Joint action and joint attention: Dance improvisation and children’s physical play as participatory sense-making activities

Abstract

Abstract In this article dance improvisation and children’s physical play events are considered organizational practices. Both activities organize and reorganize our lived and embodied experience. Even more, both activities are socially shared and culturally shaped – and thus highly relational. According to the enactive approach, sense-making evolves out of self-organizational processes in which brain, body and environment are linked. In this article the concept of participatory sense-making is used as a stepping stone to describe underlying mechanisms of both dance improvisation and children’s physical play. It is argued that the participants in a dance improvisation and physical play event coordinate their movements together and meaning is created and transformed through a shared intercorporality. The first part of the article consists of a theoretical exploration of several related concepts such as enactive account, embodiment, autonomy, experience, emergence and (participatory) sense-making. In the second part the theoretical concepts are applied to dance improvisational practice and physical play. Artistic research is used to shed light on underlying mechanisms that children’s physical play and dance improvisation share with one another, specifically how meaning is co-constituted in the direct embodied interaction.