Copyright © 2003 J. Michael Ryan Publishing, Inc. 24 Crescent Drive North, Andover, New Jersey 07821-4000. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared in the Journal of Dance Education, Volume 3, Number 1, 2003.

Martha Graham, Dance, and the Polymathic Imagination A Case for Multiple Intelligences or Universal Thinking Tools?

Michele Root-Bernstein, Ph.D., and Robert Root-Bernstein, Ph.D.

Summary psychologist Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple 1 The imaginative and compositional processes of Intelligences, in which Graham plays an Martha Graham and other dancer-choreographers important role as the epitome of the “bodily- 2 are explored in order to test the relative merits of kinesthetic intelligence.” The second approach is Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences and the our own concept of the inventive imagination and 3 Root-Bernstein’s tools-for-thinking approach to its universal, all-purpose tools for thinking, in creativity. Gardner’s focus on bodily-kinesthetic which Graham serves as an exemplar of a intelligence as both a means of communication and polymathic mind skilled in many ways. Although cognitive mode for Graham falls short of explain- we share with Gardner the conviction that bodily- ing Graham’s polymathy. Rather, Graham exer- kinesthetic intelligence, or “body thinking” as we cised a wide range of imaginative tools commonly call it, is an essential if undervalued human used by successful individuals across the arts and capacity, we differ in our understanding of how sciences and indicative of general creative skills that capacity plays out in the process of creating that cut across cognitive domains. In the effort to dance or, indeed, any other art or science. By the place dance firmly within a transdisciplinary edu- same token, we arrive at very different imperatives cation, the tools-for-thinking approach provides for the role of dance in education. As an art dance educators with more powerful support than exercising the creative process at the earliest Gardner’s multiple intelligences. stages of training, we believe dance can place itself at the center of a unified, transdisciplinary artha Graham looms over modern dance curriculum. in 20th century America, a giant in a Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence and M physical art struggling for intellectual Martha Graham recognition. It is appropriate, then, that she serve as a focal point for two very different approaches Gardner defines bodily-kinesthetic intelligence to the dancer-choreographer’s cognitive strengths as “the ability to use one’s body in highly differ- and creative abilities. The first of these is entiated and skilled ways, for expressive as well as goal-directed purposes” and he considers the “control of one’s bodily motions and capacity to Michele Root-Bernstein, Ph.D., is an independent handle objects skillfully” as the “cores” of that scholar and writer, and Robert Root-Bernstein, 4 Ph.D., is a Professor of Physiology, at Michigan intelligence. Bodily intelligence, then, is inex- State University. tricably linked with the skilled performance of athletes and dancers, but also of actors, artisans, Correspondence: Michele and Robert Root- instrumentalists, and inventors. Gardner also Bernstein, 720 Gainsborough Drive, East Lansing, argues that bodily intelligence is separate and Michigan 48823. distinct from other intellectual competences in

16 Journal of Dance Education Volume 3, Number 1 2003 17 part because people can and do use body move- Because Graham’s notebooks do not encode ment as a symbolic tool. dance movements step-by-step, Gardner shoves This communicative capacity convinces them aside as lying outside her creative process. Gardner that bodily intelligence must encompass And he does so even as he quotes Graham on the not only expressive or performance competence, role the notebooks played for her in the genera- but cognition as well. The use of different sym- tion of dance ideas: bolic systems for communication, he asserts, re- I would put a typewriter on a little table on quires the use of different mental skills. “Not only my bed, bolster myself with pillows, and write do these symbols and symbol systems differ dra- all night… I get the ideas going. Then I write matically from one another, but the kinds of men- down, I copy out of any books that stimulate tal skills needed to work with them, and to com- me at the time many quotations and I keep municate discoveries to others, are distinctly it. And I put down the source. Then when it different.”5 In short, in order to express oneself in comes to the actual work, I keep a complete a particular symbol system, one must think in that record of the steps. I keep note of every dance symbol system. For Gardner, verbal thinkers who I have. I don’t have notations. I just put it express themselves in words have little in com- down and know what the words mean, or mon with kinesthetic thinkers who express them- what the movements mean and where you selves through movement; the two partake of com- go and what you do and maybe an explana- pletely different creative processes.6 Thus, in his tion here and there.9 book Creating Minds, he finds it possible to choose an individual to exemplify each of his multiple Gardner misses the import of this passage be- intelligences. Martha Graham embodies bodily- cause, in keeping with his theory, he limits kinesthetic thinking. Graham’s creative process to work “with her own The proposition that creative people necessar- body and with the bodies of her dancers,” when ily think in the symbol system in which they ex- her bodily-kinesthetic intelligence is most in evi- press themselves causes severe problems for dence. But Graham does not prevaricate. For her, Gardner when he attempts to explain Graham’s the making of dance did in fact begin with the creative process. Not surprisingly, he presents notebooks, long before she entered the studio, in a Graham has having been naturally disposed to rich stew of ideas, emotions, and imagined move- understand the world through movements and ments verbally expressed. Even when it