Looking at Movement as Culture: Contact Improvisation to Disco

Abstract

In a made-for-television movie shown in Fall I986, a woman dies... or, at least, according to the doctors, she is "body dead." But somehow her brain remains alive, functioning normally. At the same time, a second woman is pronounced "brain dead," but her body continues to breathe and function perfectly. In a miracle operation, doctors place the living brain of the first woman into the living body of the second woman. The ensuing TV drama explores the question of this new person's identity. The doctors have no problems whatsoever with the woman's identity. Gleeful over their accomplishment, they reassure her that she really is her brain and that her body is essentially irrelevant to who she is. Her husband, however, resists this new body and is disturbed by the fact that the woman looks, moves, and feels totally different; how can she be his wife? His rejection causes her to feel doubt and confusion as to her own identity. Further complications ensue: she is followed around by the husband of the woman whose body her brain now inhabits. She looks like his wife; she must be his wife, still alive somehow. Eventually, though, the miracle woman and her husband (that is, the husband of the woman whose brain survived) become reconciled to her new body as they both realize that, indeed, she is her brain, and they live, we assume, happily ever after. This popular consideration of the mind/body split exemplifies some familiar attitudes toward movement. Like the doctors in the television