procedural implicitly skill (right side quadrants) and choreography as the explicit, conceptual composition of movement elements in a specific cultural context (left side quadrants).
Guido Orgs | Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience | Movement & Performance Group Leader | Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
Email: guido.orgs@ucl.ac.uk
NEUROLIVE project
Here, history happens. Find out more about our bicentenary.
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- May 20, 2026
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(no subject)
FROM JONATHAN SOME NOTES FROM THE 2nd STUDIO RESEARCH PERIOD, 18TH/19TH MAY 2026
Notes 18th/19th May
STANCE AND MODE CHANGE
'Funmi:
I work sometimes with what I called 'stances'. Every time I get to a new stance, or position, in relation to gravity, then I can bring in my own improvisation. I change the texture. The stance is a marker. Posture is a very important thing in every dance form. Once you shift the posture you change the dance.'
Lauren:
There's something called 'posing' in Popping, which is similar to the idea of stance. My teacher calls it 'mode change.
Katja:
It's a somatosensory anchor. You're planning contextual things to initiate your improvisation through. The content of your motor output emerges through this anchor.
Guido:
By setting a different stance you access different reflex actions. It's a way of setting some conditions, in order to tap into these less conscious possibilities.
Lauren:
I was thinking about sequencing and for me music plays a huge part in determining the sequence. Often the different stances or styles are overlapping. There are many layers to sequences. For me what stuck with me is how certain postures can trigger the adjustment of something. If I compress my chest I automatically trigger a waving movement. So the sequence is connected to the drill you've done in relation to that posture.
'Funmi:
When Lauren spoke about pathways I recognised that, and how when you reach a certain place there's a switch and you change to a different movement. The pathway you create is dependent upon particular stances which release particular vibrations. To do this transition I realise I have to set the next stance here and then the swing happens.
Guido:
Is the expressive change triggered by the thing you do, or do you start with the expression?
'Funmi:
I don't know what comes first. I shift into a stance usually triggered by something I've heard in the music, and then I go more deeply into the expression. I don't know if it's the movement or if it's the memory of where that movement comes from. There's an inward gaze, which is about you, and then there's the outward gaze. Certain stances suggest certain modes. I started to work on this movement as classroom material so it wasn't meant to mean anything except for certain physical qualities, but then I thought I liked this phrase so I started to find what expression was in it.
Guido:
You've offloaded the sequencing to the music, so you can decide on other levels of organisation. The building block there is a continuous one, and the sequence depends on what petubations you add to the buidling blocks.
Katja:
When you dance to music you also have competitive queuing of the sound, in terms of your expectation of what could happen.
Lauren:
I think you can accent certain tones within the stance itself, so different things can emerge from one stance.
PLANNING HORIZON
Katja:
I'd like to ask something around the planning horizon, with something that's well known or something that's unfamiliar.'
Katja Kornysheva
Lauren:
If learned movement is well rehearsed then it can feel like improvisation, but if I'm learning something fresh the planning is a couple of steps ahead.
'Funmi:
I find fixed choreography very difficult and I think quite far ahead. With improvisation I have to warm up because the more I dance the more I get the movement, otherwise it's just a skeleton of the movement. Your body and mind have to get to a place where they're playing with energy.
Katja:
Not every movement is controlled, they're also emergent.
SEQUENCING AND INDIVIDUAL MOVEMENTS
Kayja:
Imagine you're planning a sequence ahead of time. If you don't go ahead with it but someone asks you to show a part of it, the separate part of it is harder to access.
Bojana:
You have all the elements there but they're difficult to retrieve by themselves, because they're now part of the sequence.
Katja:
Yes.
Guido:
With the competitive queuing paradigm you learn a sequence with fingers and buttons, then when you see a red light, for instance, you're asked to perform the sequence. However, if I cue you to produce the sequence but I ask you to start with the third finger, it's harder to remember it. You have these gestural elements of the finger pushes, but when you but them into the context of a sequence the gestural element is coded with the other elements.
DISCRETE AND CONTINUOUS
Guido:
It sounds Katja like you're saying it's all discrete, seperated into discrete blocks. So what's the connection between discrete and continuous? This maps the division between choreography as discrete and dance as continous.
Katja:
The majority of the sequences we produce are internally discrete. I would challenge you to find a skilled sequence that's not recombinable...we tend to take the language as being how it looks rather than what's happening internally. It may look continuous but at the same time it's divided into discrete parts.
Guido:
What disguises as continuity when we dance is often based on other cycles, like walking.
Bojana:
The continuity for a dancer is only a matter of perception. Once we have the modular blocks, the discrete blocks of the sequence, the perception is that flow is happening.
DISRUPTING THE SEQUENCE
Katja:
How would you describe the disruption of the edges of the sequences?
