Embodied knowledge and dancers’ dance-making: Solo dance improvisation and phenomenological perspectives

The purpose of the article is to identify the essential features of dance improvisation through the historical and social prism. The research methodology is to consists of a set of methods, in particular, analytical, historical-chronological, and comparative. Scientific novelty. The historical-chronological and stylistic approach for the complex definition of the concept "choreographic improvisation" is offered. For the first time, attention is focused on the emergent nature of the system of group dance improvisation based on a sociological approach to evaluating the results of individual and collective creativity. Conclusions. Improvisation as a peculiar way of artistic creativity is characterized by the quality of the process (a work of art is created directly during its performance) and the result (the form of a specific work created by improvisation). Improvisation can be found in all kinds of choreographic art, in different chronological periods and stylistic trends, in particular, in the XX - early XXI in traditional classical dance, free dance A. Duncan, postmodern experiments W. Forsythe, etc., contact improvisation S. Paxton, dance therapy practices of Alexander and Fieldenkrais, etc. Applying sociological approaches to assessing the level of creativity of improvisations (solo and group), we can conclude about the emergent nature of the group improvisation, because collective interaction during dance improvisation is not limited to a simple sum of individual creative manifestations. It was found that the number of creative ideas in solo improvisation is much higher than in pairs; there are also more of them in the trio than in pairs, but less than in the solo. At the same time, the inner state, satisfaction with the process and plastic diversity are much greater in duet and collective interaction. In general, the effectiveness of improvisation as a creative act and as an educational practice is higher in the group version. This once again explains the extraordinary popularity of contact improvisation.
 Key words: improvisation, dance improvisation, improvisation in choreography, dance.

Dance, an activity endowed with intentional expressivity and intrinsic affectivity, has been the target of neuroscientific research since the last decade of the 20th century. We can make several inferences about the cognitive and motor aspects in dance based on this research. The main goal of the present study is to raise questions about how communication takes place among dancers during dance improvisation. This work is based on a systematic review of the literature. In this paper we approach the cognition and motivity in dance improvisation from the embodied cognition theory. This theory involves several concepts, including motor cognition, situated cognition and social cognition. It can also be inferred that mirror neurons constitute the neurobiological basis of perception and action processes present in these cognitive modes. It is suggested that this type of neural mechanism is also related to empathy, a procedure which enables a person to understand the intentions and emotions of another person without verbal language. We suggest the idea of empathic choreography for temporary structuring of movements which take place in contemporary dance improvisation. When dancers improvise, they understand each other’s motor intentions and emotions. Thus, the dancers share decision making and build an ephemeral movement structure that characterises dance improvisation.

Introduction. The art of improvisation plays a pivotal role in the professional work of a choreographer, especially in the contemporary landscape of choreography, where creativity and flexibility are paramount. The choreographer is responsible for bringing together diverse elements of movement, expression, and emotion to create compelling dance pieces. In this context, improvisation becomes an indispensable tool for fostering creativity, enhancing artistic expression, and navigating the evolving demands of modern performance art. The study investigates the significance of improvisational practices in the choreographer's work, exploring how these techniques contribute to the development of the choreographer’s creative process and the overall aesthetic of the performance. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to analyze the role of improvisation in the professional practice of a choreographer, examining the various methods of improvisation applied in choreography. Additionally, it aims to explore how these techniques influence the choreographic process, contribute to the creation of new works, and shape the artistic identity of both the choreographer and the dancers involved. The study seeks to highlight the importance of improvisational skills in enhancing the choreographer's artistic versatility and their ability to innovate within the discipline. Methods: This study utilizes a combination of qualitative research methods, including literature review, analysis of existing choreographic practices, and case studies of prominent choreographers known for their use of improvisation in dance. A historical approach is applied to trace the evolution of improvisation in choreography, with a focus on key figures such as Loïe Fuller and Pina Bausch, who significantly impacted the field through their innovative use of improvisational techniques. Interviews and practical exercises with contemporary choreographers further enrich the research, providing firsthand insights into how improvisation is applied in modern dance creation. Results: The results demonstrate that improvisation serves as a crucial tool in the choreographer's creative process. It allows for spontaneity, responsiveness to the dancers' expressions, and the exploration of uncharted creative territories. The study finds that improvisation is employed in various forms, such as thematic improvisation, where choreographers set a framework for movement based on specific emotional or narrative cues, and bodily improvisation, which allows dancers to explore natural movement without constraints. The incorporation of music and spatial improvisation also plays a significant role in shaping the overall choreography. Furthermore, the study highlights how improvisation fosters collaboration between choreographers and dancers, leading to a more dynamic and organic artistic process. Originality: The originality of this study lies in its comprehensive examination of the different forms of improvisation and their specific applications in the work of choreographers. By combining theoretical perspectives with practical examples, the study offers a nuanced understanding of the role of improvisation in the choreographic process. This research contributes to the literature on choreography by shedding light on the creative potential unlocked through improvisational techniques and their significance in the context of contemporary dance practices. Conclusion: In conclusion, improvisation is an essential component of the choreographer's toolkit, enabling them to push the boundaries of artistic expression and engage in a dynamic, collaborative process with dancers. The ability to effectively utilize improvisational methods allows choreographers to remain adaptable, innovative, and deeply connected to the evolving landscape of dance. The study underscores the importance of incorporating improvisational techniques into choreographic education and practice, as they not only enhance the creative process but also contribute to the development of a choreographer's unique artistic voice. Future research should explore the integration of new technologies and interdisciplinary approaches into improvisational practices, further expanding the possibilities of creative expression in choreography.

