WHY WE DANCE, TWYLA THARP AND NEUROSCIENCE

Can we get to universal verities through the granularities of our everyday lives? Can we gain some deeper understanding of why we do what we do by subscribing to a course of inquiry, a course that weds science and the arts of thought and action? Can we learn something about this from someone such as Twyla Tharp, the choreographer? She wrote an engaging book in 2003 titled The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life: A Practical Guide. And so it is. The book is about adding “tools” to one's toolbox of creativity. She addresses not only the practicalities of time management and creative media, but also how one's attitudes and emotions play into the creative life. She writes about ritual and discipline and about commitment and exertion. She gives suggestions on how to stimulate the creative urge and how to fashion it by identifying themes and how to keep it fresh. She is honest about the slumps and blocks that are a natural part of doing anything. She tends to see even the most mundane and boring pursuits (such as one's job) as opportunities for creativity in ways that don't elevate the basic boring job beyond recognition or dismiss its banality. All of us live in a banal environment if we are conscious and awake to the details of life. But Tharp offers a way to use some tools in more structurally constructive and personally constructive ways.

The questions I have are: What does the toolbox look like? Where are we putting the tools? What comes before the tools? Wondering why we dance in the first place directed me into what the world of neuroscience has learned about human motivation and response. After all, isn't dance something universally human and isn't it all inclusively neurological, from brain to brawn? Aren't we also asking about how dance emerges from networks and contributes to others? What is now esoteric and exotic about these associations will one day be integrated into common parlance and we will be on the cusp of another discovery. We will know more about how we are constructed as humans and how we express ourselves in the wider and deeper expanding world. But that world and that knowledge will continue to expand, just as the cosmos is expanding after the Big Bang that has given all that is.

The Big Bang of cosmic explosion has delivered to us a miraculous set of interlocking systems that manifests in ways that includes dance. We are creatures that move, that have innate systems for motion. Dance is one manifestation. It figures in courtship behavior, in play, and in a non-verbal method of social bonding by way of mimesis, imitation and resultant improvisation. Perhaps these are the “first causes” Tharp refers to when she is writing about where dance comes from. Just as we might think of the brain as a toolbox that contains all we need to perform the tasks of being human, Tharp literally uses a cardboard box (my version is what I call mind maps) for each of her creative endeavors. Into that box she throws whatever comes to mind about what might conceivably be connected to her theme. She returns to that box as a first cause for her inspiration and also as a way to remember what connections she made earlier.

“That's how a box is like soil to me. It's basic, earthy, elemental. It's home. It's what I can always go back to when I need to regroup and keep my bearings. Knowing that the box is always there gives me the freedom to venture out, be bold, dare to fall on my face. Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box.”

“Sit alone in a room and let your thoughts go wherever they will. … Note that this activity is the exact opposite of meditation. You are not trying to empty your mind, not trying to sit restfully without conscious thoughts. You're seeking thoughts from the unconscious, and trying to tease them forward until you can latch onto them. An idea will sneak into your brain. Get engaged with that idea, play with it, push it around—you've acquired a goal to underpin this solitary activity. You're not alone anymore; your goal, your idea, is your companion.”

To learn something about dance and its motivations is to know more about first causes and the marvelous toolbox that is the human brain. Antonio Damasio is an experimental psychologist and author of The Feeling of What Happens (1999). In this work he describes the layers of self. The deepest layer is the protoself that is unconscious and deals with survival activities, systems homeostasis, wakefulness, attention, emotions, and learning. The next layer is the core self and this holds the representations of the protoself derived from internal organ systems and the musculoskeletal frame. Here there are maps of relationships between objects and perceivers and the mental images that describe these relationships. Here we are conscious of feelings and body-related maps. It is here that motion and emotion make up a dance. In the brain a network of neurons called the cingulate cortices provide the most integrated view of the body where sensory (including spatial orientation) and motor information is woven with emotional processes.