Lauren:
I was giving myself concepts. When I say a pathway I mean a journey that I then isolate or break up. With a waving pathway I can change speed, shape or quality. When I think of Popping I think of a journey. Finding variation within the technique.
'Funmi:
I got to the limits of changing the dance as I knew it. There's a limit to the disruption because otherwise you're not disrupting anything anymore.
Katja:
I was interested that the change was uncomfortable but then becomes familiar. In the brain you would have these attractor states.
REPETITION
'Funmi:
We don't repeat we go deeper in. Because the dance style this movement is based on uses a lot of momentum, it feels like a loop rather than just repeating. And if you keep going you might shift the initiating impulse, and that would change the movement. So you have to be careful with that if you don't want to progress to a different movement.
RESIDUAL MEMORY
'Funmi:
When I was in the (dance company) Cholmondeleys there was a cancan sequence and my leg was always one count behind everyone else. I realised I come from African dance so I bent my knees before I kicked my leg, so in the end I had to add an extra-fast beat for the knee-bend so my leg kicked at the right time. In forms of West Coast African dance you start with your right foot, and when I did contemporary dance class and was asked to start with my left it was chaos.
TEMPLATES
Katja:
The accepted definition of synergy is a combination of muscle pattern and spatio-temporal information. The motor learning is embedded completely in sensory information. The cerebellum combines these informations from other parts of the brain and transforms them in real time. The neurons fire 200 times a second. If you don't have the sensorimotor template for the ballet arms you have to make it.
WALKING TEMPLATE
Guido:
I'm thinking more and more how all dance is walking. We have a very strong patterning for walking.
DYSTONIA
Katja:
In order to have flexibility to learn quickly and adapt in the moment the building blocks are modular. With musicians and some dance and sports you have this condition called dystonia, where you suddenly have a curling in a part of your body which prevents you from doing the art-form or sport. One perspective is that you've built up such a strong skill that it's become inflexible.
TECHNIQUE AND VOCABULARY'
Lauren:
For me Popping is the hitting which is the contraction and release that underpins it. The hitting is the technique but not the vocabulary. You work from principles.
- May 17, 2026
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additional question/ suggested reformulation from Bojana
Is there anything besides movement sequences that organizes the order in which they come? To what extent does storytelling and meanings conveyed in gestures operate through memory? are there situations and ways in which storytelling and meaningful gestures effectuate a disruption?
-
From Jonathan: draft questions for the 2nd interview sessions
Draft questions for 2nd studio research:
How many things can you prepare at the same time? How many options do you have at your disposal? To what extent are you aware or not of these possible options?
If you make movement that's remembered, what freedoms remain that you can still take within that movement? At what point are you able to choose something new?
If you disrupt the flow of your movement, what is informing that disruption and how far ahead are you aware that disruption might happen?
What's the relationship between music and your own practce and to what extent does music help or hinder your freedom to choose?
What aspects of storytelling, alter and allow memory and disruption of sequence?
Within the conscious and unconscious choices occuring as you dance when and why is it no longer Popping or a West Coast African dance form?
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29.03.2026.DAY 2
29.03.2026.DAY 2
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Comfort and discomfort in the slow learning process
•
repetition when not knowing - gillie speaks about the difference between not-knowing and when there is more to it
•
a lot is happening while learning if you don't clamp (Krakauer)
•
ballroom styles where the third thing between partners emerges and leads us
•
in partnering, when the partner is versed, the partner can do the top left quadrant (and cognitively off-load the partner)
•
the example of gillie -the performers were cognitively offloaded from decision- making, yet they had a lot to do
Tim Ingold - skilful practice is normally thought to be unreflective, unconscious and automatic; reflection isn't just
about evaluation
Guido : Ingold scrambles various categories in the opposition between the upper left and lower right quadrant which reflects dominant thinking in dance
•
What is memorized isn't fixed; it changes with the internal and external conditions
it' s alive, at no point it is fixed (Suba)
•
part of our training it's to keep alive
•
Gillie -emergence - noticing something unnamed & undecided that then becomes the thing you are doing
•
Gillie → offloading helps performance
•
Guido . → when performing you don't want to have the self- consciousness on the left side but you want to be on the
right side (that's where you get your bodily satisfaction)
3 strategies:
•
giving it to another person
•
overloading on the left upper side
•
eliminated the left side and attempt to move from the right bottom to the top right
Choreography-refreshing the space in between the one dancing and the one watching -that's the social Jonathan
Bojana's response: As an amateur dancer I don't distinguish between the familiar and the unfamiliar. I am happy when I sustain a flow without thinking What's next I become more aware & self-conscious when I repeat movements. It's as if I' m filling the void until the next thing reappears unawares. My criteria shifted between:
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this feels nice - I'm stretching, the pain is going away, so this movement is useful