Observing dance improvisation provides a unique opportunity to understand how people collaborate together while creating. It is an opportunity to consider how new ideas appear, not simply from the internal processes of a single creator but rather from the interactions between the minds, bodies and the environment acting on and between a group of improvising dancers. Improvisational scores served in this study as a laboratory into group creativity. Using a video-stimulated recall method, which asks dancers to reflect upon their own processes just after completing the score, I explored the interdependency between meta-cognitive strategies such as imagery and sense awareness, group processes, the role of others in one’s own creative processes, and interactions between bodies and with the environment. As a result I describe how dancers build together a common improvisational space, which allows them to co-create and share their ideas mostly in non-verbal, non-propositional ways. I discuss the co-agency of such a process, showing that intentionality is distributed between dancers at each moment of improvisation and that they are mainly focused on supporting the ideas of others. I also discuss the medium of the body and the embodied response as central to dance improvisation practice.

As society ages and frequency of dementia increases exponentially, counteracting cognitive aging decline is a challenging issue for countries of the developed world. Previous studies have suggested that physical fitness based on cardiovascular and strength training helps to improve attentional control in normal aging. However, how motor activity based on motor-skill learning can also benefit attentional control with age has been hitherto a neglected issue. This study examined the impact of contemporary dance (CD) improvisation on attentional control of older adults, as compared to two other motor training programs, fall prevention and Tai Chi Chuan. Participants performed setting, suppressing, and switching attention tasks before and after 5.7-month training in either CD or fall prevention or Tai Chi Chuan. Results indicated that CD improved switching but not setting or suppressing attention. In contrast, neither fall prevention nor Tai Chi Chuan showed any effect. We suggest that CD improvisation works as a training for change, inducing plasticity in flexible attention.

Improvisation is central to creative behavior across artistic and everyday domains, yet it is often portrayed as either pure freedom or rule-bound execution. While research in music and dance has shown that improvisation draws on structured kinesthetic vocabularies, less is known about how cultural rhythm and embodied memory interact in real time within and across genres. This study addresses that gap through ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa, where the first author, trained in contemporary dance, engaged in learning and performing Malian djembe dance. Drawing on autoethnography with a phenomenological orientation, alongside participant observation and conversations with Malian drummers and dancers, the analysis examines how kinesthetic and procedural memories inform real-time performance. Findings suggest that improvisation operates through culturally specific ways of sensing and attending to movement: dancers navigate genre-specific repertoire, rhythmic cues, and bodily affordances to evoke and transform embodied material. However, rather than merely reproducing fixed repertorial units, dancers also reconfigure embodied resources such as movement qualities in responsive and inventive ways. Our research supports the view of improvisation as structured play rather than unbound invention and advances the discourse by emphasizing the reconstructive play of embodied recall—how cultural and personal memories are recomposed in performance. Overall, the study contributes to understanding improvisation as a cognitive and cultural process: not the free invention of form but the creative reorganization of embodied memories within shared perceptual and rhythmic systems.

