Content uploaded by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone on Jun 19, 2016
Content may be subject to copyright.
Thinking in Movement
... Dr. Johnson's work is grounded in four premises: that memories live and move in our bodies; that our bodies draw on sense perception to access embodied memory; that we more deeply understand ourselves and each other by mapping and sharing embodied stories; and that emphatic connections result from these understandings. The expert taught students how to connect with, describe and share their emotions and memories through improvisation, memory exercises and movement [37][38][39]. ...
If architecture is an expression of human creativity through multi-sensory embodiment, then learning, creating and experiencing architecture should also be multi-sensory and embodied. In this article, we challenge the separation of mind and body through Sheets-Johnstone’s mindful bodies concept. We define a mindful body in architecture as one that documents, analyses and memory maps the moving body in different qualities of movement to create diverse spatial experiences. A mindful body approach to creating architecture involves: (i) engaging in meaningful movement and documenting the body, (ii) documenting embodied interactions with dynamic, animate elements in the built environment, (iii) connecting our body’s movements with emotions and memories, (iv) designing spaces that produce diverse movements and atmospheres, and (v) designing architecture based on these spaces. We hypothesize that if designers engage in a mindful body approach to design, they can create spatial experiences that help us make sense of ourselves, others and the world. A mindful body approach to design can result in architectural spaces that activate our attentional switches, connect haptic experiences and memories and reveal wonders.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Minds in movement: embodied cognition in the age of artificial intelligence’.
... (Kelso, 1995, p. 46) As commented and elaborated elsewhere, "The idea of letting his fingers do the walking was a spontaneous breakthrough into a new mode of thinking about spontaneously self-organized movement. It was, in other words, an ideational phase transition that aptly and finely exemplifies thinking in movement" (Sheets-Johnstone, 1981, 1999/2011 added; see also Sheets-Johnstone, 2010a, 2014c. Cognitive achievements that result from thinking in movement are commonly affectively charged, as in the phrase "To my amazement." ...
Can we again learn about ourselves and our surrounding world through dance
as we age, thereby promoting our own health? This article documents facts
of life showing that “older adults” do not have to learn to be cognitive of
their movement, affective dispositions, or surrounding world; they have been
experientially cognitive of all by way of tactility, kinesthesia, and affectivity
from the beginning. Present-day cognitive neuroscience, concentrating and
theorizing as it does on the brain’s neuroplasticity, is however deficient in
recognizing these experiential realities. Research studies on the brain and
behavior, in contrast, demonstrate that coordination dynamics are the defining
feature of both neurological and kinesthetic coordination dynamics. These
dynamics are central to corporeal concepts, to the recognition of if–then
relationships, and to thinking inmovement. In effect, the brain is part of a whole-
body nervous system. The study proceeds to show that the qualitative dynamics
ofmovement that subtend coordination dynamics are basic to not only everyday
movement but also to dancing—to experiencing movement kinesthetically and
to being a mindful body. When Merce Cunningham writes that dance gives you
that “single fleeting moment when you feel alive” and is not for “unsteady souls”
and English writer D. H. Lawrence writes that “[w]e ought to dance with rapture
that we are alive, and in the flesh, and part of the living incarnate cosmos,” their
words are incentives to those who are aging to awaken tactilely, kinesthetically,
and affectively to the existential realities of dance.
... 2012: 38). Sheets-Johnstone (2010) argues that the evolution of enactive cognition is closely related to the fact that humans put the world together in a spatial sense through movement, so spatial concepts are generated in kinesthesia and in our correlative capacity to think in movement. Because enactive cognition accords with thinking in movement, travel memoirs represent a special medium for the projection and communication of this aspect of distributed cognition. ...
This interdisciplinary article involves the intertwining of multiple theoretical areas that explore an anti-colonial reading of the fallacies of the Zionist narrative. The article also initiates new directions in postcolonial studies, while focusing on two counter-current travel memoirs about Palestine, by Salman Abu Sitta and Miko Peled. The article shows how the memoirists’ thinking can challenge Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine. These counter-current travel memoirs lay the groundwork for new perspectives in post-colonial and memory studies. The article also reads the two counter-current memoirs by allowing interactions between human agents and the cognitive ecosystem to reproduce cognitive cartographies of Palestine.
... For instance, in a physical Langar sequence, volunteers who choose to do the dishes or just make a little donation may not consume the final meal but rather seek nourishment only from the acts that they undertake towards the meal. Thus, like a dance improvisation where, in the spontaneity of moment and space, the creative process is not a medium of accomplishing a dance, but it is the very act of the dance itself (Sheets-Johnstone, 1981), Langar is something that is created in the very moment of that creation. With no past and no future; only the present. ...
