Nicola Hepp,August 2006 Dance Unlimited Amsterdam

Some thoughts on perception and movement

Introduction

During the past two years, I have become increasingly interested in non-conventional approaches to the audience. I have created choreographies that were not made for traditional viewing and set up experiments to find out more about how to interact with the spectators. In my piece ‘Close’ the audience were the performance. In my final project at Dance Unlimited, 23 | 73, the audience members were encouraged to choose their own perspective and enabled to move around during the piece. There were no chairs, no perfect viewpoint.Wherever you chose to look from, something was obscured from your view. This made me consider some of the things I will write about in this essay.

A question I have been thinking about is: how do we cope with missing information, with not seeing the whole picture? How does moving yourself affect how you perceive your environment? What is the relationship between perception and the embodiment of the spectator? These thoughts have led to other questions about how we look at dance and how the brain works in relation to that.

When we talk about conventional dance performance, much of the information we receive as an audience is visual. Sight is usually considered to be superior to the other senses, and even though they are naturally also involved in the experience of the whole, we generally talk about seeing a dance performance. However, I should point out that I am of the opinion that we should not so readily separate the senses from each other. Philosopher Elizabeth Grosz writes, quoting Merleau-Ponty in her article ‘Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism’: “...for in lived experiences the senses interact, form a union, and yield access to a singular world [...] The senses not only communicate with each other, adding to or enriching each other; they are transposable, within certain limits, onto each other’s domains, although they remain irreducible in their differences.”

As I noticed while doing research for this essay, the concepts of sight and perception often get muddled. Grosz writes that since the beginning of philosophy, knowledge was described in metaphors derived from vision and optics.An example could be how in our everyday language, the meaning of ‘I see’ actually expresses understanding. Ideas of perception and visual perception often intertwine. I found that there were very few sources writing about the perceptual systems other than the visual. It seems that people either talk about visual perception, which then specifically researches how our vision works or perception in a broader term, which includes all of the senses.

To start out I will briefly describe how our perception and our vision work, what happens in the brain. I will then continue by going specifically into how we look at movement and dance. I will try to shed some light on a few of the issues that we are dealing with if we want to begin to understand the affect movement can have on perception. My sources have been diverse, spanning the fields of dance research, cinema studies, cognitive psychology, philosophy and neuroscience. I found that a broader understanding of how perception and the mind work benefited my thinking process. It should be noted that a lot of the sources I refer to are not basing their arguments on scientific facts. Rather they express their individual views and thoughts on the subject. I am using their findings as a way to think about perception in relation to movement and to my own choreographic work.

What is perception?

In the online version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, we can read about perception as

“the process whereby sensory stimulation is translated into organized experience.That experience, or percept, is the joint product of the stimulation and of the process itself.”2 The traditional view is that we create a model of how the world works that can shift as we acquire new information. How we perceive something is always based on a combination of factors, including our past experiences and who we are as individuals. Teacher of cinema studies Anne Rutherford writes in her article ‘Cinema and embodied affect’ that perception “...is neither a cognitive process, nor a biological process [...] It involves the positing of oneself as an embodied entity in a meaningful way in relation to the environment and what the environment offers.”3

Professor of arts and sciences Daniel C. Dennett writes in his book ‘Consciousness explained’ that “wherever there is a conscious mind, there is a point of view.”4 However, when it is attempted to locate that point of view inside an individual, problems arise. There is no single place in the brain where all received information comes together. Dennett uses the term ‘Cartesian Theatre’ as a defining aspect of Cartesian Materialism, which argues that there is a specific place in the brain where all that we are consciously experiencing in a given moment is represented: what we're seeing, what we're hearing, what we're smelling, everything that we are consciously aware of.The ‘Cartesian Theatre’ is essentially a place where a hypothetical outside observer could 'look inside' and 'see' the content of conscious experience moment by moment.

Dennett rejects the ‘Cartesian Theatre’ and pleads for another way of thinking about the mind and how it works, introducing what he calls the ‘Multiple Drafts Model of consciousness’. He writes: “According to the Multiple Drafts Model, all varieties of perception- indeed, all varieties of thought or mental activity- are accomplished in the brain by parallel, multi track processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs. Information entering the nervous system is under continual ‘editorial revision’ [...]