Renowned master teacher Eric Franklin has thoroughly updated his classic text, Dance Imagery for Technique and Performance, providing dancers and dance educators with a deep understanding of how they can use imagery to improve their dancing and artistic expression in class and in performance. These features are new to this edition: • Two chapters include background, history, theory, and uses of imagery. • 294 exercises offer dancers and dance educators greater opportunities to experience how imagery can enhance technique and performance. • 133 illustrations facilitate the use of imagery to improve technique, artistic expression, and performance. Franklin provides hundreds of imagery exercises to refine improvisation, technique, and choreography. The 295 illustrations cover the major topics in the book, showing exercises to use in technique, artistic expression, and performance. In addition, Franklin supplies imagery exercises that can restore and regenerate the body through massage, touch, and stretching. And he offers guidance in using imagery to convey information about a dancer’s steps and to clarify the intent and content of movement. This new edition of Dance Imagery for Technique and Performance can be used with Franklin’s Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery, Second Edition, or on its own. Either way, readers will learn how to combine technical expertise with imagery skills to enrich their performance, and they will discover methods they can use to explore how imagery connects with dance improvisation and technique. Dance Imagery for Technique and Performance uses improvisation exercises to help readers investigate new inner landscapes to create and communicate various movement qualities, provides guidelines for applying imagery in the dance class, and helps dancers expand their repertoire of expressiveness in technique and performance across ballet, modern, and contemporary dance. This expanded edition of Dance Imagery for Technique and Performance supplies imagery tools for enhancing or preparing for performance, and it introduces the importance of imagery in dancing and teaching dance. Franklin’s method of using imagery in dance is displayed throughout this lavishly illustrated book, and the research from scientific and dance literature that supports Franklin’s method is detailed. The text, exercises, and illustrations make this book a practical resource for dancers and dance educators alike.

Creativity is a key skill for the twenty-first century, where the individual and collective imperative to adapt is omnipresent. Yet, it is still unclear how to put creativity theories into practice, which signals a lacuna in our understanding of the pragmatic means by which we get creative. This paper starts from the identification of a number of gaps in the literature. In particular, individual and group creativity are usually treated separately, and the emphasis on the search for novelty seems to overshadow the importance experts give to the disruption of their habitual patterns of behavior. To overcome these gaps, we propose foundations for a unifying framework that takes the perspective of dynamical systems. Specifically, we suggest that de-synchronization, a hallmark of disruption, is an integral part of the creative processes that operate across individual and collective levels of analysis. We show that by conjuring uncertainty, de-synchronized states provide opportunities for creative reorganization. In order to ground this framework, we survey and discuss existing literature, and focus on group improvisation practices (in particular, music and dance improvisation), where partners use the dynamics of their interaction to bring forth a collective performance in real-time. In these practices, disruption by de-synchronization, termed here as ‘problematization of coordination’, is a pragmatic approach used to push the creative process forward. We suggest that this approach might also be relevant in other types of individual and collective creative processes.

Research into group creativity with its dynamic, interpersonal, and multi-perspective character poses many challenges, among others, how to collect data and capture its shared nature. In this paper, we discuss the creative process of an ensemble in dance improvisation as an example of vivid and collaborative creative practice. To identify aspects of improvisational dance cognition, we designed and applied a videostimulated recall approach to capturing the multiple perspectives of the shared creative process. We tested the method during an improvisational session with dancers, showing how the recordings of dancers' thought narratives and internal states might be used for studying group creativity. Finally, we presented an audiovisual installation Between Minds and Bodies that aimed to recreate the dancers’ experience and offered immersion into the creative process by accessing individual dancer’s thought processes in the improvised performance while watching the dance improvisation.

This article presents a phenomenological study on lived and living conscious experiences of improvisational dance. Six experienced improvisational dancers and one dance piano accompanist were interviewed individually, and shared the past-lived experience of improvisational dance. After the interviews, the six dancers agreed to perform solo improvisational dance, which was video-recorded and immediately followed up by another individual interview to comment on the current living experience, while watching the recorded video. Transcribed interviews were analyzed from an interpretative phenomenological framework, and three major themes were identified: (a) spontaneous-free expression as a definitive theme; (b) inhibitory self-conscious state of mind and emotion; (c) reaching the aspirational level of improvisation in synchronicity. The dancers in this research experienced improvisational dance as a break away from the dynamic tension between freedom and inhibition, guided by images and stimuli. When the dancers reached the aspirational level of improvisation, they felt that the mind and body were united at the individual level, and that the dancers were in harmony with other dancers at the group level. Developmental theories of self-conscious emotions and phenomenological theories of attention and consciousness were used to interpret participants’ experiences in developmental journeys towards free, spontaneous expression in synchrony.

