Cognitive Science and the Performing Arts: Recent Conversations with Philip Barnard – by Neil Baldwin

Thanks to a competitive, major grant from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters “Creative Campus” Innovations Grant Program, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and received recently by the Montclair State University Office of Arts and Cultural Programming, the MSU community was privileged to experience the visionary Brainstorm Symposium on Creative Thinking in the Alexander Kasser Theater on April 12, 2011.   The following afternoon, before a rapt audience of theatre and dance students and faculty in the Life Hall Dance Studio, I engaged in a spirited Q&A and dialogue with Dr. Philip Barnard, co-creator of Choreographic Thinking Tools and other innovations developed since 2003 with R-Research/Random Dance; until recently, Dr. Barnard was program leader at the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge (UK).

In a pre-interview in the ACP offices — with Scott deLahunta, R-Research Director; David Kirsh, Professor in Cognitive Science at UC San Diego (another Random Dance collaborator); and Carrie Urbanic and Sarah Bishop-Stone of ACP in attendance — I sat with Phil and made my way through a thick dossier of his published and draft research papers, attempting to sort out, from the density of information, the ultimate trajectory for our forthcoming public presentation.

My own brand of “choreographic thinking,” through danceaturgy work in the studios here at MSU, has been spent observing and writing about and talking to our undergraduate BFA dancers as they move through the paces of the annual classical and modernist repertory.  I approach this relationship with dance via a textual, authorial, pedagogical and “poetics” tradition; whereas Phil Barnard is a research scientist who studies clinical issues involving human cognition and emotion, and how the mind processes meaning. His exhaustive interdisciplinary research projects with Random Dance are designed to develop productive synergies between choreographic processes and cognitive neuroscience.

[NOTE: Any time you — the reader of this post — need to refresh your perception of this dance dynamic, all you have to do is toggle between Phil’s new CRC Guest Essay blog and this text!]

Our coffee-chat was an unerring metaphor for the event to come.  After ten minutes of awkward interrogation, I realized I was in the presence of a formidably-sentient fellow unfazed by jet-lag, his nerve-endings well-exposed, gaze lucid, and disposition quiet — a quintessential listener and watcher par excellence.  Then again, I said to myself, he would have to be a person with finely-honed perceptions in order to have spent the last eight years with the likes of Scott and Wayne.

On that basis, I shifted gears, simply asking Phil what he was “most comfortable” talking about; from that instant, the time passing in the room accelerated. He spoke — and this is with no pretense at order — of himself as an admittedly-creative thinker, nonetheless one who “does not do Art.” I could hear the word capitalized. Invited into the Random Dance studios by Wayne McGregor, and exercising his facilities of observation, Phil became drawn into wonderment about the “magic” of what the dancers were doing as they proceeded to execute tasks. Through an evolving series of perceptual exercises and calculated interventions, Phil told me, he discovered discrepancies between what the dancers thought they were doing and the words they sought in order to conceptualize their physical actions.

“How do artists make things; how do they work with materials?” Phil asked, with the underlying assumption, at first disconcerting, that “creativity is not free,” because it drives the artist back into his own mind —  a reflexive dynamic.  It might seem to the uninitiated that there is an inherent contradiction between the creative process, in and of itself, and the drive to “explain” it. But that opposition is dissipated when one realizes that although the artist is coming at the craft from one direction and the scientist from another, their goal of elucidation is prelude to allowing the artist (in our case, the dancer) to find greater depth and meaning, leading to a more fulfilling execution of the work in process.

Phil and I also spoke about the dancer’s concept of his or her own movement as depicted in his mind, and that commensurate relationship to kinaesthetic intelligence. The painter knows his way around the terrain of the canvas propped up in front of him, so that, if we stand by and watch  in the studio, it can look intuitive; in the same way, the dancer devises a movement, perhaps based upon a “prompt” by the choreographer, that will utilize a learned vocabulary, and become muscle-memory. Indeed,  those muscles still have to be deliberately exercised.

“In the end,” Phil insisted, “the work that comes out of the practice is Wayne’s piece. He has a job to do and he does it consummately well.” To which I responded that the implication seemed that at a certain juncture Phil steps away, after having stepped in, stopped and interrupted the flow of work. He agreed, advancing the analogy I was hoping for  — between the clinician who pursues a course of therapy up to the borderline of the psyche where the patient (read “dancer,” and “choreographer,” instead of clinical practitioner) must proceed alone down the path to art — or a semblance of self-knowledge and, perhaps, healing.

“It all comes down to language,” Phil said, with a deliberate smile on my behalf. “We give the dancers permission to explore a task and then we try to translate what they describe into applied methodologies for others to come.”

Our talk for the students and faculty picked up where this one left off as if we had not had two days between. Phil traced his rich and varied path through the sciences, the broad aims of his cognitive and clinical work, and the major driving themes and areas of research, prior to meeting Wayne McGregor and Scott deLahunta in 2003, insofar as his interest in “how meaning systems work” set the scene for working with Random Dance — “how and why [Phil] was in the room” when it all began. We discovered as we talked that there is a conceptual dialectic between “self” and ”world” that needs to be figured out by the objective practitioner, no matter what the field.

There were also instructive parallels and mutual illuminations between communication behaviorally [i.e., in “real life”]; and communication of the dancer with the audience – and other dancers. Hence,  Bridging Representations, as per this chart in Phil’s Guest Essay, starts out as a schematic visual construct, the dancer placed in a position to absorb multimodal information before being asked to externalize/perform it for the purpose of trying to understand and articulate how information and particularized thought is synthesized into movement.

The complications and obstructions that arise at this point, when the Choreographic Thinking Tools are actually being built, include figuring out how to re-enter the reflective findings and the feedback taken from one group of highly-imaginative and very professional dancers into a larger, more expansive model to be further amplified and applied.

By the end of our two conversations, one private and one public, I realized that Choreographic Thinking Tools are rippling and omnidirectional.

They are being built out of inspiration in order to inspire.