came to tensions of the body that determined not only how the actual composition of the dance (and written she thought about dance, but also the way in which records apparently lost or destroyed), the words she created and composed it.7 Nevertheless, his of the English language served as a privately attempt to explore her “creating mind” ends up meaningful notation. How, then, does her creative revealing almost nothing about Graham’s inven- thinking qualify as uniquely “bodily-kinesthetic?” tive process. Most of his discussion consists instead It doesn’t. Gardner does not wish to admit, how- of a summary of the many dances she performed ever, that the physically composed and performed – her bodily-kinesthetic products – rather than a dance may have antecedents in something other demonstration of how she employed a particular than a bodily-kinesthetic cognition. Nevertheless, type of mental cogitation in her work. compelling evidence exists that many of Graham’s The limitations of Gardner’s approach become dances were inspired by a poetic, narrative drive particularly apparent when he turns briefly to rather than, simply, a movement-motivated one. Graham’s published notebooks. These contain, for Gardner himself quotes Graham saying that she the most part, literary quotations, copies of poems, was like a playwright or novelist: “I have to have synopses of myths, personal musings, and dance a dramatic line even in the most abstract things plots. Clearly, Gardner would have liked to find I’ve done.”10 By her own admission, she borrowed the notebook full of descriptions, drawings or no- ideas from a wide range of philosophic and visual tations of movements. Because they do not, he as well as kinesthetic sources. “I steal from the speculates that in Graham’s case bodily-kines- best where it happens to be – Plato, Picasso, thetic intelligence was “represented in the course Bertram Ross. I am a thief – and I glory in it.”11 In of its own experimentation” in the dance studio, the end, Gardner himself must acknowledge, Gra- “rather than thought through or encoded in a self- ham had a “polymathic mind.”12 What Gardner standing symbol system” and he laments that “no does not choose to acknowledge is that this very written records of Graham’s experiments-in-move- polymathy undermines his claims that his eight ment exist.”8 “intelligences” are separate from one another, not 18 Journal of Dance Education Volume 3, Number 1 2003 just as performance competences but as modes of to a visual observation* seen many years before cognition.13 – Graham’s first glimpse of modern art around 1923. One painting particularly affected her. “I Graham and the Universal Creative nearly fainted because at that moment I knew I Process was not mad, that others saw the world in the way Our own research shows that thinking (cognition) I did. It was by Wassily Kandinsky, and had a and expressing (communication) are two separate streak of red going from one end to the other. I aspects of the creative, compositional process.14 said, ‘I will do that someday. I will make a dance Autobiographical and archival sources pertaining like that.’”17 For Graham, a special analogy be- to hundreds of successful artists, scientists, hu- tween painting and dancing was born. “Perhaps manists, and inventors convinces us that no one you might call [my work] painting with move- thinks, no one generates new ideas in words or ment,” she was to say in later years. “It has color, numbers; expressive products such as poems, it has continuance of line, it has shock, and it proofs, and dances are never a reliable guide to should have vibrancy.”18 The problem she faced in the creative thinking that generated them. Rather, the early 1920s as a still untried dancer-choreog- creative individuals like Graham first conceive rapher was how to transform this streak of red ideas in private, intuitive forms such as feelings, from a stroke of paint on canvas to a meaningful images, and symbolic shorthand that is then ex- set of human gestures and movements. pressed in public languages such as written nar- It was a challenge that Graham was uniquely ratives or dance performances. “First there is the prepared to meet. From her father, a doctor spe- concept,” Graham wrote of choreographic creativ- cializing in the bodily expressions of mental ity. “Then there is the dramatization of that con- disorders, Graham learned early that the body cept which makes it apparent to others.”15 cannot lie, that each gesture, each movement un- We also find that people in every discipline erringly reveals true inner emotion. It must have employ a common set of imaginative capacities followed for the young Graham that the emotions that we call “tools for thinking.”16 These include experienced before Kandinsky’s painting had an observing, imaging, abstracting, pattern recogniz- equivalent physical expression, as unalloyed with ing and pattern forming, analogizing, body think- traditional representation or narrative as was ing, empathizing, dimensional thinking, modeling, abstract painting itself. In order to achieve that playing, transforming, and synthesizing. The end physical expression, however, Graham faced two result of using these all-purpose thinking tools is hurdles. that creative individuals apprehend things in First she had to “rediscover” what the body could many ways simultaneously, linking intuitive, sub- say, to invent a dance vocabulary that allowed the jective ways of feeling with objective, communi- body to speak directly of her emotion. Ballet and cable ways of knowing. Creative people are there- other classical dance forms did not suffice. From fore almost always multiply-talented, or the mid-1920s through the next decade Graham polymathic. Indeed, we suggest that the experimented with and honed a novel approach polymathic Graham was creative precisely because to dance movement that communicated through she used a wide range of thinking tools to import the percussive contraction and release of the ideas from outside the bodily-kinesthetic intelli- breathing body. According to the dancer-choreog- gence into her dance discipline. rapher Agnes de