Coordinated Collaboration and Nonverbal Social Interactions: A Formal and Functional Analysis of Gaze, Gestures, and Other Body Movements in a Contemporary Dance Improvisation Performance

Vito Evola,Joanna Skubisz

doi:10.1007/s10919-019-00313-2

Vito Evola, Joanna Skubisz

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-019-00313-2

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Abstract

This study presents a microanalysis of what information performers “give” and “give off” to each other via their bodies during a contemporary dance improvisation. We compare what expert performers and non-performers (sufficiently trained to successfully perform) do with their bodies during a silent, multiparty improvisation exercise, in order to identify any differences and to provide insight into nonverbal communication in a less conventional setting. The coordinated collaboration of the participants (two groups of six) was examined in a frame-by-frame analysis focusing on all body movements, including gaze shifts as well as the formal and functional movement units produced in the head–face, upper-, and lower-body regions. The Methods section describes in detail the annotation process and inter-rater agreement. The results of this study indicate that expert performers during the improvisation are in “performance mode” and have embodied other social cognitive strategies and skills (e.g., endogenous orienting, gaze avoidance, greater motor control) that the non-performers do not have available. Expert performers avoid using intentional communication, relying on information to be inferentially communicated in order to coordinate collaboratively, with silence and stillness being construed as meaningful in that social practice and context. The information that expert performers produce is quantitatively less (i.e., producing fewer body movements) and qualitatively more inferential than intentional compared to a control group of non-performers, which affects the quality of the performance.

Highlights

When watching a performed improvisation, where creativity emerges from performers’ coordinated collaboration, it may seem remarkable how the performers know what to do and when, and without it seeming haphazard
This study presents a microanalysis of the phenomenology of coordinated collaboration in a less typical social context of joint activity, which has no regulated turns in the traditional sense and is linguistically independent
The data subsets from the Expert Performers (EP) and Non-Performers (NP) groups resulted in a total of 3397 annotations from the game action tier and the tiers of the three annotation clusters

Summary

Introduction

When watching a performed improvisation, where creativity emerges from performers’ coordinated collaboration, it may seem remarkable how the performers know what to do and when, and without it seeming haphazard. For various choreographers and dancers, the ultimate key in the performer’s decision-making process is “intuition” Choreographer and researcher Jonathan Burrows in his A Choreographer’s Handbook posits various maxims or principles (one being “follow your intuition”) so as to avoid being overwhelmed in the creative process and being “free to do what you do best, which is to be intuitive” 2); another book by choreographer Darla Johnson is subtitled Intuition and Improvisation in Choreography (2012). Just how collaborative information is construed and processed in languageabsent, face-to-face interactions like improvisations remains largely to be explored

Methods

Results

Conclusion