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I recognize this exercise from the body practices I've done (this rarely happened, yet a few familiar moves cropped up)
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I'm thinking while moving, and my thoughts are unrelated to the embodiment I'm experiencing
Gillie: wish to move is stronger than the wish to stay focused;
the identification of this thing is always fleeting (which parameter or aspect? I don't how); I could tell you which parts should be doing it, but those could change and some parts would remain the same in a dance-making process, I would tweak the score if it didn't produce "this" (what works, what satisfies the hunch)
B: chiselling the tool (score) not the outcome
G: I am not using scores for the sake of openness and egalitarianism
S: what do I feel like moving today? physicalizing what my body needed. Transitions were slow nothing driving it, except the physical need. The gestures crept in without precision they usually have. then it started becoming a thing - why was i moving in and out of gestures then I started wondering about the meaning making in what was being seen in relation to precision what is "this works"
J: "imprecision" is the thing I am doing
Guido: the context of- S. Davies studio I had the memory of all the tasks; so I then focused on my tasks in relation to the gradient, the upper left -distinct, disconnected the moment I start working with the weight I was in the lower right; my strategy:
establish a rhythm; transpose but between the body parts
- opportunity to get a stretch, what is useful and not creative
Guido: music offloads' music as a cover - it's there, providing meaning regardless of what I'm doing, it gives temporal frame and rhythm
Jonathan: Deborah Hay - start from something you don't know and repeat it until it becomes something that matters
choreography as metacognition involves strategies you discover and then apply to gain different levels of awareness
Jonathan - fixed time-frame, like a score, a matter of cognitive off-loading aware of internal (closed eyes) and external doing mapping myself in the room awareness of being container
of multiple forms; they crop up with unclarity: I don'tcare much
Buszaki - discovered brain rhythm ; they never stop, rhythms change, it self-sustains
the philosophical concepts of mind, attention. perception &
action - the same brain process
The syntax in the brain is prior to bodily experience. We are born with it; however it is only due to our interaction with
world and embodied
Andy Clark developed the thesis about predictive coding; we have memory in order to anticipate Daniel Wolpert -we need the brain to move
the brain comes with a preformed dictionary of meaningless words - the behavioral significance is acquired through
exploration
I speculate that the roots of language and musical syntax
emanate from this native neural Syntax. All this about acquiring meaning is thanks to communication
social; the temporal range
250 milise-1sec - time of interaction
All learning is social interaction, because this is all that matters for survival
SUBA - If I search for the new, I am thinking: How could I make the vocabulary that I have work for me? I was trying to make the moments of discomfort but not that it looks
uncomfortable. I wasn't chunking, always going to the beginning. Now I could add and treat it like a chunk, I restarted from the point which was fresh, I just learnt it and I
would have to build simplify it from there
GILLIE & JONATHAN
the memory of one movement is linked to the memory of another; breath internal to the rhythm of daily
teaching does not only convey movements, but you convey chunks, the whole cognitive structure you do it intuitively
GESTALT - spatial; temporal working memory -3-4 elements
that's why we divide phone numbers by 3s & 4s
Sociality can increase memorization interlocking time
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- April 6, 2026
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(no subject)
FROM JONATHAN SOME NOTES FROM THE 1ST STUDIO RESEARCH DAY, 28TH MARCH 2026.
1st task - Work with movement that draws on already embodied forms, coordinations, types of movement, default pathways, habits? How do you experience or not the existence or emergence of movement/sequences with a sense of syntax (beginning, end, rhythmic and logical connection)? Sequence here and throughout is used as a descriptor of links between movements, rather than an aesthetic category of dance.
Gillie's responses:
Repetition is a response to not knowing what to do.
I definitely have units of movement or units of action which are 6 or 7 movements long.
There's an order of things I do then it becomes about sensation seeking, and this is the pattern of what I do, how I organise my dancing.
When I'm dancing I'm moving between quadrants.
When you say choreography is about a feeling of how things transition into another, it sound like something is only choreography if it's right? Some choreography is wrong.
Suba's responses:
The thing that gives me the ground from which to shift things is the rhythmic structure.
I wanted to change the speed of the movement within the rhythmic structure, to slow it down, to feel it.
Something around the physical me moving, and then the form and the movement that's in my body.
If I was only classically trained could I access this conversation? I'm curious and want to investigate whether these things do happen in Bharatanatyam, but which are languaged differently.
2nd task - Move while focussing your awareness on shifts between pre-embodied (but unaware) form, form you are aware of, experienced flow or reflex movement. How frequently do you experience a shift? What kinds of overlap occur?
Gillie's responses:
I noticed a lot of a kind of transition between something not decided and not named, and then I'd notice myself doing it and it would become the thing that I was doing.
I was struggling to escape the overlaps (between quadrants). There is a sense of needing for it to read as dancing.