These editorial processes occur over large fractions of a second, during which time various additions, incorporations, emendations and overwritings of content can occur, in various orders. We don’t directly experience what happens on our retinas, in our ears, on the surface of our skin.What we actually experience is a product of many processes of interpretation- editorial processes, in effect.”5 Dennett continues to explain how stimuli transform to collated, revised representations of a complete experience, taking place in various parts of the brain.The Multiple Drafts Model claims that once specific information has reached and been considered by the corresponding specialized part of the brain, it does not have to be sent somewhere else to be reexamined by some ‘master’ examiner. In Dennett’s words, “...[it] does not lead to a representation of the [...] feature for the benefit of the audience in the Cartesian Theatre- for there is no Cartesian Theatre.”6

How we see

What we see is light and reflected light. Inside the eye receptors transform the light energy into electrical signals that continue to the visual cortex.The generally accepted theory of vision asserts that the eye forms an image of an object on the back of the retina. Note that we are once again experiencing the return of what Dennett calls “the persuasive imagery of the Cartesian Theater”7 into our way of thinking! Perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson also disagrees with this line of thought, pointing out that it leads to a logical fallacy, “...that the retinal image is something to be seen”8. Gibson calls it the ‘little man in the brain’-theory, which corresponds closely with Cartesian Materialism.

Gibson developed his own theory of visual perception and pleads for what he calls an ecological approach to visual perception. His model emphasizes the process of visual kinesthesia. Gibson suggests that vision depends not only on the eyes connected to the brain, but to “...the eyes in the head on a body supported by the ground, the brain being only the central organ of a complete visual system.”9 He claims that vision is kinaesthetic in that it registers movements of the body or part of the body relative to the ground. This information he calls proprioception. He argues that the idea that vision obtains only external information is false, that instead it gathers information about both the environment and the self.Anne Rutherford describes Gibson’s theory as a discarding of the subjective-objective dichotomy in traditional models of perception. She writes: “By the recognition that visual perception involves both the processes of exteroception and proprioception, [Gibson] radically rethinks the notion of the senses. This is the core of his ecological approach to perception: that perception is an environmental process. By this he means that the perceiver constantly locates him or herself in the environment, that what we perceive is not data about the environment out there, but the significance of surfaces in relation to our body."

Gibson writes in his book “The ecological approach to visual perception” how natural vision entails looking around, walking up to something and moving around it to see it from all sides. He rejects the way textbooks assume that vision works like a camera and refers to it as snapshot and aperture vision- only two forms of vision along others such as ambient and ambulatory vision. According to Gibson,“the flow of optical stimulation is not a sequence of stimuli or a series of discrete snapshots. [...] The flow is sampled by the visual system.And the persistence of the environment together with the coexistence of its parts and the concurrence of its events are all perceived together.” One of Gibson’s main points is that of a changing perspective. He writes: “When the moving point of observation is understood as the general case, the stationary point of observation is more intelligible. It no longer is conceived as a single geometrical point in space but as a pause in locomotion, as a temporarily fixed position relative to the environment. “10

Perceiving movement

A general definition of movement could be that it is a natural event that involves a change in the position or location of something. James J. Gibson speaks of movement as ‘flow’. We see movement as objects or body parts coming in and out of our field of vision, becoming magnified when moving closer to us or minified when moving away.The movement of our own bodies has to constantly be reassessed by our visual perception system to give us further information on what we are seeing. Gibson writes:“The flow of the ambient optic array specifies locomotion and is propriospecific; at the same time certain features of the flowing array specify the environmental layout and are exterospecific. During locomotion, one is always aware of both his own unique moving point of observation and the surrounding surfaces, each in relation to the other.”11 His theory implies that we are looking at something while in motion ourselves and that therefore the adjustments for the perception of persistence and change must be ongoing.

Movement is ever present in our bodies, in our environment. Where there is no movement there is no life. However, to take the discussion deeply onto that level is basically another essay. Because of my particular interest about perception and movement in relation to my final project at Dance Unlimited, I have decided to concentrate mainly on movement that is spatial. Later on in this essay I will compare ‘sitting still in an auditorium’ with ‘walking around in space’ as if one is non-moving while the other in constant motion.These are of course simplified ways of thinking about the two situations as there might be moments of pause and stillness in the walking as well as one could argue that there is always some kind of movement going on in the body even while sitting ‘still’.

