Choreographic Cognition In Dance

This highlights the fact that the environment of an artist and especially a choreographer has a huge influence on the dances he creates. This environment is not particularly the immediate, where he finds himself but an accumulation of different paths of learning either in choreography or in other courses of survival. The choreographer has a drop-box of ideas where he consciously and unconsciously stores mental images of his experiences: imagined, seen or felt. Therefore, it suffices to say that creation and execution of dance requires a thinking process which can be referred to as choreographic cognition. Choreographic cognition in the opinion of Catherine Stevens and Renee Glass “refers to the cognitive and mental processes involved in constructing

The ability to create and recreate is a cognitive function which helps in solving the question of learning. Mental images play a major role in determining how dance is composed and conceived by the choreographer, the dancer and ultimately the audience, for whom the art work is being created. What readily drives a choreographer in creating dance movements can easily be at least one of the following factors: the need to fulfill a function with the dance, to embellish an opera, a response to an outside stimuli, the need to work with a particular dancer or the need to move to the structure of movement suggested by a piece of music. Ultimately, there is a craving to be satisfied. Mason opines that “the processes of dance making have been likened to an irrepressible ‘evolutionary urge’ ” (2009:27). Creativity always seeks to do certain tasks in different manners rather than adhering to conventions. Choreographers also employ such in creating movements and/or when reworking conventional dance sequences to allow for freshness and newness in

The choreographer explicitly gives his dancers tasks that require them to shift between modalities. For instance, he might ask them to imagine that their bodies are made of fragile materials, or that they should imagine the feeling that the parts of their bodies are being dismembered. Their task is to translate those feelings into movements. One reason to see this process of simulating in one sensory modality and then translating to another modality as embodied cognition is that it relies on each modality having its own way of coding input, and ‘concepts’. Although embodied cognition, has different meanings, a common element across most versions is that cognitive processes are grounded in specific brain systems. The way we acquired concepts through sight, sound, touch, and so on, continues to affect our understanding of those concepts, long after they have been abstracted from specific senses. The idea of running is abstract but we ground our understanding of that idea in the physical activity of running which we experienced when