Home / Selected Projects / 23 Feelings in Dance
Edinburgh Festival Fringe / 2010
23 Feelings
in Dance
Can audiences recognise complex emotions expressed through dance?
In 2010 I became interested in a question that sounds quite simple: if a choreographer creates a dance about a particular feeling, will an audience understand what they are trying to express?
Dance Doctor, Dance! The Psychology of Dance Show
Bedlam Theatre · Edinburgh Festival Fringe · 2010
2010
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
23
Three-minute dance pieces
23
Nights of performance and discussion
Watch
Film from the project
The Rock. Choreographed by Nicola London, danced by Laura Grover and Hanna Bardall. Shown as part of Dance Doctor, Dance, Bedlam Theatre, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 2010.
The idea
How it started
I wanted to go beyond obvious emotions such as happiness, anger or fear. I was interested in more complex feelings and emotional states: feelings that might be difficult to describe in words and even harder to communicate through movement.
I put out a call to choreographers and asked them to create a three-minute dance based on a selection of words drawn from a list of 190 feeling-related terms. I received hundreds of films in response, including contemporary dance, ballet, jazz and tap.
Many of the choreographers sent me an explanation of what their dance was about. I deliberately didn’t read these before watching the film. I wanted to experience the dance without knowing what I was supposed to see.
From the submissions I selected 23 pieces. I was particularly interested in dances that explored complex combinations of feelings rather than pieces built around a single easily recognised emotion.
Choreographers were given a list of emotion words.
On stage
A different piece
each night
At the time I was preparing Dance Doctor, Dance! The Psychology of Dance Show for the 2010 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The show ran for 23 nights at the Bedlam Theatre, which gave me an opportunity to do something rather unusual.
I invited the choreographers to bring their work to Edinburgh. A different piece was performed each night.
Before the performance I talked about the psychology of emotion and movement. I didn’t tell the audience what the dance was about. When the piece finished, I asked them what they thought the choreographer had been trying to communicate.
People shouted out ideas. We talked about what they had seen and felt. Then I invited the choreographer onto the stage and we discovered how closely the audience’s interpretation matched the original intention.
“Sometimes people struggled to find the right words. They seemed to understand something before they could explain exactly what they understood.”
Peter Lovatt
An audience response
One performance has
stayed with me.
This account includes pregnancy loss.
What fascinated me was how often audiences seemed to grasp the emotional essence of a piece, even when the choreography was abstract and the feelings being represented were complicated.
The dance was choreographed by a woman and performed as a solo by a man. It explored the experience of a woman losing an unborn child during pregnancy.
When the dance finished, I asked the audience what they thought it had been about.
There was silence.
Eventually someone said they didn’t know exactly what they had seen, but it felt like “something to do with loss”. As they spoke, they repeatedly moved their hands downwards from their chest towards their lap. That particular gesture hadn’t appeared in the choreography.
Another person described the piece as being about “decay, or dying inside”, although they couldn’t place the feeling within a particular story.
They didn’t know the subject of the dance. Yet they appeared to have understood something important about its emotional character.
What I took from it
That experience captured what interested me about the whole 23 Feelings in Dance project. Movement can carry psychological information that we respond to without necessarily being able to explain how we know what we know.
For 23 nights I watched choreographers, dancers and audiences explore that idea together.
For me, it was also an early example of something that has shaped much of my work ever since: taking questions from dance psychology out of the laboratory and exploring them with people through movement, performance and conversation.
The audience responses were gathered through open discussion. The observations here are my reflections on those conversations.
From the archive
The people and the performances
Hagit Yakira
Debora Renzi
Infinate Dance
A conversation starts here
Have a project in mind?
I’d be pleased to hear from you about programmes, performances and collaborations exploring dance and human behaviour.