Gestalt psychology views the perception of expressiveness as directly tied in with the perception of the object itself- prior experience with the object isn't required! Objects, even nonsense figures, have physiognomic properties which cue a sense of expressiveness; something I can look more into. A book I skimmed earlier, called "Rings" which is a collection of works of art into five emotional categories, introduced me to the origins of the idea of physiognomic characteristics. Humbert DeSuperville said "man is upright" and any change from this has potential to express (Brown, 1996), which says something exciting for my purpose to create expressive dances! The section discusses unconditioned universally expressive signs in art, which can include angles, colors, tempo and other elements to cue emotions in the absence of an actual emotional display (Brown, 1996).
These drawings demonstrate the facial expressions that correspond to the physiognomic guides to the left.
The three directions (expansive, horizontal, convergent) are connected with emotions such as agitation/order/solemness. Colors roughly correspond as well in this view: red, white, and black, respectively.
Something I found personally interesting was a claim that we might seek out tension-arousing or displeasing art as a form of relief. The art gives us a focus for otherwise cue-less more general tension that we had before we encountered the art, it lets us attribute that tension to something, the art object (Crozier and Chapman, 1984). I think this is an important thing to address, because we often relate art to beauty- and while awe is beauty with a sense of fear and is a common reaction to art such as religious art- we forget in this definition that there is plenty of art that disgusts or saddens us or leads to many other negative emotional reactions. I know that personally, while generally a pleasant person who enjoys pleasant things, I have found myself deeply "enjoying" or maybe more appropriately, finding a sense of relief, in negatively-valenced artistic experiences. This theory is something that I want to keep in mind when I address negative emotions which I intend to include in my choreography. The satisfaction that can come out of experiencing a negative work of art is an interesting situation that I want to look more into when taking feedback from dancers and audience. Also, with my professional goals, I have thought how this idea might be valuable in therapy.
Between my resources, there seems to be a debate forming between the idea of the universality of art's power to express, and the opinion that it is a more elite expression, best understood by those who are trained. My preference is to work more with universal kinds of expression as much as possible, because I will be showing my dance not only to fellow dancers, but hopefully to audiences from the general (though university-connected) public. In some studies, students and even artists are not able to appropriately identify the expression of a work without guidance on what terms to use (Crozier and Chapman, 1984). But this conclusion is drawn after they are challenged to put the appropriate term to the expression they experience with no word bank, and I think that if they were instead asked to describe the emotion or mood differently that they might have fared better. I will be using Self Assessment Manikins (SAM) with my participants to let them "describe" their emotions through simple illustrated scales of valence, activation, and control (see photo) and I hope that this might let me see, without necessitating vocabulary, how closely they react to my expectations.
Self-Assessment Manikin: this simple set of three illustrated scales has been used in the creation of the stimuli that I will base my dances off of. It measures emotional reactions in terms of valence (negative-positive), activation (calm-excited), and control (dominated-dominant), and the participant bubbles in one image for each of the three scales to overall describe a single emotional reaction. (Example: something scary might cause a reaction with negative valence, high activation, and low control, which is essentially fear.) I have yet to define sets of SAM results in terms of common emotion-names, which will be a helpful step later.
An interesting thing that came of some related experiments was the fact that participants across cultures and countries generally identify some emotions better than others. Negative emotions tend to be most easily identified. This leads us to the alarm hypothesis. This idea comes from studies of animals, in which different species can recognize each others' warning signals, while pleasanter communications are not as well understood between species or even human cultures. Behaviors stemming from fear and anger tend to be best understood, which makes me think that these emotions might be easier to recognizably portray in dance (though I don't want this to take away from the authenticity and depth of the portrayal, just because a basic image is so easily understood. of course, I also don't want to overcomplicate things either!) Human body posture is cited as the best human example for the alarm hypothesis (Crozier and Chapman, 1984). Accordingly, studies of dot-figures in Johansson's 1975 paradigm proved that impressions of anger and fear were most easily identified (bottom).
Clearly this shows a negative emotion- probably something along the lines of sadness...
...and this is harder to pin an emotion to- it's less distinctly emotional, and likely not as negative, in line with the alarm hypothesis.
Johansson's paradigm for assessing sensitivity to human movement is illustrated here by a "walking" figure's dots. People generally interpret videos of this type as human movement, and attribute emotions or actions with varying degrees of accuracy.
Finally, a note on tempo and volume which may be useful to me in creating dances and were discussed in relation to expressive value in the physiognomic sections of these readings. Volume, according to Sundberg (1982) is "mere translation into the acoustic domain of general body movements," so with dance, I will can reclaim from music a sense of volume. This statement was made in reference to the alarm hypothesis, indicating a particular tie of volume to the negative emotions. And as for tempo, Brown considers the heartbeat: it is fast when we are excited, and slows when we are calm; dance tunes are fast while dirges are slower. Slower tempos also produce tension in the "negative" empty temporal space between the beats (Brown, 1996). This physical origin for the value of tempo differences contributes to arguments for universality as well as the strengths of dance for expressiveness because of its physical and temporal nature (temporal value in addressing emotions will also be discussed later in my next note). I also note the reference to tension, which can be useful in processing emotions with dance later.
Resources:
Brown, J.C., 1996.
Crozier, 1984.
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I'm glad to have constructive feedback to benefit my project.