Suba's responses:
So there was a lot of conscious work to undo that pre-embodied form creeping in. Something kept creeping in gesturally. However free I wanted to be
I didn't actively try to make the gesture disappear because it didn't feel odd.
My body was balancing out the creeping in of pre-embodied forms.
Then I went back to the original (Bharatanatyam) sequence and I didn't want to be there because the freedom I'd given myself made it seem wrong.
The shifts (between the quadrants) were frequent and the overlaps frequent.
Guido on quadrant:
I would place stage presence top right (procedural). Flow sits in all four quadrants.
Once something is embodied and inaccessible you only notice it because you can't do something else.
You have so many automised sequences subdivided into chunks, and you can access them.
A ritual is for the person doing it but a performance is for the audience which is outside the quadrant.
FROM JONATHAN SOME NOTES FROM THE 2ND STUDIO RESEARCH DAY, 29TH MARCH 2026.
Guido:
Where do you find comfort and where do you find discomfort?
There's a lot of learning in the background.
Krakauer uses the image of clamping, where you I
the errors artificially, but at the same time you remove the learning.
1st task - Move freely while observing how, when and why appear to to change.
Gillie responses:
Gillie
For me the interesting thing is the not knowing. There are moments when the not knowing is more.
I repeat to give me the confidence to go on.
Gillie on being led in the dance:
When I did waltzing with my friend who comes from that background, I gelt I didn't have to dance at all.
Guido:
In that moment you can be on the right side (of the quadrant) - sequencing of the left side is taken away from you.
Gillie:
There's something about copying where the performer doesn't have to be present performing.
Guido:
Stage presence is the top right quadrant (Motoric/Procedural/Continuous Explicit/Deliberate/Accessible).
Suba responses:
Suba:
The jathi is in the body, but it's alive and it always changes. Part of the training asks that you keep it alive.
Gillie:
I think a lot of this is about what gets offloaded. There's a certain kind of offloading the overwhelming. Things get moved out of the way, and then sometimes tiny things can happen. Tactics to offload different bits of the matrix.
Guido:
It's about a desire to move from the left to the right, which then feels like I'm arriving at what I'm capable of. As a dancer you don't want to be on the left side; you don't want the self-consciousness of the left side. You lose the self-consciousness not by taking it away, but by getting to the right side.
Suba:
When I dance the jathi I do want to be on the right side so that the form is there.
Guido:
A culture like ballet or Bharatanatyam is defined by being on the left, but when you actually do it you also want to trust that it's there - to rely on the mastery of it.
Gillie:
In Strictly you can see the left side of the untrained dancer working so hard.
Giving at to somebody else to offload it doesn't have to be a person, it could be a score.
2nd task: Move freely while observing the moment of recognising the emergence of 'this is what I'm doing now' - what does that transition feel like from it not yet being named to recognising it as a thing (even if you can't name it)? - 5 minutes.
Jonathan responses:
The timer itself removes the responsibility to organise the larger time and the task determines to some extent the smaller time.
An awareness of things receding as well as things emerging. The transitory nature of the moment of recognising that 'this is what I'm doing now'. Some of these moments are directly named ('circling', 'balancing'). Some of these moments contain complex coordinations or overlapped movements that are recognised only as a rhythm (which repeats until it fades into the next thing) - the repetitions contain a strong element of physical pleasure.
Throughout is a definite movement between internal doing (eyes often closed) and external doing (mapping through and into the room). Throughout is a definite series of moments that ask 'How did I get here?'.
Balance plays a large part in the physical changes, as weight shifts the direction and focus of a movement.
I wasn't aware of alternating right and left. I was very aware of multiple already embodied possibilities re-emerging.
Gillie responses:
The wish to move is stronger than the wish to stay focussed. Everything is referential to me so I start to notice things I recognise. But it's not mindless. I noticed that the recognition of 'this thing as this thing' is very fleeting, and if I stay with it I wouldn't be able to tell you what it is. I can identify it by body parts. I know it but I couldn't tell you what it is.
I can never get myself interested enough in the individual actions when I have so much else I could be interested in.
Suba responses:
I started with 'what does my body need to be doing?'. The transitions came quite slowly. What became 'the things that's happening' came quite slowly.
Then when that felt comfortable the gestures crept in, but in a very imprecise way. That made me think what was the curiosity in the lack of precision? Then I started thinking about what is being seen.
Guido's responses:
I immediately remember tasks from other people, so it's a cultural thing. Then I was thinking about strategies that I use.
In order for me to repeat something I often establish a rhythm, and then shift body parts by maintaining that rhythm.
That it becomes obvious music is a way to offload decisions. Music provides the scaffolding of rhythm,, but also the scaffolding of a meaningful context.