Mille, Graham’s technique was Graham cast a much broader creative net than shot through with numerous innovations, which Gardner seems willing to address. Though we have in and of themselves amounted to a tremendous no film records of Graham at work in her studio, creative achievement.19 But Graham faced a sec- and only a few records of her finished dances, we ond hurdle as well. It is not enough to know how do have recollections, letters, interviews, and other to speak, one must also have something to say. resources for reconstructing critical aspects of her Graham had to experience the emotions and the repeated trips from first, internal inspiration to intellect that lay behind the Kandinsky painting, finished, external expression in dance. For ex- indeed, behind all great art, and to digest the ex- ample, the idea for “Diversion of Angels,” which perience in terms uniquely capable of expression premiered in 1948, began as an emotional response in dance. Graham confessed to “a great curiosity about *In the discussion that follows, we highlight the life, about the actions of other people, other be- thinking tools evident in Graham’s creative pro- ings”20 and she fed it in two ways — by observ- cess. Definitions of each tool appear below. ing and by reading. “A dancer’s art,” she wrote, “is Journal of Dance Education Volume 3, Number 1 2003 19

built on an attitude of listening, with his whole which mix and combine in every woman. Diver- body.”21 So she listened, she observed directly as sion was a dance “about the love of life and the her physician father had taught her to do. How love of love.”28 did a person’s movement reveal feeling? She also Graham chose to work out this dance “script” observed indirectly, recreating motion and emo- as a series of physical images, a physical poem, in tion through conscious acts of empathy – the which the complexities of love are distilled into young Graham, it is well to remember, was trained communicable essences. So she abstracted or sim- as a actress. Sometimes her empathizing in- plified real behaviors into the suggestive gestures volved trying to “become part of nature by repre- that evoked, but did not explain, the feeling she senting natural forces in dance forms – winds – wanted to express. Abstracting was, in fact, one of flowers – trees… ornamented forms of impression- Graham’s primary imaginative activities. As one istic dancing” crafted by direct analogy to impres- of her students said, “Graham was always engaged sionist painters.22 So critical was imagery and in the process of exploring, eliminating, and sim- analogy to Graham’s way of thinking that she plifying in order to capture the appropriate quali- used both extensively in her teaching. “Get to know ties of movement.”29 all your pores” she told her students. “[F]eel tingles Having abstracted the behaviors of love into from within,” learn to “feel like a piece of sculp- essential movement gestures, Graham’s next chal- ture with holes, such as in a Henry Moore sculp- lenge was to explore and to pattern these as ture. That is…. have the feeling of air going dance.30 There was a logic to this process that in- through the holes in [y]our bones.”23 By means of volved linking bodily movements in ways that such observing, imaging and analogizing, the yielded the emotional responses she desired in the dancer learns things “that the body and [subcon- order and magnitude that she imagined. No ver- scious] mind choose to remember.”24 bal slouch, she distilled this pattern-forming The second major source of Graham’s experi- process into a linguistic abstraction, writing that ence came with the voracious reading that yielded “the word ‘and’ is inseparable from the dance.”31 so many entries in her notebooks. As a young stu- Just as poets compose from verbal phrases, Gra- dent, Graham had excelled in the study of litera- ham said, “I have a very physical memory. I work ture. As an adult, according to Agnes de Mille, she from body phrase.”32 One movement followed an- demonstrated “a remarkable feeling for words and other according to a deeply-felt logic of motor ac- language.”25 Graham believed, perhaps because tivity that was, for Graham, an “absolute science.”33 her father had shown her, that words were inti- Graham worked out the physical aspects of this mately linked to gesture, springing as it were from logic on her own body, modeling steps and phrases the same source. “If you are stuck for a gesture,” for her dancers; in later years she also used the she once told de Mille, “say the word, say the sen- improvisations of dancers who knew her vocabu- tence. The action will come.”26 Such transform- lary intimately. But dance logic was not just physi- ing came naturally to her, so much so that she cal. It had also to do with the associational flow of spoke of dance as a “script of movement.”27 kinesthetically-signed gestures – what Stephen The close, transformative connection Graham Spender referred to in poetry as the “logic of im- drew between words and movements helps explain ages.”34 the manner in which her notebooks served to sym- Not all these images were gestural; some were bolize for her the emotion-movements from which aural, some visual, some verbal. Graham some- she meant to build her dances. Other, non-verbal times choreographed in silence to music “I now images that inhabited her imagination served the felt in my body as well as heard in my mind.”35 same purpose. Pondering Kandinsky’s red streak Other times she established her dance patterns over many years, Graham began to associate it well before commissioning or choosing her accom- verbally with the theme of love, which fascinated paniment, so as not to be unduly swayed by the her in its many psychological and mythic dimen- musical form. Once the music was introduced, sions. Graham’s notebooks do not include notes for however, much additional choreographing took Diversion of Angels per se, yet they do attest to an place as Graham fine-tuned what she called “a enduring obsession with the symbolic woman breath association”36 between the kinesthetic and splintered into goddess, mother, and harlot by the aural