Cognitive Poetics
Perfect Execution
Dance, Allegory and XYZ Metaphors
Metaphors in Motion
Iconicity in Dance Movement
Done in collaboration with Vito Evola and Marlene Johansson Falck
For this dance project, a series of 12 videos was developed. Dancers choreographed around different theme types: spatial concepts (e.g. verticality), non-spatial concepts (e.g. dark), emotion concepts (e.g. love) or a narrative theme (e.g. your first love).
These pieces were used to create a dance labeling experiment. In a matching task, participants matched videos with titles. In a creative task, they invented video titles.
Research questions include: Are dancers/non-dancers able to understand non-verbal concepts portrayed in dance? Which types of mistakes are most frequent? Are creative titles related to conceptual metaphor elements? What dance elements are most iconic?
Results revealed both groups were equally able to complete the matching task with some degree of accuracy performing especially well with the emotion concepts (100% accuracy) but also showing deviations from the actual title. For example, mistaking “my first love” with “last time I was angry” and vice versa.
We are currently exploring cross cultural in different languages by collecting similar data in the US, Portugal, and Sweden.