The self (and creativity, too) is an open system, meaning it is dependent on context. And context changes all the time, but adding up to a discernible box of tools. The final layer of Damasio's whole self is the autobiographical or extended self and this is our normally functioning self in the world, the self derived from personal history that depends on working memory. It involves constructing metaphors from memories and transforming them into art. The self then, and art, are about mimesis, about imitating and copying. Who we become is dependent on the contexts of our lives. How we dance is about our motor and somatosensory capacities. We become acculturated and we become human beings, evolving over a lifetime. Neurologically, in imitating we are enlisting the “mirror neurons” within the brain and we are making the distinction between self and other—and self in the other, as if we and they had merged. Mirror neurons enable us to mentally mimic and recall situations that generate empathy and compassion.

The most basic image in this mental map is a proprioceptive one of what it is like to move one's body. The bodily system becomes a system of reference and is shaped by gestures, physical signs, postures, and rhythm. In mimicking such motions we are rehearsing social roles and social orientations. This occurs predominantly in the right brain, quite opposite of the administrative and analytical functions found in the left brain. And the map is improvisational. It resembles a collage more than it does a portrait.

“Inspiration comes in molecules of movement, sometimes in nanoseconds. A quick combination of three steps is an idea. A turn of the foot coupled with an arm gesture is an idea. A new way of collapsing to the floor is an idea. A man grabbing a woman above the elbow is an idea. A quick combination of five steps leading into a jump is practically a mega-idea—enough to keep me going for hours.”

We are ordering beings as well as improvisational and contextual beings. Ideas that are disparate beg to be ordered into similarities. We move from the generation of an idea to retaining it. We study it and then transform it to suit our different purposes. We have engaged our left brain capabilities for order. And so it is with dance. In its initial stages the improvisational rhythms of dance activate our sympathetic nervous system and call upon our energy stores and the endogenous (native) opioids dopamine and serotonin as well as epinephrine and norepinephrine. There is an absorption of attention and the engagement of the ordering dynamics for play. Breathing becomes rhythmic and meditative. The emotional state produced is one of catharsis and emotional release with a rebound sense of tranquility. However, with continued energetic rhythmic dancing there is saturation of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems (associated with amygdala, hypothalamic, and hippocampal processing) and a feeling of collapse into a state of ineffability and the disintegration of self, leading to a profound peacefulness. This is perhaps a simple explanation for the spiritual heightening experienced by Sufi dancers (Sufi whirling, a physically active form of meditation), the Jewish Hasidic-style dancers, and dance as experienced in other religious and spiritual traditions.

“This, to me, is the most interesting paradox of creativity: In order to be habitually creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative, but good planning alone won't make your efforts successful; it's only after you let go of your plans that you can breathe life into your efforts.”

Dance is relational and transactional. It is social and educational. It is engagement and release. It is individual and communal. It is elemental and innovatively developmental. Dance reflects the processes that are inherent in our neuronal circuits and networks and that contribute to our sense of a creative self. Recent studies support the idea that dance in all its manifestations contributes to brain plasticity, the capacity of the brain to adapt and even to establish new circuits. Tharp suggests we not forget the roles of timing and rhythm, discipline, commitment, pattern-finding, repetition, imitation, and order out of disorder. She writes about the importance of being open to surprises, to being grateful for mentors, colleagues, and one's lineage. As well, she focuses on the necessity of getting in and out of ruts, and of risk and failure. Dance is about making connections, just as the brain is in the background making connections. Dance is neuroscience made manifest. Motion and emotion are who we are and who we might become.

Tharp's conception of meditation as an emptying phenomenon is interesting. I think that has come to us as an exotic and mystical notion about what the final “goal” of meditation is when, in fact, meditation is attention training. It is a filtering out process. It is its own toolbox of materials and thoughts and the whole conglomeration of elements can be, like her cardboard boxes, a source of creativity. But just as she brings some order to her collection of things, so we are challenged to find some order or theme in our meditation spaces. Sometimes that happens and other times it doesn't. There is no success or failure either way. It is just us being mindful—if only an awareness of the mess before us. May we all have the patience to discover the hidden delights of our own toolboxes.