composition. At the same time, she at- qualities of love. In fact, many years after com- tended to the visual display of the dance, as it posing the dance she wrote that the three dancers would be seen by an audience, coordinating ges- who took to the stage symbolized three different ture and movement with the sculptural shape of aspects of love – mature, adolescent, and erotic – the dancers. She designed innovative costumes and 20 Journal of Dance Education Volume 3, Number 1 2003 sewed them herself. She collaborated intimately agree with Gardner that Martha Graham was an on stage lighting and on set design, altering physi- extraordinary bodily-kinesthetic expresser (though cal and metaphysical dimensions of the dance in not exclusively so), but we cannot concur that she order to “enlarge the sense of horizon.”37 Indeed, was solely or even primarily a bodily-kinesthetic so completely did she absorb these auxiliary arts thinker. Rather, she epitomizes for us the that props and sets, for instance, became “an ex- polymathic dancer-choreographer who wrought tension of her body.”38 Graham also titled every exceptional artistic achievement from general piece suggestively, lending literary associations to thinking tools that cut across Gardner’s separate her work.39 intelligences and render them useless as cogni- Ultimately, the logic of the dance as a whole lay tive categories. in the meshing of all kinesthetic, aural, visual, and verbal images one with the other. Such combina- Imaginative Tools for Thinking tions involve what we call “synaesthetic” appre- Did Gardner simply choose the wrong exemplar hension, literally meaning “a synthesis of multiple of bodily-kinesthetic intelligence? Would some sensory modes.” When such synesthetic experience other individual have better illustrated the man- is combined with the kind of book learning and ner in which a dancer-choreographer thinks pri- intellectual rigor that Graham brought to each of marily in terms of movement? We don’t think so. her dances, then one achieves what we call Imaginative tools for thinking connect Graham to “synosia” – the “synthesis” of aesthetic, sensory, creative individuals across the arts and sciences and emotional feeling with “gnosis,” the Greek – and to other creative dancer-choreographers as word for knowledge or understanding. One feels well. Like poets or engineers, dancer-choreogra- what one knows and knows what one feels in a phers of all sorts articulate their use of the whole wholistic way, using all of mind and body. range of thinking tools. In the case of Diversion of Angels, the result of all Graham’s creative thinking – her observing, Observing empathizing, imaging, abstracting, analogiz- Every dancer must observe well, honing sight, ing, pattern forming, bodily and dimensional hearing, smell, taste, touch, and body feeling. Cho- thinking and so forth – was a synthesizing of reographer Glen Tetley remarks, “You take in im- visual, aural, emotional, and kinesthetic under- pressions all the time that are stored away for- standing finally and fully expressed as a joyful, ever: tactile things, visual things, sounds, images lyric ballet. Initially stimulated by Kandinsky’s from everywhere.”43 According to the dancer-cho- painting, enlarged by voluminous reading, obser- reographer Alwin Nikolais, the dancer is, of course, vation, introspection, and the innovative explora- a specialist in the “perception” of movement. Far tion of how human feelings are expressed in move- more aware than the person who merely moves ment and gesture, this dance became a meditation from point A to point B, the dancer “observe[s] and on love in which Kandinsky’s flaming streak of red sense[s] all thru which he passes.”44 This is the paint was analogically transformed into “a woman heightened observational power that allowed the in red, who flashes across the stage…. [with] dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham to en- breathlessness and a deep eroticism.”40 Diversion large the physical vocabulary of dance with small of Angels was received by Graham’s peers as a scale movements “found by watching people out master work of matchless choreographic design.41 the window of the studio... movements anyone does She had combined something new to say with a when getting set to do a larger movement.”45,46 new way of saying it. And she did so because hers was a broadly competent imagination that enabled Imaging her to integrate logical, visual, musical, emotional, In the absence of direct observational stimuli, the and verbal material into seminal, kinesthetic con- dancer images or recalls perceptual experience as tributions to dance. Graham’s colleagues knew interior sensations.47 For Balanchine, a “kaleido- this. “She is erudite and knows what she is doing,” scope of... movements lives within the said the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who collaborated choreographer’s brain... [as] abstract memories of with Graham on the set design of Diversion of form.”48 But the dancer must also use visual, tex- Angels and many other dances. “It is not by acci- tural, aural, and other images as well. “A lot of dent that she creates but by reading and assimi- dance,” said one student of Ze’eva Cohen of the lating knowledge. She is a very global woman.”42 Princeton University Dance Program, “is pictur- Martha Graham truly was and is an exemplar ing things...”49 – and in many ways. The dance – but not of the sort MI theory would suggest. We teacher or choreographer, Cohen says, must be Journal of Dance Education Volume 3, Number 1 2003 21 articulate “in terms of shape, timing, direction and ing recursively from apprehension to invention force, forms, intention, texture.”50 In fact, choreog- and back again – is an explicit part of a composi- rapher Trisha Brown often starts her composi- tional process in which movement phrases are tional process by drawing on paper what she has abstracted from dance improvisations and elabo- imaged internally and showing those visual im- rated into formal design. ages to her dancers, who draw upon them as guides to movement.51 Analogizing To discover or invent a pattern is