Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices

Description

A key interdisciplinary concept in our understanding of social interaction across creative and cultural practices, kinesthetic empathy describes the ability to experience empathy merely by observing the movements of another human being. Encouraging readers to sidestep the methodological and disciplinary boundaries associated with the arts and sciences, Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices offers innovative and critical perspectives on topics ranging from art to sport, film to physical therapy.

Foreword – Amelia Jones

Introduction – Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason

Part I: Mirroring Movements: Empathy and Social Interactions

Introduction – Dee Reynolds

Chapter 1: Knowing Me, Knowing You: Autism, Kinesthetic Empathy and Applied Performance – Nicola Shaughnessy

Chapter 2: Kinesthetic Empathy and Movement Metaphor in Dance Movement Psychotherapy – Bonnie Meekums

Chapter 3: Affective Responses to Everyday Actions – Amy E. Hayes and Steven P. Tipper

Part II: Kinesthetic Engagement: Embodied Responses and Intersubjectivity

Introduction – Dee Reynolds

Chapter 4: Cinematic Empathy: Spectator Involvement in the Film Experience – Adriano D’Aloia

Chapter 5: Musical Group Interaction, Intersubjectivity and Merged Subjectivity – Tal-Chen Rabinowitch, Ian Cross and Pamela Burnard

Chapter 6: Kinesthetic Empathy and the Dance’s Body: From Emotion to Affect – Dee Reynolds

Part III: Kinesthetic Impact: Performance and Embodied Engagement

Introduction – Matthew Reason

Chapter 7: Kinesthetic Empathy in Charlie Chaplin’s Silent Films – Guillemette Bolens

Chapter 8: Effort and Empathy: Engaging with Film Performance – Lucy Fife Donaldson

Chapter 9: Breaking the Distance: Empathy and Ethical Awareness in Performance – Rose Parekh-Gaihede

Part IV: Artistic Enquiries: Kinesthetic Empathy and Practice-Based Research

Introduction – Matthew Reason

Chapter 10: Re-Thinking Stillness: Empathetic Experiences of Stillness in Performance and Sculpture – Victoria Gray

Chapter 11: Empathy and Exchange: Audience Experiences of Scenography – Joslin McKinney

Chapter 12: Photography and the Representation of Kinesthetic Empathy – Matthew Reason, with photographs by Chris Nash

Part V: Technological Practices: Kinesthetic Empathy in Virtual and Interactive Environments

Introduction – Dee Reynolds

Chapter 13: T he Poetics of Motion Capture and Visualisation Techniques: The Differences between Watching Real and Virtual Dancing Bodies – Sarah Whatley

Chapter 14: Interactive Multimedia Performance and the Audience’s Experience of Kinesthetic Empathy – Brian Knoth

Chapter 15: Kinesthetic Empathy Interaction: Exploring the Concept of Psychomotor Abilities and Kinesthetic Empathy in Designing Interactive Sports Equipment – Maiken Hillerup Fogtmann

Conclusion – Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Arts visuels
• Architecture
• ART
• Palace
• Cultural Studies
• General
• General officer
• Performing Arts