A traditional way for psychologists to discuss movement is to refer to the concept of apparent motion. An optical illusion according to most scientists, it is often described using the classic example of the moving dot. This entails that if we are exposed to a series of static images of a dot in different locations, it can be perceived as moving. On the website of the Department of Psychological sciences of Purdue University we can read that in this experiment, the timing of the flashes is important in determining whether or not motion is seen.“If the time between the offset of the first stimulus and the onset of the second stimulus (called the interstimulus interval or ISI) was very short, observers simply see two dots presented nearly simultaneously. If the ISI is very long observers see one dot flash on and off and then the other flash on and off. For intermediate ISIs the first dot seems to turn off, move through the space between the dots and appear at the position of the second dot.”12

Interestingly, as choreographer and researcher Ivar Hagendoorn writes in his article ‘The dancing brain’ about a study by Freyd and Maggie Shiffrar, “if the dots are replaced by images of a human body in two different positions, the brain chooses an anatomically possible route to connect the two positions. This suggests that the brain’s implicit knowledge of the movements that the body is capable of making somehow influences perception. “13

How do we look at dance? The spectator and embodiment

Ivar Hagendoorn writes in ‘Dance, Perception, Aesthetic Experience & the Brain’ about looking at dance: “The feelings we experience [...] are the product of a myriad of sensory, cognitive and emotional brain processes.They are not accidental but depend on the properties of the brain processes involved in the analysis of sensory stimuli and on the interaction of expectations, associations and personal preferences as laid down in the brain.”14

Conventional theatre and dance performance has the audience seated in an auditorium, looking at the performers from one perspective.With the development of for example performance art, live art, site-specific work and happenings that changed and opened up an array of possibilities of where to place the audience.

Let us first look at the traditional way of watching dance from a two-dimensional perspective.This is the subject of some investigation by choreographer Chris Clow in his final dissertation at Laban Centre for Movement and Dance. He highlights some of the problems the proscenium arch creates: “ The proscenium arch frames the stage, and like any frame controls what and how much is seen. It also dictates where the spectators can view from.”15 Clow claims that the proscenium arch creates a division between stage and auditorium, which in essence is an invisible barrier between performer and spectator and even the content or situation of the work. However, at the end of the dissertation, Clow comes to the conclusion that the proscenium arch actually helps eliminate distractions and directs the spectator’s focus. He stresses that viewing from one perspective uses our innate abilities to “complete the incomplete”16.Whenever we look at a three-dimensional object such as a body, a part of it is hidden. Our brains imagine that which we do not see.Clow continues in his dissertation:“When viewing the body in the theatre we can only see from one perspective.This might not be a problem in so far, as what we can’t see might be completed by our past experience.”17 He uses an anecdote quoted from Semir Zeki’s book ‘Inner vision: An exploration of art and the brain’ about a man behind a desk. We accept that when we see a man behind a desk, even though we have no sensory confirmation of the fact that he has legs, we assume that they are present based on our past visual experience. “Equally, when we see only one half of a building or a cat, because the rest is hidden from our view, we assume that the rest is nevertheless there.”18

Applying this to movement, Hagendoorn writes that “the brain will complement the movement by interpolating between the positions it did perceive, which in case of body positions means choosing a biomechanically feasible path.” 19 Of course this actually applies to how we humans look at a moving body in any situation, as we can never see from more than one angle at any given moment. Even if we are allowed to walk around the performer and look at him or her from different angles, similar to how Gibson describes natural vision, the moment before has passed and something else might be obscured by our new position. Hagendoorn writes: “In principle almost anything can happen while we are unable to see the object, but in practice most objects continue along their track and we are able to accurately predict where and when it will reappear. Indeed, we tend to be surprised if the object does not reappear or at a different location. Conversely, once the object has reappeared the brain is able to infer the motion trajectory between the points where it vanished and resurfaced.The latter is a specific example of what is known as ‘apparent motion’, since we did not really see the object move, we merely saw it dis- and reappear.”20