to reveal con- Abstracting nections between things. When the similarity be- The dancer-choreographer combines keen observ- tween two otherwise unlike things is functional, ing and multi-sensual imaging with abstracting, the connection made is an analogy. Doris eliminating the inessential aspects of complex Humphrey drew a powerful analogy when she observations and images to leave the “telling wrote, “I see in [J. S. Bach’s] Chaconne implica- line.”52 Dancer-choreographer Peter Pucci ab- tions of what one of the Greek philosophers meant stracts certain telling lines of ballet and street when he said, ‘every man should dance in order to sports for his piece, Rapt.53 Dancers interested in understand the State and be a good citizen.’”59 Just further abstracting eliminate more and more ref- as music may function like law to order human erents to reality without sacrificing the essential, movement, dancers’ interactions onstage may mir- sought-for quality. For Agnes de Mille, that meant ror those of a whole nation. Analogical thinking “find[ing] a gesture that was not literal...without allowed other pioneers of modern dance to perceive loss of emotional impact...”54 The end result of ab- that bodies in motion could convey harmonies, stracting is the discovery of a simplicity in com- rhythms, and other logical relationships indepen- plexity, “a simple but comprehensive insight into dent of narrative pantomime. Isadora Duncan the nature of things”55 wrote Bauhaus dancer-cho- spoke of hearing in dance “the notes of the scale of reographer Oskar Schlemmer. movement.”60 Agnes de Mille thought a dance should create “visual overtones like those set up Recognizing and Forming Patterns audibly when a gong is struck.”61 Merce Once the dancer has abstracted the essence of the Cunningham’s innovative style based on chance ideas, feelings, textures, shapes, and movements composition stems from the analogy he has been that form the vocabulary of a new dance, he be- said to draw between the operations of nature and gins recognizing and forming patterns with them. the operations of dance.62,63 Recognizing patterns entails perceiving similar- ity of structure or property in things, ideas, and Body Thinking processes. Pattern forming involves combining el- For a dancer, patterns, metaphors, and analogies ements of things, ideas, and processes in order to ultimately involve the body. When asked to com- create similarities of structure or property. Both ment on the long, slow fall backward she performed kinds of patterning operate in dance on many lev- in one of Graham’s dances, May O’Donnell com- els, from the “design of...everyday living,”56 to the pared her challenge analogically to that of “a impulse to move with a found rhythm, to the de- craftsman working with metal to find the tension scription of repeating lines and circles on the dance between two points. In the body, the fall took such floor. Glen Tetley explains that a high release that you had to calculate the ten- sion between the knees and upper back in order [w]hen I come to work on a ballet – if I am to sustain the movement for a long time.”64 What working in the right way – scores I have she described was body thinking, that capacity to loved, incidents, things suddenly make con- enact, recall and, in essence, reason with muscu- nections that I have never put a connection lar tensions, postures and movements – as well as to before: sometimes there comes a wonder- textures and pressures of the skin. Certainly, the ful state when everything starts to have dancer feels what it is like – physically and emo- meaning for me.… There is a structure to all tionally – to move in certain ways and uses those things.57 body sensations to practice and enhance the tech- Dancer-choreographer James Sewell layers com- nical performance of a contraction or a pas de plex polyrhythms by working “one side of my deux.65 The choreographer, too, fathoms gesture, body...[in] circular patterns and the other side in pose, and movement and the physical meanings square patterns, simultaneously.”58 For many oth- they make by acting them out. Like Eliot Feld, who ers, recognizing and forming patterns – and mov- finds the beginnings of a dance in his own body,66 22 Journal of Dance Education Volume 3, Number 1 2003 many choreographers compose by experiencing as far as is humanly possible. This exploitation their own body in movement. has often been enhanced by costume, prop, or stage Body thinking also includes feeling or imaging design. Oskar Schlemmer altered the body’s pres- body sensation in the absence of movement, as ence in space, at one time confining his dancers in when a dancer mentally rehearses her steps or a the sculptural dress of spheres and cubes, at an- choreographer, half asleep after a day’s work in other attaching them to twelve-foot poles. Like the studio, finally solves the transition from one sculptors (and Schlemmer was that, too), dancers dance moment to another.67 A real hallmark of body do more than create physical and visual images, thinking, however, is the ability to project bodily they create an “emotionally charged space”75 that sensitivities beyond the body itself. Describing they alter plastically with the shape of their move- himself in performance, the dancer Louis Murray ments.76 wrote, “My nerve endings reached out to the fur- Additionally, dancers also engage in various thest seat”68 as his mind and body fused in move- forms of dimensional thinking when they preserve ment meaning. Similarly, when dancers wield and record their three-dimensional movement in hand-held props they learn how these props move two-dimensional diagrams, symbolic notations through space, they feel them as “extra bones and such as Benesh or Laban notation, computer soft- flesh,”69 in Alwin Nikolais’ words. ware, and film – or, conversely, reconstruct living dance from these flat maps. Empathizing The good dancer not only thinks with body, she Modeling empathizes. Merging subject with object, she be- By observing, imaging, abstracting, patterning, and comes what she reenacts and embodies. The dancer analogizing with greater or lesser facility, the Gelsey Kirkland identified with her roles as mythi- dancer senses her world and begins to make sense cal firebird or mate-murdering insect by observ- of it. Combining body thinking, empathizing, and ing and mimicking animal movements, but also dimensional thinking, she explores felt reaction by investing these behaviors with emotional mean- and physical response to that experience and sets ing and with character.70 Ruth St. Denis sought as the stage for a movement vocabulary. In her use a dancer to “feel one’s self actually a part of the of the next three thinking tools – modeling, play- cosmic world.