Choreographers draw from a multitude of internal and external resources when creating dances, tying together images, concepts, emotions, metaphors, and more in the development of “meaningful choreography” to share with audiences. What exactly carries meaning is a point that I hope to explore in this project. A choreographer may be struck by objects, pictures, sounds or music, concepts, and words that inspire their creative processing with dancers. Visual or auditory aesthetics, subject matter, or emotional qualities that seem inherent to the desired subject may be behind the apparently intuitive choices of gathering and dissecting inputs to manipulate movement. Because of the interpretive and organic nature of the arts, dancers contribute unique associations to what the choreographer initiates. With material generated and understanding developed, the choreographer reintegrates all that has been processed into a work that finalizes with time and rehearsal.
One aspect of dance, and life, which is difficult in many ways to quantify or even to verbally describe is emotion. A choreographer may have a goal to portray a particular emotion as part of or the basis of a dance, yet how can sheer emotion be communicated artistically? How can one translate those pure emotions into a non-verbal system of movement? The arts often engage in this process of translation and abstraction, but another process of translation comes from psychology. UF’s Center for the Studies of Emotion and Attention has developed internationally standardized systems stating common emotional responses to pictures (International Associative Picture System, ex. a photo of an attacking snake (Lang, P.J., Bradley, M.M., & Cuthbert, B.N., 2005)), sounds (International Affective Digital Sounds, ex. the sound of a train (Bradley, M. M., & Lang, P. J., 1999)), and words (Affective Norms for English Words, ex. “melody” (Bradley, M.M., & Lang, P.J., 1999)).
I propose an experiment in choreography and creative process in which original movements are reworked into “emotional” sequences with a small group of dancers. Each section of work would be based on a different contrasting emotion, developed from stimuli taken from the IAPS, IADS, and ANEW systems specifically for the affect that they typically induce in subjects of psychology experiments. As part of this experimental/creative process I would keep records through video and journal, as the dancers would be asked to re-interpret the original movements to portray the qualities of the featured emotion. After performances of the pieces, I would test both the dancers and the audience for emotional responses using SAM (Self-Assessment Manikin (Bradley, M.M., Lang, P.J., 1994)) which measures emotional experience with scales of pleasure, arousal, and dominance. I would also solicit open-ended responses to further illuminate the effects of the choreography. I am interested in the strength and characteristics of the emotional effects of the movement compared to the usual results for directly-percieved stimuli, as well as whether certain emotions seem to be more easily translated into dance than others. Is there a common element that can be maintained in translating a collection of sensory or verbal stimuli into dance, such that a consistent response may be found as psychologists have sought to define for other media? How much, like language, can one communication indicate a relatively commonly held understanding, in this case, of an emotional concept or feeling? I would argue that in some way, people have commonalities in their experiences of certain emotions, as Carl Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious suggests- the effectiveness of sharing this through dance is an interesting question. How much of the effectiveness of any communication relies on our common understanding, and how much can be maintened through the enriched lenses of individual experience? Related points of interest include how dance relates to language in its operation and perception in the brain, and how its function may relate to that of language.
I intend to pursue a Masters in Dance and Movement Therapy, in which dance is used as a tool for psychological counseling. Here, movement and the mind mix, and here a personal understanding of the process of creating dances regarding emotions, and an understanding of the effects of performing and watching these dances will be useful. Given the interpretive nature of the arts, I want to explore the range of responses that this non-verbal mode of communication can result in, whether there are universalities that will be found, or if variety is the more reliable response in sharing emotion in this way. Inspired by the findings of UF’s CSEA, I ask, How can movement carry meaning, particularly pertaining to emotions? To choreographers and dancers in general, documentation of the process and results of transferring the effects of standardized emotional stimuli (the IAPS, IADS, and ANEW) through dancers to an audience could bring a new stock of inspiration. While, as Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states, we cannot pin down or accurately predict the exact features of what we seek to measure, I would like to openly explore something that each of us experiences in our own way, and how the movement-medium acts as a factor of the quality of the emotional experience.
