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.