How do you find ways of taking information in your body, and then through repetition pay attention to them? So they move from left to upper right (of the quadrant).
3rd task - Take time to begin a process of creating and memorising a short sequence of simple arm movements - ask are you aware of elements of the sequence 'chunking'? - are you aware of the emergence of an abstract 'generalisation' of the sequence that appears as a rhythm, shape, feeling or inevitable logic?
Suba responses:
I have to go back to the beginning and then go on, then once it's 'chunked' like 'phrase one', then I can continue. There's a point in my body and my head when they've reached a place of knowing, so to build the sequence I have to get to this point and then continue. I was aware that the movements needed to be teachable, that it was explicable.
Guido:
In that process of teaching you reveal the cognitive structure that this phrase takes on for you. You also convey the 'chunks'. And that all happens completely intuitively. You break it down into those chunks.
Then what you described as one movement making the next movement easier is 'priming'. Symmetry also primes the next thing. A natural boundary
for a new chunk to start.
When you mark things with your spine only, you don't really do it with your spine, you visualise it and then don't show it.
To find the 'chunks' start with the 2nd, then 3rd, then 4th movements until you find the boundary which isn't accessible to you.
We can only hold 3 or 4 elements in the memory, which is why telephone numbers are in 3's.
- March 29, 2026
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Re: notes from the day
Thanks Bojana it's useful to read so quickly what you caught of the conversations yesterday, and I have a sense that more was articulated than perhaps we thought in the aftermath of Gillie's 'academic' comment. I caught a few other notes which I'll send this morning if I have time and otherwise later this week.
I woke this morning thinking that it's perhaps necessary this morning to risk a motivation beyond the awareness of the scientific concepts, so I propose beginning with a creative motivation given by me which clarifies the context as being 'a dance workshop'. This may then situate the research questions in a less academic place and give us a sense how that differs from the more specifically science focussed tasks.
Having said that though, I would repeat my comment of yesterday that a different tone of conversation arises from the risk to focus away from creative motivation. Does it matter then that it feels less comfortable for the dancer? I would argue that they will take away with them tools to rethink what the're doing which will have a slower impact than the two days can immediately offer, but perhaps we need to test this with follow up communication over the next month or so?
Jonathan
On Sat, 28 Mar 2026 at 23:36, Bojana Cvejic <bojanacvejic@gmail.com> wrote:In the preparation of the day, Guido asks what might be missing from Krakauer’s theory:
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Motivation – extrinsic (sports: functional, scoring) and intrinsic (artistic: aesthetic criteria)
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Metacognition – another process of awareness, similar to self-reflection, which includes observing how one get better at motor learning: more sensitive, more apt, motorically etc.
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The feeling of one performing before an audience
Jonathan: I belong to those performers who avoids self-consciousness
Bojana: why you practice folk music
Guido: There is always consciousness, but the question is about traning what you are paying attention to
Jonathan: What if everyone who dances is already creating choreography? Warning from Chrysa: dancers might not agree to this equation; those who don’t identify with being a choreographer, but an artist
Suba: on the question of music: although Indian classical dance is identified with music, music is not always the source of movement; in working with different social groups from Bharatanatyam and Kathak, for example with people with dementia, the motivation was feeling, storytelling, etc. in order to perform gesture
Jonathan: “gesture” might be another object of study that we haven’t thought of
Guido’s lecture: “What do dancers do when they dance?”
Cognitive and discrete elements: the knowledge that you can put into words
The sensorimotor – how I perceive and move;
as a knowledge it cannot be adequately verbalized, the words are not sufficient, you have to do it to learn it, acquire skill
the part of it that is accessible, that is, can be put into words: procedural knowledge
the part that isn’t accessible as such is the continuous, because you can’t easily say where it starts and ends
the cognitive and the sensorimotor are considered to be a binary
awareness isn’t binary, but a spectrum, a matter of different degrees
on the bottom left: cognitive, discrete but implicit, inaccessible > knowledge that could be put into words but isn’t readily available, we are not aware of the bias because of forgetting (e.g. a series of actions you learnt and you could verbalize it if you haven’t forgotten them)
the cognitive, declarative, discrete but implicit and inaccessible (the bottom left) is so ingrained and therefore difficult to change (e.g. we become aware of it through unsuccessful attempts to change against it) > culture as an inevitable default
for example, the bias of gender; another example, what appears in improvisation as set, part of default, while it is not perceived by the dancer as such (for example, the amalgamation of many modern dance techniques in Steve Paxton’s improvisation)
Suba: there is no improvisation in the Western sense in Bharatanatyam or Kathak, everything is codified and the dancer learns to master movements
Bojana: is it about a scale of variation that is negotiable within this classical form?
