The Dancing Brain

If Descartes’ error in writing down his famous sentence (Je danse donc je suis) had not been corrected by his editor into Cogito ergo sum, what might centuries of dance studies have contributed to our knowledge of the mind? We shall never know, and the marginal status of dance in our culture and in the academies is of course a reflection of various misunderstandings of the significance of movement for human development.

In evolutionary terms, we learnt from Charles Darwin and Stanley Kubrick, dance is as vital for the survival of the species and its expressions in ritual, social, and theatrical contexts as it is for the evolution of the Hollywood film industry. Movie images encapsulate popular stereotypes and icons, revealing the roles of gender, race, fashion, economic and political force. There are movies playing in our minds all the time – images of objects, images of spatial organization, motor processes, memory, body maps, etc. In science fiction we can step into the brain room and switch off the automated technology when it becomes too threatening. In reality, it has proven to be more difficult to grasp how the brain inside the human organism engenders mental patterns – how ...