How multimodality shapes creative choice in dance

Abstract

Creative choice is an individual act. As in other fields such as filmmaking, dance creation is based on a cognitive dualism that considers the choreographer as the creative decision-maker, while the dancer is objectified. The dancer’s body is an instrument for exploration of the choreographer’s imagery. We claim that the products of creativity are minute but crucial modifications of transitory stages of a dance rehearsal. On the one hand, attention is given to a dance company as a distributed cognitive system. The choreographer communicates in diverse modalities, which carry specific information, physical as well as symbolic. Through the analysis of an audiovisual and cognitive ethnography with ELAN software we find differences in decision-making patterns across multimodal instructions. On the other hand, we apply Social Network Analysis and UCINET software as a methodological innovation in order to formalize data from observed rehearsal settings. In all, the choice of modalities in the chorographical instruction shapes movement production, which is based on dyads, triads and other forms of creative interaction.