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841507002
• Langue: English

Extrait

Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices
Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices
Edited by Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA
First published in the UK in 2012 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2012 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2012 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover photograph: Chris Nash. Dancers: Valentina Formenti and
Kate Jackson
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Copy-editor: MPS Ltd.
Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire
Production manager: Tim Mitchell
ISBN 978-1-84150-491-9/EISBN 978-1-84150-700-2
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Amelia Jones
Introduction
Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason
PART I: Mirroring Movements: Empathy and Social Interactions
Introduction
Dee Reynolds
Chapter 1: Knowing Me, Knowing You: Autism, Kinesthetic Empathy and Applied Performance
Nicola Shaughnessy
Chapter 2: Kinesthetic Empathy and Movement Metaphor in Dance Movement Psychotherapy
Bonnie Meekums
Chapter 3: Affective Responses to Everyday Actions
Amy E. Hayes and Steven P. Tipper
PART II: Kinesthetic Engagement: Embodied Responses and Intersubjectivity
Introduction
Dee Reynolds
Chapter 4: Cinematic Empathy: Spectator Involvement in the Film Experience
Adriano D Aloia
Chapter 5: Musical Group Interaction, Intersubjectivity and Merged Subjectivity
Tal-Chen Rabinowitch, Ian Cross and Pamela Burnard
Chapter 6: Kinesthetic Empathy and the Dance s Body: From Emotion to Affect
Dee Reynolds
PART III: Kinesthetic Impact: Performance and Embodied Engagement
Introduction
Matthew Reason
Chapter 7: Kinesthetic Empathy in Charlie Chaplin s Silent Films
Guillemette Bolens
Chapter 8: Effort and Empathy: Engaging with Film Performance
Lucy Fife Donaldson
Chapter 9: Breaking the Distance: Empathy and Ethical Awareness in Performance
Rose Parekh-Gaihede
PART IV: Artistic Enquiries: Kinesthetic Empathy and Practice-Based Research
Introduction
Matthew Reason
Chapter 10: Re-Thinking Stillness: Empathetic Experiences of Stillness in Performance and Sculpture
Victoria Gray
Chapter 11: Empathy and Exchange: Audience Experiences of Scenography
Joslin McKinney
Chapter 12: Photography and the Representation of Kinesthetic Empathy
Matthew Reason, with photographs by Chris Nash
PART V: Technological Practices: Kinesthetic Empathy in Virtual and Interactive Environments
Introduction
Dee Reynolds
Chapter 13: The Poetics of Motion Capture and Visualisation Techniques: The Differences between Watching Real and Virtual Dancing Bodies
Sarah Whatley
Chapter 14: Interactive Multimedia Performance and the Audience s Experience of Kinesthetic Empathy
Brian Knoth
Chapter 15: Kinesthetic Empathy Interaction: Exploring the Concept of Psychomotor Abilities and Kinesthetic Empathy in Designing Interactive Sports Equipment
Maiken Hillerup Fogtmann
Conclusion
Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason
Notes on Contributors
Index
Acknowledgements
This book comes at the end of a three-year-long project titled Watching Dance: Kinesthetic Empathy. We would like to thank the other members of the project team - Shantel Ehrenberg, Marie-H l ne Grosbras, Corinne Jola, Anna Kuppuswamy, Frank Pollick, Katie Popperwell and Karen Wood - whose research and thinking around kinesthetic empathy has shaped this publication in many ways.
In April 2010 the Watching Dance project held a conference on the topic Kinesthetic Empathy: Concepts and Contexts . Some of the chapters here began life as conference papers, with others being specially commissioned for this publication. We would like to thank all the authors who have contributed to this publication for helping to make the editorial process so smooth and particularly Chris Nash for engaging with the photographic research collaboration and producing such stunning images. We d like to thank Amelia Jones for contributing a foreword.
Finally, we wish to acknowledge the financial support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which funded the project from 2008 to 2011 and also the support received from our respective institutions, University of Manchester and York St John University.
Foreword
Amelia Jones
Kinesthetic empathy in philosophical and art history: Thoughts on how and what art means
H ow does art (in the broadest sense of cultural works produced with creative intent) mean? The originality of this book is to take this question, along with the larger question of how we communicate, and insist that it can only be answered through an interdisciplinary study of embodied expression. Honouring the innovations of this book, I want to sketch, as an art historian interested in performance and the performativity of perception and interpretation, a very brief history of how and what art has come to mean in relation to theories in philosophy and the visual arts.
As the title of this book suggests, empathy is one way of thinking about our connection to art (or desire to see and interpret is informed by our empathetic connection with the person we imagine to be making/performing or to have made/performed the work). Art historian Wilhelm Worringer developed the idea of empathy in relation to aesthetics in a 1908 book, Abstraktion und Einf hlung: ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie (Abstraction and Empathy: Essays in the Psychology of Style), drawing on the theories of Theodor Lipps and Alo s Riegl. 1 Aesthetic empathy, as philosopher David Morgan points out, is an extension of the German idealist concept of art as a kind of enchantment , art as animated by the expressiveness of the creative genius (Morgan 1996). At play in this concept is the key notion that particular kinds of human expression (here, visual art) project feelings and elicit what Lipps had called aesthetic sympathy such that those engaging with the work feel (presumably similar feelings) in response (Lipps 1900; Morgan 1996: 321).
This is a simple idea with profound resonances across the belief systems going backward and forward in time, linked of course in European culture to eighteenth-century aesthetics and nineteenth-century romanticism as well as to twentieth-century ideas about modernist art. Art is that which expresses feeling. And art can, by expressing feeling, move viewers in the future by changing their ideas, their emotions, their beliefs (this latter idea being the key to twentieth-century modernism in its avant-gardist forms).
Worringer, along with others developing parallel ideas, thus planted the seeds for one of the primary impulses in modernism - the extension of a nineteenth-century romantic idea of art as expression into expressionism . As a movement and a tendency common to twentieth-century modernism (particularly in Worringer s own Germany), expressionism expanded the belief that the forms, materials and themes of a work of art express individual feelings to be, in turn, re-experienced and interpreted by later viewers. This theory expands upon the core belief behind western aesthetics (art is an expression of an individual subject), while opening the way for what the authors of the chapters in this volume call kinesthetic empathy (art, and other modes of human being in the world, potentially engages others through eliciting empathetic responses).
Movement or kinesthesia is the term added to Worringer s theory, with aesthetics (in Euro-American thought largely focussed on still images and objects) opened to the shifting, pulsating, writhing, dancing, expressive action of bodies in space over time. More than just an idea of the expression of feeling , kinesthetic empathy explores what Henri Bergson, just before Worringer s investigations, argued to be the durational dimension of human experience, the embodied mind s capacity to give meaning to each present instant by making recourse to past embodied memories. 2
Dance, theatre, cinema, music and performance are time-based media (what Matthew Reason usefully calls in the introduction to part three of this book explicit performances that announce themselves as creative and to-be-looked-at as such) and, if we stick with creative expressions, for obvious reasons thus appear to be paradigmatic sites of investigation for the project of exploring kinesthetic empathy. Here, however, from an art historical point of view, I want to push this boundary of how we conceive meaning and time in relation to embodiment by suggesting (as argued by several authors in this book) that a static artwork (in Worringer s sense) also clearly functions as a potential site of kinesthetic empathy. As Bergson s model suggests, the durationality of any encounter explains how humans make sense of things, people and other aspects of the world. All experience is durational and technically speaking (in terms of how human perception works) there is no moment of non-kinesthetic empathy in our apprehension of creative or even everyday objects and bodies in the world. This broader concept of durationality adds a crucial phenomenological dimension to the understanding of human intersubjectivity as kinesthetic and empathetic. 3
In fact, Bergson is careful to note that all experience is durational. The moving body in space has no reality except for a conscious spectator and motion is a mental synthesis, a psychic process (1889: 111). Motion, insofar as we can know what it is and means, does not exist except in perception. This observation, made in his 1889 book Time and Free Will , revolves in fact around a discussion of the