Building on qualitative approaches, post-qualitative is a turn of “becomings,” never reached but always moving. Turning from and beyond established qualitative traditions, in the post-qualitative, we pursue the leads of St. Pierre and Lather to push qualitative boundaries and offer Langar – a Sikh cultural practice of collective cooking and consumption of a shared meal as an alternative site of knowledge creation. As part, we harness the philosophical virtues of Langar and utilise its resistive prowess to put forward a methodological footprint that turns from the qualitative yardstick of rigor-tested legitimisation of knowledge. We navigate the ontological turns to locate the post-qualitative determinants of Langar and argue for its methodological rightness that disclaim scientism-based warrantability of knowledge building and acceptance.
... This is another form of 'creative process unblocking things' (Arnett, interview) -a thinking in movement (Sheets-Johnstone, 1981) alongside a thinking through making (Gray & Malins, 2004;Lexicon of Design Research, n.d.;Marshall and Wallace, 2017;Nimkulrat, 2012 Caitlin further articulated Luke's co-creative making process as assisting him in a 'rite of passage'; a shift from perceiving himself as an offender to an ex-offender (see Maruna, 2011). Examples of Luke's words formed through his co-creative making process may be seen in Figures 13-16, ...
Literacy and language challenges amongst offending populations are well-documented and yet restorative justice processes rely heavily on oral and literacy competencies. Through a qualitative practice-based study, the co-creative making and gifting of a handmade thing as part of a restorative justice process is found to enable the
formation of a ‘physical’ and ‘non-offending language’ within the person responsible (offender). In this way, a handmade thing is viewed as a ‘conversation starter’, and as helping to form connections, so-called solidarities, across the space between
participants in restorative justice encounters. Through phenomenological and thematic analyses of the data, co-creative making and gifting are shown to be innately about the formation of solidarities between people. It is proposed that they contribute towards a language of convergence in which non-verbal components are primary, with verbal elements emerging secondarily. This language draws on the author’s own definition of solidarity in restorative justice research and practice as a place of convergence, meaning to bend or turn towards the other.
Inspired by Harney and Moten’s (2013) description of study in the undercommons, I bring the perspective of a dance teacher to a conversation about educational equity. Dance is an important method of study and a form of knowledge. It shows up in the undercommons (Harney & Moten, 2013) and in students’ at-home educations (Shujaa, 1993). In-school dance educators have a unique opportunity to bridge the undercommons and the public schools. In addition, using dance to cultivate a multidisciplinary dialogue is a move toward decolonized education and affirms a mode of study that has been historically excluded from schools.
Dance Movement Therapy is gradually becoming recognized as a treatment option in Mental Health Care. However, the working mechanisms can be difficult to comprehend without experiential knowledge of this therapy form. This article aims to offer insight into the clinical application of Dance Movement Therapy for Sanne, a woman with a history of interpersonal relationship difficulties, problems with self‐regulation, low self‐efficacy and diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and co‐morbid Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This case illustration describes treatment interventions during two months of bi‐monthly Dance Movement Therapy as an additional treatment alongside weekly group therapy and bi‐monthly individual Psychotherapy. Post treatment, Sanne demonstrates improvements in self‐regulatory behavior, interpersonal relationships and self‐efficacy as well as an experience she describes as being whole. This article highlights the implications for practitioners of embodied forms of therapy as well as multidisciplinary teams who wish to better understand how the use of opposites within Dance Movement Therapy may be used as an additional intervention for people with Borderline Personality Disorder and co‐morbid complex Post Traumatic stress Disorder.
This article analyses Ekman’s ballet A Swan Lake from the perspective of new materialism, which is understood as the agency of the non-human, particularly the role of water in the creation of movement and in the script of the ballet. The question guiding this article concerns how the materiality of water takes place in Ekman’s ballet. I propose that by paying attention to the corporeality of dance itself as a discursive practice (Barad 2003), it is possible to appreciate the creation of a kind of language or code that can be interpreted. Following Barad, a discursive practice not only is language or what is said but allows certain things to be said. Here, both the bodies of the dancers and the water allow things to be said. In other words, encounters of the materiality of the human, that is, the bodies of the dancers with the non-human agency of the water, provoke new ways of moving and therefore form part of the choreographic composition, thus co-creating the ballet itself.
The intelligibility of a performance of improvised dance does not reside in the rehearsed execution of a pre-existing script, nor does it result from a sustained verbal interaction between the dancers. Many aspects of the speechless performance obviously play an important role in the achieved intelligibility of the dance: a dancer is seen moving on and from a ground, on a stage, in a space delimited by walls, illuminated by spotlights, sounded by music, in front of an audience. And of course with other dancers, whose joint gestures and moves give shape to a choreography by providing pace, rhythm and sequences, thereby constituting a narrative or fragments thereof. This paper addresses the manufacture of this witnessable order, by presenting some results of an ethnographic inquiry. The investigation will be focused on how, in an improvised duet, each dancer interacts with the other, and more specifically how she or he positions her- or himself in relation to the other, from distance to proximity and touch. This work of distance management is the dance, whose choreographic accountability is produced and structured by dancers staying at a distance, getting closer and touching each other. The analysis shows that distance management is oriented to as relevant by the dancers and that it has consequences on their improvised duet. It is also what makes their performance analyzable by distant observers.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.