{"id":478,"date":"2011-04-19T13:14:53","date_gmt":"2011-04-19T17:14:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.montclair.edu\/crdirector\/?p=92"},"modified":"2019-05-28T09:40:58","modified_gmt":"2019-05-28T13:40:58","slug":"cognitive-science-and-the-performing-arts-recent-conversations-with-philip-barnard-by-neil-baldwin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/2011\/04\/19\/cognitive-science-and-the-performing-arts-recent-conversations-with-philip-barnard-by-neil-baldwin\/","title":{"rendered":"Cognitive Science and the Performing Arts: Recent Conversations with Philip Barnard – by Neil Baldwin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thanks to\u00a0a\u00a0competitive, major grant from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters “Creative Campus” Innovations\u00a0Grant Program, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation <\/a>and\u00a0received recently by the Montclair State University Office of Arts and\u00a0Cultural Programming, the MSU community\u00a0was privileged to experience the visionary Brainstorm Symposium on Creative Thinking <\/a>in the Alexander Kasser Theater on April 12, 2011.\u00a0\u00a0 The\u00a0following afternoon,\u00a0before a rapt audience of theatre and dance students and faculty in the Life Hall Dance Studio, I engaged in a spirited Q&A and dialogue with\u00a0Dr. Philip Barnard<\/a>, co-creator of Choreographic Thinking Tools <\/a>and other innovations developed since 2003 with R-Research\/Random Dance;\u00a0until recently, Dr. Barnard was program leader at the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge (UK).<\/p>\n

In a pre-interview\u00a0in the ACP offices —\u00a0with Scott deLahunta, R-Research Director<\/a>;\u00a0David Kirsh, Professor in Cognitive Science at UC San Diego (another Random Dance collaborator)<\/a>; and Carrie Urbanic and Sarah Bishop-Stone of\u00a0ACP in attendance — I sat with Phil\u00a0and made my way through a thick dossier of his published and draft research papers,\u00a0attempting to sort out, from the density of information, the ultimate trajectory for our forthcoming public presentation.<\/p>\n

My own brand of “choreographic thinking,”\u00a0through\u00a0danceaturgy<\/em> work in the studios here at MSU, has been spent\u00a0observing and writing\u00a0about and talking to our undergraduate BFA dancers as they move through the paces of the annual classical and modernist repertory.\u00a0 I approach this\u00a0relationship with dance via\u00a0a textual, authorial, pedagogical and “poetics” tradition; whereas Phil\u00a0Barnard is a\u00a0research scientist who studies clinical issues\u00a0involving human cognition and emotion, and how the mind processes meaning. His exhaustive interdisciplinary research projects with Random Dance are designed to develop productive synergies between choreographic processes and cognitive neuroscience.<\/p>\n

[NOTE:\u00a0Any time you — the reader of this post —\u00a0need to refresh your perception of this dance dynamic, all you have to do is toggle between Phil’s new CRC Guest Essay blog <\/a>and this text!]<\/p>\n

Our coffee-chat\u00a0was an unerring metaphor for\u00a0the event to come.\u00a0\u00a0After ten minutes of awkward interrogation, I realized\u00a0I was in the presence of a formidably-sentient\u00a0fellow\u00a0unfazed by jet-lag,\u00a0his nerve-endings\u00a0well-exposed,\u00a0gaze\u00a0lucid, and disposition quiet — a quintessential listener and\u00a0watcher\u00a0par excellence<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0Then again, I said to myself, he would have<\/em> to be a person with finely-honed perceptions in order to have spent the last eight years\u00a0with the likes of Scott and Wayne.<\/p>\n

On that basis, I shifted gears, simply asking Phil what he was “most comfortable” talking about; from that instant, the\u00a0time passing in the room accelerated. He spoke — and this is with no pretense at\u00a0order —\u00a0of himself as an admittedly-creative thinker, nonetheless one who “does not do Art.” I could hear the word capitalized. Invited into the Random Dance studios by Wayne McGregor, and exercising his facilities of observation,\u00a0Phil\u00a0became drawn into wonderment about the “magic” of what the dancers were doing as they proceeded to execute tasks. Through an evolving series of perceptual exercises and calculated interventions, Phil told me, he discovered discrepancies between what the dancers thought<\/em> they were doing and the words they sought in order to conceptualize their physical actions.<\/p>\n