…”71 In fact, dancers are adept at feel- ing, and transforming – she learns how to learn, ing into things, whether animate or inanimate, and invent, and compose. Dance is, in fact, permeated movement itself enhances this empathy. Physical by modeling, the making of facsimiles or analogs actions, when witnessed, also stimulate empathy of complex structures and processes. Teachers and in others. The dance historian John Martin writes choreographers perform the steps they wish their that it is “the dancer’s whole function” to excite in dancers to imitate and learn. They also model her audience an “inner mimicry” of her movements, dancers like one models clay by pushing, pulling, which in turn arouse an inner mimicry of her feel- and molding their bodies “to give dancers a sense ings and emotions, whatever these may be.72 Even of the physicality of a step.”77 Moreover, each dance dancer-choreographers who eschew any kind of itself, narrative or not, creates on-stage a repre- emotional narrative depend on kinesthetic empa- sentation of some process, idea, or thing. Despite thy. “The kinesthetic sense,” Merce Cunningham the abstract nature of her dances, Trisha Brown has observed, “is a separate and fortunate behav- wants people to “see in them models for their own ior. It allows the experience of dancing to be part lives.”78 of all of us.”73 Playing Dimensional Thinking In the process of building a dance, choreographers Dance becomes part of us by taking unusually almost invariably play by improvising answers to explicit advantage of dimensional thinking as well, movement problems and elaborating on the ser- that capacity to alter the scale of things, to con- endipitous discovery of new solutions. Play has no ceptualize beyond a given space and time. To think direct purpose or goal other than itself, but for dimensionally as a dancer is, according to Agnes some, it becomes a thinking strategy for generat- de Mille, to embrace and struggle “with the fun- ing unexpected and surprising physical ideas. damental ground,”74 to alter the level and size of Norman Morrice, Director of the Ballet Rambert gestures, to shift the force and speed of motion, to during the 1970s, said that he would often begin work sometimes on the floor and sometimes in the choreographing by “playing around…. In Blind- air, to exploit movement through time and space Sight, I played games for a few days as to what Journal of Dance Education Volume 3, Number 1 2003 23

would happen with dancers who promised me that one, relying on the use of multiple tools to think they would keep their eyes closed and wander in multiple ways simultaneously. Parsons synthe- around a room.…”79 The dance troupe Pilobolus sized as he recursively exercised various ways of has also engaged in collaborative play to jump- thinking. Synthesizing is also evident in dance start the compositional process.80.81 In his experi- performance, as when David Dorfman interweaves ments with chance procedures, Merce words and dance in such a way that “the words Cunningham systematizes rule-bound play. Dance make the movement more literal; the movement becomes a puzzle or game in which the sequence, makes the words more kinetic.”85 Music, stage sets, length, timing, and direction in space of move- lighting, costume – any or all of these are set to ments are determined by random means. In this human movement in seamless integration. Indeed, way Cunningham breaks up expected behaviors dance melds a wide range of ideas, emotions, con- and recombines their elements, breaks established cepts, patterns, meanings, and cognitive sources rules and generates new ones – all hallmarks of in order that knowing and feeling become one for play – and in the process describes new notions of dancer and audience alike. The measure of that human motion.82,83 “synosic” accomplishment is the measure of any particular dance’s artistic and intellectual success. Transforming Is dance the means by which such a synthesis In the process of generating ideas and composing of ideas and feelings is generated, or is dance a dance, the dancer-choreographer transforms between synthetic expression of ideas and feelings gener- one thinking tool and another, between private and ated by other means? In Gardner’s cognitive public knowledge, between imagining an idea in scheme, a bodily-kinesthetic person would have many ways and expressing it in singular kinesthetic to dance in order to think. What we find are danc- form. The transforming process can be particularly ers and choreographers telling us they must think well traced in the dance David Parsons created on in order to dance. Dance is a translation of im- the television program Behind the Scenes.84 First ages, feelings, patterns, and many other ways of Parsons observed sleep positions by asking his thinking, just as art, architecture, music, poetry, dancers to image and model their own and others’ and the equations of science are also translations. sleep habits. He then abstracted from the impro- It would not have mattered who Gardner picked vised play material certain recognizable patterns to exemplify his bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. To of body movement and posture. By “codifying” or styl- one degree or another, all dancers intuitively use izing these, he made them into “something unreal” a wide range of imaginative thinking tools that that required dancers and audience alike to think are generally used by creators in every field. about being in motion rather than just moving. Cer- tain of these