"Dance Data, Cognition and Multimodal Communication is the result of a collaborative and transdisciplinary effort towards a first definition of "dance data", with its complexities and contradictions, in a time where cognitive science is growing in parallel to the need of a renewed awareness of the body's agency in our manyfold interactions with the world. It is reflection on observing bodily movements in artistic settings to view human social interactions, multimodal communication, and cognitive processes through a different lens, that of the close collaboration between performing artists, designers, and scholars. This collection focuses simultaneously on methods and technologies for creating, documenting, or representing dance data. The editors highlight works focusing on the dancers' embodied minds, including research using neural, cognitive, behavioural, and linguistic data in the context of dance composition processes. Each chapter deals with dance data from an interdisciplinary perspective, presenting theoretical and methodological discussions emerging from empirical studies, as well as more experimental ones. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars in contemporary dance, neuro-cognitive science, intangible cultural heritage, performing arts, cognitive linguistics, embodiment, design, and creativity studies"--

Dance Data, Cognition, and Multimodal Communication is the result of a collaborative and transdisciplinary effort towards a first definition of "dance data", with its complexities and contradictions, in a time where cognitive science is growing in parallel to the need of a renewed awareness of the body’s agency in our manyfold interactions with the world. It is a reflection on the observation of bodily movements in artistic settings, and one that views human social interactions, multimodal communication, and cognitive processes through a different lens—that of the close collaboration between performing artists, designers, and scholars. This collection focuses simultaneously on methods and technologies for creating, documenting, or representing dance data. The editors highlight works focusing on the dancers’ embodied minds, including research using neural, cognitive, behavioural, and linguistic data in the context of dance composition processes. Each chapter deals with dance data from an interdisciplinary perspective, presenting theoretical and methodological discussions emerging from empirical studies, as well as more experimental ones. The book, which includes digital Support Material on the volume's Routledge website, will be of great interest to students and scholars in contemporary dance, neuro-cognitive science, intangible cultural heritage, performing arts, cognitive linguistics, embodiment, design, new media, and creativity studies.

The creative potentiality of metaphor is one of the central themes in research on creativity. The present volume offers a space for the interdisciplinary discussion of the relationship between metaphor and creativity by focusing on (re)contextualization across modes and socio-cultural contexts and on the performative dimension of creative discourse practices. The volume brings together insights from Conceptual Metaphor Theory, (Critical) Discourse approaches to metaphor and Multimodal discourse analysis. Creativity as a process is explored in how it emerges in the flow of experience when talking about or reacting to creative acts such as dance, painting or music, and in subjects’ responses to advertisements in experimental studies. Creativity as product is explored by analyzing the choice, occurrence and patterning of creative metaphors in various types of (multimodal and multisensorial) discourses such as political cartoons, satire, films, children’s storybooks, music and songs, videos, scientific discourse, architectural reviews and the performance of classical Indian rasa.

This book explores the genealogy of Jamaican dancehall while questioning whether dancehall has a spiritual underscoring, foregrounding dance, and cultural expression. This study identifies the performance and performative (behavioural actions) that may be considered as representing spiritual ritual practices within the reggae/dancehall dance phenomenon. It does so by juxtaposing reggae/dancehall against Jamaican African/neo-African spiritual practices such as Jonkonnu masquerade, Revivalism and Kumina, alongside Christianity and post-modern holistic spiritual approaches. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in performance studies, popular culture, music, theology, cultural studies, Jamaican/Caribbean culture, and dance specialists.

"The chapters in this book are the product of an international conference organised in Lisbon to mark the closure of the TKB project "A Transmedia Knowledge-Base for Performing Arts". Under the title "Multimodal Communication: Language, Performance and Digital Media", this conference provided a forum for researchers and artists from different research fields, interested in the study and documentation of the performing arts. The book offers contributions on issues of multimodality in human interaction and performance, embodied cognition and metaphor, gesture studies, video annotation for creative processes, and performance and digital media.

Told from the perspective of the dancers, »Processing Choreography: Thinking with William Forsythe's Duo« is an ethnography that reconstructs the dancers' activity within William Forsythe's Duo project. The book is written legibly for readers in dance studies, the social sciences, and dance practice. Considering how the choreography of Duo emerged through practice and changed over two decades of history (1996-2018), Elizabeth Waterhouse offers a nuanced picture of creative cooperation and institutionalized process. She presents a compelling vision of choreography as a nexus of people, im/material practices, contexts, and relations. As a former Forsythe dancer herself, the author provides novel insights into this choreographic community.

Butoh America unearths the people and networks that popularized Butoh dance in the Americas through a focused look at key artists, producers, and festivals in the United States and Mexico. This is the first book to gather these histories into one narrative and look at the development of American Butoh. From its inception in San Francisco in 1976, American Butoh aligned with avant-garde performance art in alternative venues such as galleries and experimental theaters. La MaMa in New York and the Festival Internacional Cervantino in Guanajuato both served to legitimize the form as esteemed experimental performance. A crystallizing moment in each of the three locations—San Francisco, New York, and Mexico City—has been a grand-scale festival featuring prominent Japanese and numerous other international artists, as well as fostering local communities. This book stitches together the flow of people and ideas, highlights the connections in the Butoh diaspora, and incorporates interviewee perspectives regarding future directions for the genre in the Americas.