“How do artists make<\/em> things; how do they work with<\/em> materials?” Phil asked, with the underlying assumption, at first\u00a0disconcerting, that “creativity is not free<\/em>,” because it drives the artist back into his own mind —\u00a0 a reflexive dynamic.\u00a0\u00a0It might seem to the uninitiated that there is an inherent contradiction between the creative process, in and of itself, and the drive to “explain” it. But\u00a0that opposition is dissipated when one realizes that although the artist is coming at the craft\u00a0from one direction and the scientist from another, their goal of elucidation is\u00a0prelude to allowing the artist (in\u00a0our case, the dancer<\/em>) to find greater depth and meaning, leading to a more fulfilling execution of the work in process.<\/p>\n

Phil and I\u00a0also spoke about the dancer’s concept of his or her own movement as depicted in his mind, and that commensurate\u00a0relationship to kinaesthetic intelligence<\/a>.\u00a0The painter knows his way around the terrain of the canvas propped up in front of him, so that, if we stand by and watch\u00a0 in the studio, it can\u00a0look intuitive; in the same way, the dancer devises a movement, perhaps\u00a0based upon a “prompt” by the choreographer, that will utilize a learned vocabulary, and become muscle-memory.\u00a0Indeed, \u00a0those muscles still have to be deliberately\u00a0exercised.<\/p>\n

“In the end,” Phil insisted, “the work that comes out of the practice is Wayne’s<\/em> piece. He has a job to do and he does it consummately well.” To which I responded that the implication seemed that at a certain juncture Phil steps away<\/em>, after having stepped in<\/em>,\u00a0stopped and interrupted the flow of work. He agreed,\u00a0advancing the analogy I was hoping for\u00a0 —\u00a0between the clinician who pursues a course of therapy up to the borderline of the psyche where the patient (read “dancer,” and “choreographer,” instead of clinical practitioner)\u00a0must proceed alone down the path to art — or a semblance of self-knowledge and, perhaps, healing.<\/p>\n

“It all comes down to language,”\u00a0Phil said, with a deliberate smile on my behalf. “We give the dancers permission to explore a task and then we try to translate what they describe into applied methodologies for others to come.”<\/p>\n

Our talk for the students and faculty picked up where this one left off as if we had not had two days\u00a0between. Phil traced his rich and varied path through the sciences, the broad aims of his cognitive and clinical work, and the major driving themes and areas of research, prior to meeting Wayne McGregor and Scott deLahunta in 2003, insofar as his interest in \u201chow meaning systems work\u201d\u00a0set the scene for\u00a0working with Random Dance —\u00a0\u201chow and why [Phil] was in the room\u201d when it all began.\u00a0We discovered as we talked that\u00a0there is a conceptual dialectic between \u201cself\u201d and \u201dworld\u201d that needs to be figured out by the objective practitioner, no matter what the field.<\/p>\n

There were also instructive\u00a0parallels and mutual illuminations between communication behaviorally [i.e., in \u201creal life\u201d]; and communication of the dancer with the audience \u2013 and other dancers.\u00a0Hence,\u00a0 Bridging Representations<\/em>, as per this chart in Phil’s Guest Essay<\/a>, starts out as a schematic visual construct, the dancer\u00a0placed in a position to absorb multimodal information before being asked to externalize\/perform it for the purpose of\u00a0trying to understand and articulate\u00a0how information\u00a0and particularized thought is synthesized into movement.<\/p>\n

The complications and obstructions that arise at this point, when the Choreographic Thinking Tools are actually being built, include figuring out how to\u00a0re-enter<\/span> the reflective findings and the feedback taken from one group of highly-imaginative and very professional dancers into\u00a0a larger, more expansive model to be\u00a0further amplified and\u00a0applied.<\/p>\n

By the end of our two conversations, one private and one public, I realized that Choreographic Thinking Tools <\/a>are rippling and omnidirectional.<\/p>\n

They are being built out of<\/em> inspiration\u00a0in order to<\/em> inspire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to\u00a0a\u00a0competitive, major grant from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters “Creative Campus” Innovations\u00a0Grant Program, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and\u00a0received recently by the Montclair State University Office of Arts and\u00a0Cultural Programming, the MSU community\u00a0was privileged to experience the visionary Brainstorm Symposium on Creative Thinking in the Alexander Kasser Theater on April 12, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-director-s-essay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1116,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478\/revisions\/1116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}