In this chapter, the authors address how their collaborative creative process facilitated strong and previously unacknowledged expressions of grief during the initial part of the COVID 19 health crisis. These metaphors emerged spontaneously during an informal project that developed as the pandemic was beginning. In February 2020, a small group of creative arts therapists from China, Guam, and the USA joined together as an experiment to see if they could communicate their personal experiences of the crisis with each other using improvised dance, music, art, and storytelling online despite being from diverse cultures and having a limited common primary language. The project expanded as the health crisis became global. This chapter will focus on a session from December 2020 in which grief became the central theme following a surge in the COVID 19 illness when related deaths developed in the communities in which the participants lived. The expressions of grief were unexpected at the start of this session and emerged as the improvisation became more developed. These expressions were primarily nonverbal. The authors also reviewed studies of grief and mourning during the pandemic and compared the improvised expressions with these observations.

This article discusses some aspects and ideas of the practice based Ph.D. research project ‘Sound Skeleton’, an interactive ChoreoSonic environment in which the spatiality of dance movements will be transformed into a real-time 3D spatial sound composition. The project resides in the fields of interactive ambisonic surround sound design, contemporary improvised dance, wireless electronic tracking systems and computer programming. Several spatial observations referring to movement theorist Laban and psycho-acoustic scientist Blauert are reviewed and integrated in the project development. The Data Interpreting Methodology (DIM) is introduced as the mapping procedure that is developed in ‘Sound Skeleton’. As a conclusion of this article several parametric mapping models are presented. A virtual spatial sound body outside the dancing body is created: ‘a choreography of a spatial sonic disembodiment’.

Dance Improvisation is an essential skill and tool for dancers. It is grounded in the kinesthetic experience and its constantly changing dynamic qualities through self-movement. It requires a spontaneous kinesthetic response in a spatiotemporal vigorous qualitative dynamic happening of affect and movement; a momentum that allows dancers to perform innovative material and as such supports the creative process. The current study raises questions as to whether dance improvisation can be sufficiently examined by the Theory of enaction, developed by scientists from late 70’s on. This theory is an attempt to explain the brain and bridge the gap between mind and experience. The inquiry in this paper asks on the one hand, to what extent enaction as set forth by contemporary neuroscientists and cognitive scientists is sufficient to account for the reality of dance improvisation, and on the other hand, how written descriptions of improvisation in dance education can advance understandings of the relationship of consciousness and movement or mind and body.

The literature on authenticity of cultural production has systematically examined the perceived authenticity of both the producer and the cultural product but not of the creative process. This study aims to address this lacuna, adopting Carroll and Wheaton’s typology of type and moral authenticity to examine how contemporary dance choreographers construct authenticity during the creation of a new choreography. Our analysis of data from 23 contemporary dance companies reveals that the two meanings of authenticity dynamically reconstitute one another in the creative process. First, choreographers construct moral authenticity through transformation of form, deconstructing established artistic dance forms and introducing new movements from a bricolage of techniques. Second, they construct type authenticity through wrapping expression, facilitating the deconstruction of the values attached to the bricolage of techniques into artistic dance aesthetics. Finally, choreographers evoke both moral and type authenticity through a creative process of reconstruction. Our noteworthy finding reveals how the construction of authenticity in the process of creating a new choreography, and the dynamics between the two meanings of authenticity, serve significantly as a means of communication among the involved actors, thereby enabling the creative process.

ABSTRACTIn a study combining methodological elements from cognitive psychology and social anthropology, we worked with professional contemporary dancers making choreographic movement material to investigate the effects of working with others during improvisation. Dancers improvised alone, in pairs, and in a trio, they self-reported the number of new movement ideas created within two and four minutes, and self-rated ease, interest, originality, and clarity. Within two minutes, higher ratings were assigned in the unfamiliar pair than the familiar pair condition but there was no effect of group size on the number of ideas created. Within four minutes, more ideas were created in the solo condition than the pair condition with no effect of group size on ratings. Open-ended responses suggested that the quality and relevance of the ideas increased in the duo and the trio conditions. The conclusions point to emergent aspects of relations between persons as fundamental to creativity.