Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind (1993) presents his theory of multiple intelligences. One of these he calls Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence. He writes on dance and dancers:
According to the American dancer and choreographer Paul Taylor, a dancer must learn to execute a dance movement precisely in shape and time. The dancer is concerned with placement, stage spacing, the quality of a leap, the softness of a foot – whether a movement goes out to an audience or spirals into itself…It is from the contribution of [different movement] qualities – varied in speed, direction, distance, intensity, spatial relations, and force – that one can discover or constitute a dance vocabulary.
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…it is difficult to get dancers (or even dance critics) to characterize the activity in a straightforward or concrete way. Isadora Duncan, pioneer dancer of the century, summed it up in her well-known remark,
‘If I could tell you what it is, I would not have danced it.’
Martha Graham, perhaps the premier modern dancer of this century, has made an intriguing observation:
I have often remarked on the extreme difficulty of having any kind of conversation with most dancers which has any kind of logical cohesiveness – their minds jump around (maybe like my body) – the logic – such as it is – occurs on the level of motor activity. (p. 225).
At an extreme, dance becomes sheer pattern. It has been said that, just as the ballet-master Balanchine cut the bond between dance and narrative, Merce Cuningham has cut the knot between music and dance. Cunningham, in fact, is interested in movement pure and simple; he likes to observe insects under microscopes and animals in zoos…one of the prime formalists of the dance, an inveterate investigator of how weight and force interact with time and space, a champion of the idea that dance is an independent art that requires no support from music, no visual background, and no plot…
Atavistic forces underlie the creation of a dance. Dancer and choreographer Alwin Nikolai gives an appealing description of how an idea becomes a dance:
I prefer to drop a simple, single idea into my brain and let it rummage around for several months, with no particular efforts towards consciousness on my part. Then two or three weeks before I begin to choreograph, I attempt to cast up the result of this Rorschach process. Then I like to choreograph swiftly and within a short span of time; I feel in this outpouring I keep the channels of my subject open. (p.226)