Deep bodily coordination in a dance improvisation “game”

In this talk I will provide insight into how a group of dance improvisation performers interact socially when they are in “performance mode”. To this end, five expert performers and five non-performers, joined by Portuguese contemporary choreographer João Fiadeiro, were filmed separately during a contemporary dance exercise, making use of objects, palying the “Real-Time Composition Game“ (Composição em Tempo Real, or CTR).

The study was dedicated to analysing multimodal behavioural and interactional data, where the methodology was based on a video frame-by-frame microanalysis 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.

Focusing on what information performers “give” and “give off” to each other, results show that the group of expert performers collaborated not only without making use of verbal language and without gaze exchanges, but without producing any communication-focused gestures at all, as opposite to what the non-performers did.

We concluded that expert performers, when in “performance mode”, 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. This interaction shapes a shared space-time, leading to group cohesion and the emergence of collective spatial-temporal awareness.

According to Susi & Ziemke (2001), collective behaviour is often characterised by the so-called ‘coordination paradox’: individual ants, while not appearing to cooperate or communicate explicitly, are collaborating implicitly at the social level, where their cooperative behaviour apparently emerges without any central coordination. Such emergent coordination had been previously explained, in the case of social insects, by the theory of stigmergy (Grassé 1959), which Fiadeiro refers to: in brief, this theory describes how individuals can affect the behaviour of others and their own through artefacts that are product of their activity. The fact that artefacts play a strong role in human collective behaviour has also been emphasised, for example, by proponents of distributed cognition.

The composition in real time Game can be seen as an example of kinaesthetic tuning or a stigmergic type of human group behaviour: the expert participants develop a high level of coordinated behaviour in order to create a ‘common ground’ and to build on the emergent event, in other words, to build a deeply harmonised “concert in silence” (cf. Sheets-Johnstone 2017). In the total absence of verbal or gaze exchanges, what could be seen as lack of communication proved to be the opposite: each action taken by those individuals worked as traces that affected the next player, as if in a continuum of generative actions in a constantly deep search for attunement.