Ensemble Thinking (ET) is a toolkit of movement scores developed by dance-maker Nina Martin in the 1980s in New York City. The scores of ET arose out of a confluence of Martin's choreographic and improvisational performance practices. The impetus for developing ET was to develop a technical language for creating and discussing improvised dance.…

Dance is a multifaceted creative act that has been used to communicate emotions throughout human evolution. Despite this history, there has been no empirical exploration of components of dance that allow it to communicate emotion. We address this with a mixed methods study in which a quantitative study with dance viewers builds upon qualitative…

Movement can be a powerful force for sensory connection and expression in young children who sometimes don't speak. Their kinaesthetic curiosity naturally experiments with--and forms spontaneous relationships through--touching, sensing, and moving-with the world around them. This article wonders what might happen if children's connective movements…

We demonstrate the ways an improvisational dance workshop provided the opportunity for university students to be autonomous actors and engage in embodied sense-making through dance--two key parts of the conceptualization of enactive cognition. As part of a Design-Based Research project, we use Interaction Analysis to present examples of using…

This article presents a phenomenological study on lived and living conscious experiences of improvisational dance. Six experienced improvisational dancers and one dance piano accompanist were interviewed individually, and shared the past-lived experience of improvisational dance. After the interviews, the six dancers agreed to perform solo…

Practitioner Exchanges (PXs) at Luna Dance Institute are casual community conversations co-facilitated by dance educators around a topic of dance teaching inquiry. With the physical disconnection of the COVID era, these in-person roundtables shifted to Zoom, and became even more essential in bringing teaching artists together. Educators from all…

Creativity is considered to be an embodied concept, where internal psychological and external behavioral processes are intertwined. Creativity enhancement programs often target the cognitive side of this bi-dimensionality leaving the impact of motor interventions underexplored. To address this gap in the literature, we tested the effectiveness of…

Contemporary dance and meditative practices are increasingly intertwining in both academic and professional settings as the wide range of current mind/body modalities infiltrate the already vast landscape of modern dance. While the value of emphasizing mindful movement in dance cannot be understated, focusing solely on the slower, sensorial…

This paper describes the pedagogical roots of the work we do, both as teachers and as performers; and how our work reaches beyond the classroom and into community, eliciting narratives and weaving them through improvised dance and music collaborations, eventually onto the walls of an art museum. Our concept was to solicit stories that told of some…

Recent scholarship in 4E Cognition posits what dancers intuitively know so well--that our conceptual maps and communicative strategies emerge directly from and in fluid relationship with our own bodily habitation of our world. This article offers a pedagogical strategy aimed to bridge the ontological divide between dancing and writing through the…

In the past a typical performance situation consisted of a proscenium stage, performers on the stage and audience seated somewhere in the front. In today's technological age, audiences are prone to watching performance on their smart devices. This live-disconnect between the audience and performer/performance has affected the industry on multiple…

This article addresses the notion of touch and its constitutive role in the participatory sense-making process (de Jaegher and Paolo 2007) of play and dance improvisation. It is argued that touch is always relational, as it continuously changes the contours of self, other(ness), and world(ing). It is therefore surprising that touch traditionally…

Recent voices in creativity research emphasize the vital role that processes of active engagement and interaction play. These distributed, interactivity-based, and ecological accounts critique the reduction of creativity to mental mechanisms and eschew the methodological individualism that underlies this view. Instead, they elevate socio-material…

I argue that personal style in improvisational dance is, amongst other factors, a matter of the dancers' attunement to sets of affordances. We can use the language and theory of affordances and enactive embodied cognition as a teaching tool to improve our students' improvisational practice. Often when a student's improvisational skill has…

'Dancing Glass: Reflection of Art through Dance' was a collaborative project using artwork from the glass gallery at the Lowe Art Museum of the University of Miami, as a springboard for artistic inquiry in improvisational dance. Students enrolled in a Dance Improvisation course, guided by professors Carol Kaminsky and Jorge L. Morejón in order to…