Suba: yes, on two levels: it is either individual, dependent on training with a teacher, or deliberate, a matter of interpretation (which amounts to a combinatory)
Guido: In cultural transmission, learning goes through copying the explicit, cognitive and deliberate, and the individual sensorimotor, continuous and explicit must become cognitive to be available for emulation
Bojana: what we learnt from the neuroanthropologist Gregg Downey is that the implicit, cognitive – for example, the style of behavior of the teacher in capoeira, the social practice of roda – also partakes of cultural transmission
Part of the implicit is your autobiography, something that congeals into the nebulous background
To conclude, the bottom left includes: bias, default, autobiography, contex, culture
Guido: the “dual process theory” – thinking/learning&acquiring/forgetting fast/slow applies to these four distinctions
We learn fast, forget fast and remember slow: the cognitive, declarative, discrete
Possibly, the implicit and inaccessible within the cognitive, declarative, discrete might be slower to both form and dissipate; you accumulate knowledge over lifetime
Guido: strangely enough, dance only recognizes the existence of these two in opposition:
The top left: cognitive/declarative/discrete + explicit/deliberate/accessible
Top bottom right: sensorimotor/procedural/continuous + implicit/automatic/inaccessible
Jonathan's preference for dancing without self-consciousness finds itself situated between the other two cateogies (cognitive, discrete, implicit and sensorimotor, procedural, explicit, accessible)
After the first task:
Gillie: I wasn’t warmed up, so the dancing I did amounted to an execution of warm-up “seasoning the space”. I noticed I have the habit of going to the floor and stretching hips. I am seeking sensation.
I rememebred that in the community dance froup I am conducting, we are five, we have this work of “making a portrait”; one person leaves the room and the remaining four make a portrait of her; they took a piss out of me and portrayed me with “slow dance”, something I like to do and ask of them and they dislike it
In this task, I didn’t know what to do. I became aware of repeating six-sevent units of action, something that occurs as opening syntax. Normally I am not concerned with whether this is dance or not, now I was
Suba: I worked with jathi – eight-rhythm cycle from slow to fast, and with faster tempo it gets more complex, concluding in a flourishing rhythm; there is a distinct beginning and ending to it
I observed two things:
1)
Structure made me feel an urge to shift, and I was wondering whether playfulness resulted from the context; or because I master it in this context I have this overwhelming urge to play with it2)
I realied that the skeletal structure of the rhythm gives me confidence to shift and change; I could even give myself paramters for shifting, and this included:-
Speed of the movement, slowing down to get the feeling of it
-
Being low in the ground
Jonathan: is ther ea sense of wanting to change when tou know something well?
Gillie: the most familiar stays unremarkable
Suba: perhaps change was possible because I am so confident about this sequence
Gillie: it is possible to move from the cognitive…inaccessible to the cognitive…accessible – like in my example of the hips habit – the frame of the task enabled me to realize it
Intuition is the movement from bottom (inaccessible) up (accessible); a “delayed cognition” when something which wasn’t remarked before suddenly crystallizes
Guido: for cultural transmission (“teaching”), if you are going to start from your own movement, then this movement has to shift from the right to the left
Bojana: Forsythe has done that, because in his solo we understand that he is far beyond the improvisation technologies which he developed with and for his dancers, who have a background in ballet; but he had to make it explicit, cognitive, declarative and deliberate knowledge through geometry, drawing lines and figures and writing with the body
Forsythe counts on two types of knowledge in the implicit and inaccessible lower region: the sensorimotor reflexes of ballet-trained dancers and their ballet bias (computation of images)
His method movs from the bottom right to bottom left to top left to top right
Clockwise movement
In Ingold’s theory of educating attention, motor learning goes from the bottom right to the top right
Guido: the top right is where stage presence is situated
Bojana: virtuosity, capacity to bring good decisions in the moment because of accumulated knowledge
Gillie: the example of driving entails moving from the top left to the top right to the bottom right to the bottom left
Suba: these categories in the four quadrants might happen universally in dancing (Guido: species-specific) but are they explored in the classical form of nonWestern dance like the Indian classical dance? Perhaps in other terms and questions, they might be motivated differently, for example, in Bharatanatyam expression might be the reason
Guido: in Western dance, habit and skill have a peculiar relationship; habit is the negatively valenced skill
Bojana: how would somatic approach make its trajectory through the four categories? Counterclockwise; it starts from the sensorimotor implicit and inaccessible as the locus of truth, the real that is spontaneous that crops up in a somatic exploration; thanks to the somatic techniqe it becomes sensorimotor continuous accessible (procedural knowledge), which then can move to the cognitive concepts
Looking at the quadrants again in light of dance:
You become aware of the reflex indirectly – by resistance through error, inertia to change
Motor learning is on the right side and equals to forming habit
Suba: I am taught to be aware and control the image of every little bit of my body for the viewer, to project the slightest detail to the viewer
Bojana: difference in comparison with the dancer’s agency in Western tradition (shifting away from the visual, ocular, the image into the feeling and sensation); your agency is in the control of the image, its projection
Jonathan: do the same four categories apply to the audinece?