stylized movements took some body Polymathy and the General Use of Body thinking and empathizing, as dancers and chore- Thinking ographer worked out what was physically possible. Gardner finds unappealing our conclusion that all Parsons then began forming patterns of his own, creative people, including dancers, use universal adding a beat and articulating elements in consis- tools for thinking. In Intelligence Reframed he tent and repetitive ways. “I’m interested in the group- states that he is, “skeptical about the existence of ings,” he said, “the repetition, the patterns and the horizontal faculties – ones such as memory or at- way the whole thing looks.” He engaged in dimen- tention or perception that are alleged to operate sional thinking by purposefully altering the scale equivalently across all manner of content.”86 of movement phrases. Sleep motions tend to be small, Gardner’s opinion notwithstanding, other cogni- rare, and horizontal, but Parsons made them large, tive studies support the “horizontal,” all-purpose frequent, and vertical, too. Throughout this process, nature of the thinking tools87 and the attendant he transformed the idea of sleep from a few simple observation that people are actually whole-brain internal images into a series of external expressions thinkers.88 that he tested and altered until the dance was se- Two additional research observations further quenced in a manner he found aesthetically pleas- clarify our hypothesis that the imaginative facul- ing. In this way he translated a privately-held vi- ties are general and universally useful. First, sion into a public performance of art. whereas Gardner would have it that dancers are primarily bodily-kinesthetic expressers, we predict Synthesizing that since dancers are universal thinkers, they will Finally, because the making of dance is inherently express themselves in many ways. Second, a transforming activity, it is also a synthesizing whereas Gardner limits the use of bodily-kines- 24 Journal of Dance Education Volume 3, Number 1 2003 thetic intelligence to people who express them- The prediction that body thinking is not lim- selves through movement or bodily capability, we ited to dancers, athletes, or other professions de- predict that since body thinking is part of a uni- pendent on bodily performance is also met. Just versal tool kit, people in all disciplines will be found as body thinking does not describe the sum of the to use it, regardless of their preferred mode of ex- dancer’s imaginative skill, neither does it define pression. the dancer’s intelligence as distinct from that of Ample evidence supports the prediction that the other artists or scientists. The sculptor Auguste best dancers and choreographers, like Martha Rodin stated explicitly that the “Thinker,” meant Graham, are almost always multiple expressers to represent creative individuals of all types, cogi- who transform between many modes of thinking. tated with knitted brow and “every muscle of his Agnes de Mille, for instance, was certainly as lin- arms, back and legs.…”91 Certainly bodily think- guistically talented as Graham, penning a large ing is typical of sculptors. Louise Nevelson stud- number of books. Doris Humphrey also shared this ied eurhythmics for over twenty years in order, linguistic talent, writing frequently and cogently she wrote, to “solve the plastic problem... of both about dance pedagogy and criticism. The dance alternative equilibrium and tension” and to hall artist Loie Fuller, by way of contrast, was achieve “harmonious creation” in her found-art mainly a visual and technological innovator. She sculptures.92 For other professions, the role of body pioneered the use of prosthetic wands to manipu- thinking has been reiterated by the educational late yards of iridescent materials in her famous philosopher John Dewey and psychologist Eliot skirt dances. She also experimented with the Dole Hutchinson.93,94 Even sedentary writers find chemistry of colored glass and invented electrical inspiration in body thinking, nearly inverting the and stage devices to create novel lighting effects process that Graham used to inspire her dances. that not only revolutionized how dance was pre- Some, like Derek Walcott or Gary Snyder have sented, but also resulted in a series of patents. expressed a strong affinity with the rhythms of Oscar Schlemmer was similarly wide-ranging in dance and dance movement. Others are more sen- creative endeavor, engaging professionally as a sitive to the emotional weight of body feelings. The painter, sculptor, costume designer, set designer, poet Robert Frost once observed that “a poem... and as a dancer and choreographer. Transforming begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a ideas from one medium to another, he conceived homesickness, a love sickness.”95 Isabel Allende has of and taught art not as an end in itself, but as a written that her books begin “in a very organic way of exploring man’s relationship to all of na- way. Books don’t happen in my mind, they happen ture and knowledge. somewhere in my belly…. I don’t know what I’m These individuals may have been particularly going to write about [at first] because it has not successful, but they are not atypical in their yet made the trip from the belly to the mind.”96 polymathic interests. From Paul Taylor to Edwin Body thinking is also absolutely essential to Denby, many dancers have turned to writing, pro- many mathematicians and scientists.97-99 Well be- ducing not just memoirs, but other forms of non-fic- fore he found the words or equations to express tion and fiction as well. Many, such as Trisha Brown what he thought, Albert Einstein felt what it was and Merce Cunningham, have engaged in visual art. like, in a muscular sense, to be a photon in motion Some, indeed, have pursued multiple careers. Hubert or a light wave under the attraction of gravity.100 J. Stowitts, Anna Pavlova’s dance partner, choreog- C. S. Smith, who was considered by many people rapher, and set and costume designer, retired from to be the greatest metallurgist of the past century, dancing to paint portraits in India, in accord, though