Michael O’Connor | Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam | Amsterdam University of the Arts
This contribution considers how artistic research based on the development of a form of practice
for improvisational dance draws upon, and helps develop, theory from cognitive linguistics and principles from the
phenomenology of movement. Dancers given the task of translating the sound of a singer’s voice (rather than her words)
into bodily actions while a song was played were found (based on their narratives about the experience) to have
intuitively employed certain forms of iconicity, image schemas, metaphor, and metonymy as principles for mapping sound
qualities to moving one’s body (movement processes) and assuming certain poses (products of movements). For example,
an extension of the tongue or opening of the jaw is parallel in certain ways to the muscular effort involved in the
extension of one’s arm, namely via mappings of iconicity between movement of different articulators. The abrupt onset
and decay (the aural image [Rhodes, 1994]) of air
turbulence coming from a pronounced consonant like ‘k’ affords understanding in terms of what Stern (1985) calls a vitality affect, allowing us to interpret the quality of plosiveness
across the domains of sound, touch, or action. This theoretically-informed improvisational dance practice explores the
bases of felt meaning that can give rise to and ground conceptual metaphors based on actions (as well as their
corresponding lexicalizations) – an issue explored extensively in R. Gibbs’ work.
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