Anne Rutherford refers to this phenomenon as mimesis and suggests that it is a critical link between Gibson’s ideas of proprioception and visual kinesthesia, “its affective dimension, and its resonance for an understanding of (cinema) spectatorship.“23 Rutherford describes it by quoting Michael Taussig writing about mimesis as “the visceral bond which connects the perceiver to the perceived”24. Taussig (again as quoted by Rutherford) writes that “sentience takes us out of ourselves- [it] is not ‘the mind’s eye’ that reaches out to grasp or grope the image or space before me—it is my embodied self locating, placing myself in the world which I am viewing."25 Rutherford continues by putting forth that it is “the heightening of this sentience that gives rise to embodied knowledge.”26

How does movement influence perception?

Having shared these diverse insights as to how we perceive, I would now like to focus on the difference between looking at a dance piece from an auditorium and walking around inside a performance, seeing it from the inside. What does it mean for an audience to have to execute the additional task of moving while looking at something? Is moving yourself just a part of our natural system of vision like Gibson suggests? If so, are we wrong to want to put our audience in a certain place and have them stay there? What are the consequences of where you place your audience to how they perceive your work?

Drawing on some of the ideas that I have laid out earlier in this essay I would suggest that James J. Gibson’s ideas are of paramount importance here. I would like to use his descriptions of vision to explain some of the differences in watching from a static or a changing perspective. Sitting in an auditorium and watching from a distance could be likened to his view of aperture vision.The “eyes in the head on a body supported by the ground” is working as one system but the kinesthetic adjustments that are possible to make are very small. On the other hand, when walking around inside a piece, we make use of our natural vision. It is ambulatory and keeps shifting.

In my final project at Dance Unlimited, 23 | 73, I wanted to give the audience the choice of how to look at the piece. I had placed two male performers on either side of a large video-screen.The audience was free to move around in the space, seeing the scene from different angles. I was not necessarily concerned with pinpointing what the difference was between how people perceived the piece if they chose a fixed point or kept walking around. It was clear that the experience would be different for everybody. Each person would see his or her own individual ‘edit’ of the piece. Conceptually, it was more important to me that they realized they were missing a part of the performance as they could not be on both sides at the same time. I also wanted to make them conscious of their choices.

Some feedback I’ve had afterwards about how the spectators experienced looking at the performance while moving were that many felt they had to disconnect and reconnect to the choreography, each time they moved to a new spot. Other reactions I have had were that because of the plenitude of things to look at while walking around, the actions of the performers would need more time than in a conventional performance. Several people felt that curiosity became a motivation in how to approach the work. Quite a few people were distracted by noticing other members of the audience in their own field of vision. This is an example of Gibson’s theory of persistence and change. As long as something is constant, the brain can take its attention away from that factor and focus on other things. Gibson describes it as follows: “The perceiver extracts the invariants of structure from the flux of stimulation while still noticing the flux.”27 If the environment is perpetually changing such as in 23 | 73, where some 40 people randomly move around in space, it constantly demands reconsideration.

External movement such as walking or changing position in space can easily be connected to Gibson’s theories of visual perception. I would like to now take it one step further and suggest that we can also make a link to more internal movements, our thoughts and our concept of ‘self’’.

When looking at dance, we make our own interpretations or stories. Our thoughts wander from one thing to another, making associations and attaching meaning to what we see.We have emotional and physical responses to what happens before our eyes.Are our thoughts affected by moving? I believe that they are. Imagine yourself in these two situations: First in a darkened theatre, facing a stage where performers are moving.You are allowed to disappear, to be anonymous, a voyeur. Your body is not important and stays in more or less the same position throughout the performance. Now the other situation:You are in a bright space with a group of people walking around an installation in a gallery.You are able to see what everyone else is doing, how they are reacting to the installation and they can see you.You are aware of yourself existing in that space in a completely other way than when you sit in a dark auditorium. That leads me to ask whether it is harder as a spectator to forget yourself and ‘lose’ yourself in a piece if you are more conscious of your own body.

