Knowledge unspoken : contemporary dance and the cycle of practice-led research, basic and applied research, and research-led practice

Contemporary dance is most often created through bodily explorations in the medium of movement. It is expressive, ephemeral and unspoken. Dance epitomises the challenge for the temporal arts in documenting, describing, quantifying and explaining unspoken knowledge. In this chapter, we argue that the qualities of dance that challenge traditional research methods and documentation are informative in disciplines such as cognitive science. We will describe the way dance encapsulates embodied cognition and the potency of that unspoken knowledge. Drawing on our own experiences in multidisciplinary research in, about and for contemporary dance we discuss the application of extant qualitative and quantitative methods to creative, perceptual and cognitive processes in horeographers, dancers and observers.