Response to the second task:
Suba: my instinct was to move freely and to have eliminated all parameters (such as speed, space, rhythm); this was a delibearte decision; but very quickly onwards I noticed how structuring elements from Bharatanatyam crept in, like symmetry, and I would have to consciously undo them, this was a matter of explicit and deliberate decisions.
Something else happened with gestures; while dancing freely I felt strange that I wasn’t doing everything with my fingers; gestures appeared and disappeared without me having to actively undo them.
The freedom I gave myself made it more difficult to return to the phrase and explore it more
The context was missing
Bojana: could our method be to continue to query your practice with some of these questions in the context of your practice?
Gillie: what I recognizes as reflex was to correct balance ad pain. Every time I recognized a pattern, I would amplify it. I struggled to escape the overlap between the four.
| | | | | | | | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | | | Text Box: 30/30/35/20 | | Text Box: 30/20/20/20 | | | | | | | | | | | | Text Box: 20/30/22,5/50 | | | | Text Box: 20/20/22,5/10 | | | |
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- March 28, 2026
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notes from the day
In the preparation of the day, Guido asks what might be missing from Krakauer’s theory:
- Motivation – extrinsic (sports: functional, scoring) and intrinsic (artistic: aesthetic criteria)
- Metacognition – another process of awareness, similar to self-reflection, which includes observing how one get better at motor learning: more sensitive, more apt, motorically etc.
- The feeling of one performing before an audience
Jonathan: I belong to those performers who avoids self-consciousness
Bojana: why you practice folk music
Guido: There is always consciousness, but the question is about traning what you are paying attention to
Jonathan: What if everyone who dances is already creating choreography? Warning from Chrysa: dancers might not agree to this equation; those who don’t identify with being a choreographer, but an artist
Suba: on the question of music: although Indian classical dance is identified with music, music is not always the source of movement; in working with different social groups from Bharatanatyam and Kathak, for example with people with dementia, the motivation was feeling, storytelling, etc. in order to perform gesture
Jonathan: “gesture” might be another object of study that we haven’t thought of
Guido’s lecture: “What do dancers do when they dance?”
Cognitive and discrete elements: the knowledge that you can put into words
The sensorimotor – how I perceive and move;
as a knowledge it cannot be adequately verbalized, the words are not sufficient, you have to do it to learn it, acquire skill
the part of it that is accessible, that is, can be put into words: procedural knowledge
the part that isn’t accessible as such is the continuous, because you can’t easily say where it starts and ends
the cognitive and the sensorimotor are considered to be a binary
awareness isn’t binary, but a spectrum, a matter of different degrees
on the bottom left: cognitive, discrete but implicit, inaccessible > knowledge that could be put into words but isn’t readily available, we are not aware of the bias because of forgetting (e.g. a series of actions you learnt and you could verbalize it if you haven’t forgotten them)
the cognitive, declarative, discrete but implicit and inaccessible (the bottom left) is so ingrained and therefore difficult to change (e.g. we become aware of it through unsuccessful attempts to change against it) > culture as an inevitable default
for example, the bias of gender; another example, what appears in improvisation as set, part of default, while it is not perceived by the dancer as such (for example, the amalgamation of many modern dance techniques in Steve Paxton’s improvisation)
Suba: there is no improvisation in the Western sense in Bharatanatyam or Kathak, everything is codified and the dancer learns to master movements
Bojana: is it about a scale of variation that is negotiable within this classical form?
Suba: yes, on two levels: it is either individual, dependent on training with a teacher, or deliberate, a matter of interpretation (which amounts to a combinatory)
Guido: In cultural transmission, learning goes through copying the explicit, cognitive and deliberate, and the individual sensorimotor, continuous and explicit must become cognitive to be available for emulation
Bojana: what we learnt from the neuroanthropologist Gregg Downey is that the implicit, cognitive – for example, the style of behavior of the teacher in capoeira, the social practice of roda – also partakes of cultural transmission
Part of the implicit is your autobiography, something that congeals into the nebulous background
To conclude, the bottom left includes: bias, default, autobiography, contex, culture
Guido: the “dual process theory” – thinking/learning&acquiring/forgetting fast/slow applies to these four distinctions
We learn fast, forget fast and remember slow: the cognitive, declarative, discrete
Possibly, the implicit and inaccessible within the cognitive, declarative, discrete might be slower to both form and dissipate; you accumulate knowledge over lifetime
Guido: strangely enough, dance only recognizes the existence of these two in opposition:
The top left: cognitive/declarative/discrete + explicit/deliberate/accessible
Top bottom right: sensorimotor/procedural/continuous + implicit/automatic/inaccessible
Jonathan's preference for dancing without self-consciousness finds itself situated between the other two cateogies (cognitive, discrete, implicit and sensorimotor, procedural, explicit, accessible)
After the first task:
Gillie: I wasn’t warmed up, so the dancing I did amounted to an execution of warm-up “seasoning the space”. I noticed I have the habit of going to the floor and stretching hips. I am seeking sensation.