Anne Rutherford writes about the embodiment of the spectator in ‘Cinema and Embodied Affect’. She argues that Gibson's theory of an ecological approach to perception provides a link between the theorization of vision and an understanding of affective experience and its relationship to embodied spectatorship. Citing philosopher Sue Cataldi’s discussion of Gibson in her book ‘Emotion, Depth, and Flesh: A Study of Sensitive Space: Reflections on Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Embodiment’, Rutherford writes: “While Gibson is not concerned with the question of emotion, Cataldi's reading extends his argument from the ‘perception of one's body in relation to the ground’, to include a discussion of what one's body is doing or feeling in relation to that ground. [Cataldi] takes this model of situation of self in relation to the environment onto the level of emotion, arguing that we are simultaneously placed emotionally in relation to that environment.”28

I have often been fascinated by how my thought process is different depending on what I am doing at the time.To me it seems our thoughts are influenced by our environment and actions. For example the way I think is completely different if I sit down in a quiet place with pen and paper or if I’m riding my bike through town. One is more structured and the other has a more creative flow.This would mean that if movement affects our thinking, the way we perceive a dance piece (or anything for that matter) would become affected too.

But in what way? Does moving and changing position make the experience more subjective? We always bring our own history with us to whatever we look at or experience- so in that sense our experience is always subjective. Perception is not only what the eyes see or what our senses pick up, but what kind of meaning we each individually bring to what we see or take part in. Returning to Christopher Clow’s conclusion that the proscenium arch might be the best way through which to view dance, I agree with him that the proscenium arch or a conventional theatre situation allows the spectator to concentrate solely on the movements and the choreography made for the stage. He argues that precisely because of some of the conventions and rules that exist within the theatre, we know what is expected of us and can concentrate on looking at the piece with a minimum of distractions. But I would like to put forth the idea that creating dance that is not meant to be looked at in the conventional way just necessitates a different way of thinking about movement and content while you are creating the work. Not that it cannot be done or should not be done.

Summary

In this essay I have laid out some ideas about perception in relation to movement. I think we can safely say that perception is influenced by movement.

In a way similar to how it proves impossible to separate the way the senses work from each other in perceiving the world around us, it seems equally impossible to separate movement from perception.

When thinking about the concept of how something is perceived in relation to dance performance we are not only dealing with the content of the piece, but also with the spectators and their perceptions. As became evident while creating performances like ‘Close’ and ‘23 | 73’, each individual decision has repercussions on how people experience taking part in it. And even though we often think of going to a dance performance as being a primarily visual experience, in my opinion there are many more pieces of information to take into consideration of what is forming the whole experience, and thus our perception of it.

1 GROSZ, E, 1994.Volatile Bodies:Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Indiana University Press, Bloomington; and Allen and Unwin, Sydney

2 Available from http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9110465 [Accessed August 18 2006]
3 RUTHERFORD,A, 2002, Cinema and embodied affect.Available from http://www.sensesofcinema.com/

contents/03/25/embodied_affect.html [Accessed August 9 2006]

4 DENNETT, D, 1991, Consciousness explained, Little, Brown& Company

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8 GIBSON, J.J. 1979,The ecological approach to visual perception, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston

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11 GIBSON, J.J. 1968, On the Difference between Perception and Proprioception, unpublished manuscript. Available from: http://www.huwi.org/gibson/difference.php

12 Available from: http://www2.psych.purdue.edu/~coglab/VisLab/ApparentMotion/AM.html {Accessed July 29 2006}

13 HAGENDOORN, I, 2003,The dancing brain. Cerebrum Vol 5, No. 2, Dana Press
14 HAGENDOORN, I, Dance, Perception,Aesthetic Experience & the Brain’ Available from http://

www.ivarhagendoorn.com/research/perception.html {Accessed July 11 2006}

15 CLOW, C, 2004,Why are three-dimensional moving bodies traditionally viewed from a two-dimensional perspective, similar to that which occurs within the theatre?

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19 HAGENDOORN, I, 2004, Some Speculative Hypotheses about the Nature and Perception of Dance and Choreography, Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (3-4)

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21 VAN RUIJVEN, E, 2005, Close

22 HAGENDOORN, I, 2004, Some Speculative Hypotheses about the Nature and Perception of Dance and Choreography, Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (3-4)

23 RUTHERFORD,A, 2002, Cinema and embodied affect.Available from http://www.sensesofcinema.com/ contents/03/25/embodied_affect.html [Accessed August 9 2006]

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