had a “very strong feeling... of how I would behave he may not have known it, with ancient Hindu ad- if I were a certain alloy, a sense of hardness and vice to learn the art of dancing in order to learn the softness and conductivity and fusibility and art of painting.89 The dance-teacher Marian Chace, deformability and brittleness – all in a curiously inventor of dance therapy, acquired expertise in internal and quite literally sensual way.”101 Norbert multiple disciplines, training first in visual arts at Wiener used certain bodily feelings, including pain the Corcoran School of Art, then in dance with and other forms of discomfort, as temporary, short- Denishawn in the 1920s, and later in psycho- hand symbols for unresolved mathematical diffi- therapy.90 Clearly, the polymathic dancer is so much culties.102 The only difference between the dancer more than the bodily-kinesthetic expresser that and the physicist, in this regard, is that the scien- Gardner portrays, cultivating technical proficiency tist usually (but not always103,104) translates his in a number of artistic languages and professional bodily feelings into equations or diagrams in or- fields, not just in dance. der to communicate with other people, rather than Journal of Dance Education Volume 3, Number 1 2003 25 into bodily enactment and stylized movement. In pedagogical strategy summarized here.109 First, short, body thinking is universally useful. Students educators should emphasize the universal nature headed for every art and science, every profession, of the tools for thinking that students learn and and every walk of life, have reason to master it. practice through dance. Use the terminology ex- plicitly and convince colleagues in other fields to A Tools-for-Thinking Education do so as well. When students learn to think ex- Like all arts advocates, dance educators face plicitly about the patterns they are learning choices. Perhaps the most important choice of all through dance and those they see in mathematics involves the educational utility of dance itself. In or politics, then they will begin making already over-crowded curricula it will not be transdisciplinary connections even without cur- enough to insist on dance for dance’s sake. It will ricular change.110 Second, educators should empha- also be necessary to insist on dance for the sake of size creative process rather than product. A dance education as a whole. In such case it makes a dif- is not an equation; but the way one invents and ference whether educators validate dance as a for- learns a dance is the same way that one invents mal expression of a bodily-kinesthetic “intelli- and learns an equation. Students who learn to pay gence” that is necessarily limited in application to attention to the creative process learn how to learn. body disciplines or whether they argue that dance Third, polymathic exemplars should be used. The training prepares the student in imaginative writer who does not yet dance well may find stimu- thinking tools that have wide, transferable appli- lation in the words of a Graham or a Humphrey. cation across the arts and sciences. We argue that The artist or historian may be inspired by the the student who learns to dance learns a great manner in which Schlemmer and Stowitts wed- deal more, not only because he or she gets direct ded dance to visual and humanistic studies. The experience with the creative process and its imagi- technologically-oriented student may find a soul- native thinking tools, but because dance training mate in Fuller’s explorations of light and electric- sensitizes even those who will not become danc- ity. ers to thinking with body movements, body im- In sum, a transdiscliplinary, tools-for-thinking ages, and body feelings – to experiencing the body education is one that makes connections across as a “body of ideas.”105 the curriculum by focusing on the nature of the The accompanying choice between discipline- creative process and developing transferable, based arts or integrated arts curricula has, in part, imaginative skills necessary to lifelong learning. been articulated elsewhere.106 Suffice it to say here What we conclude from this study of Martha Gra- that all integrated curricula are not alike. Using ham and the polymathic imagination is that dance imaginative tools for thinking, it is possible to trains far more than the bodily-kinesthetic “intel- achieve a unification of art, science, and humanis- ligence,” but rather contributes an absolutely nec- tic subjects that is transdisciplinary (i.e., that links essary art, a fourth “R” on a par with reading, writ- across and beyond expressive product to creative ing, and arithmetic, to essential schooling. process) without sacrificing disciplinary integ- rity.107 Such a program need not involve yet an- References other overhaul of educational practice. Tools for 1. Gardner H: Frames of Mind: The Theory of Mul- thinking are already embedded in educational tiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books, 1983. standards around the United States. In Michigan, 2. Gardner H: Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Cre- for example, observing, abstracting, patterning, ativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, analogizing, and modeling appear explicitly as cur- Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi. ricular goals across the arts, humanities, sciences, New York: Basic Books, 1993. and mathematics. Other tools appear implicitly.108 3. Root-Bernstein R, Root-Bernstein M: Sparks of What can and should be argued is that these think- Genius, The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s ing tools, necessary as they are to all endeavors, Most Creative People. New York: Houghton Mifflin, are best learned and exercised in the arts, because 1999. the arts involve students in the creative process 4. Gardner H, 1983, p. 206. at the earliest stages of training. Dance teachers 5. Gardner H, 1993, p. 373. can make a case for helping to meet general edu- 6. Gardner H, 1993, p. xiii. cation standards even as they promote the best 7. 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