I rememebred that in the community dance froup I am conducting, we are five, we have this work of “making a portrait”; one person leaves the room and the remaining four make a portrait of her; they took a piss out of me and portrayed me with “slow dance”, something I like to do and ask of them and they dislike it
In this task, I didn’t know what to do. I became aware of repeating six-sevent units of action, something that occurs as opening syntax. Normally I am not concerned with whether this is dance or not, now I was
Suba: I worked with jathi – eight-rhythm cycle from slow to fast, and with faster tempo it gets more complex, concluding in a flourishing rhythm; there is a distinct beginning and ending to it
I observed two things:
1)
Structure made me feel an urge to shift, and I was wondering whether playfulness resulted from the context; or because I master it in this context I have this overwhelming urge to play with it2)
I realied that the skeletal structure of the rhythm gives me confidence to shift and change; I could even give myself paramters for shifting, and this included:- Speed of the movement, slowing down to get the feeling of it
- Being low in the ground
Jonathan: is ther ea sense of wanting to change when tou know something well?
Gillie: the most familiar stays unremarkable
Suba: perhaps change was possible because I am so confident about this sequence
Gillie: it is possible to move from the cognitive…inaccessible to the cognitive…accessible – like in my example of the hips habit – the frame of the task enabled me to realize it
Intuition is the movement from bottom (inaccessible) up (accessible); a “delayed cognition” when something which wasn’t remarked before suddenly crystallizes
Guido: for cultural transmission (“teaching”), if you are going to start from your own movement, then this movement has to shift from the right to the left
Bojana: Forsythe has done that, because in his solo we understand that he is far beyond the improvisation technologies which he developed with and for his dancers, who have a background in ballet; but he had to make it explicit, cognitive, declarative and deliberate knowledge through geometry, drawing lines and figures and writing with the body
Forsythe counts on two types of knowledge in the implicit and inaccessible lower region: the sensorimotor reflexes of ballet-trained dancers and their ballet bias (computation of images)
His method movs from the bottom right to bottom left to top left to top right
Clockwise movement
In Ingold’s theory of educating attention, motor learning goes from the bottom right to the top right
Guido: the top right is where stage presence is situated
Bojana: virtuosity, capacity to bring good decisions in the moment because of accumulated knowledge
Gillie: the example of driving entails moving from the top left to the top right to the bottom right to the bottom left
Suba: these categories in the four quadrants might happen universally in dancing (Guido: species-specific) but are they explored in the classical form of nonWestern dance like the Indian classical dance? Perhaps in other terms and questions, they might be motivated differently, for example, in Bharatanatyam expression might be the reason
Guido: in Western dance, habit and skill have a peculiar relationship; habit is the negatively valenced skill
Bojana: how would somatic approach make its trajectory through the four categories? Counterclockwise; it starts from the sensorimotor implicit and inaccessible as the locus of truth, the real that is spontaneous that crops up in a somatic exploration; thanks to the somatic techniqe it becomes sensorimotor continuous accessible (procedural knowledge), which then can move to the cognitive concepts
Looking at the quadrants again in light of dance:
You become aware of the reflex indirectly – by resistance through error, inertia to change
Motor learning is on the right side and equals to forming habit
Suba: I am taught to be aware and control the image of every little bit of my body for the viewer, to project the slightest detail to the viewer
Bojana: difference in comparison with the dancer’s agency in Western tradition (shifting away from the visual, ocular, the image into the feeling and sensation); your agency is in the control of the image, its projection
Jonathan: do the same four categories apply to the audinece?
Response to the second task:
Suba: my instinct was to move freely and to have eliminated all parameters (such as speed, space, rhythm); this was a delibearte decision; but very quickly onwards I noticed how structuring elements from Bharatanatyam crept in, like symmetry, and I would have to consciously undo them, this was a matter of explicit and deliberate decisions.
Something else happened with gestures; while dancing freely I felt strange that I wasn’t doing everything with my fingers; gestures appeared and disappeared without me having to actively undo them.
The freedom I gave myself made it more difficult to return to the phrase and explore it more
The context was missing
Bojana: could our method be to continue to query your practice with some of these questions in the context of your practice?
Gillie: what I recognizes as reflex was to correct balance ad pain. Every time I recognized a pattern, I would amplify it. I struggled to escape the overlap between the four.
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- 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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