Choreographing architecture

Our bodies are in constant dialogue with our built environment: we move to experience architecture, and in turn, are moved by its presence. Movement is intrinsically linked to the way we experience our buildings, yet the body in motion has not been acknowledged for understanding and conceiving architectural form. In this thesis, the phenomenon of kinesthetic empathy will be unleashed within the exploration of a choreographic architecture, where body, form and movement share an entangled relationship in the creation of an architectural composition. This approach investigates an architecture that embraces gestural and physiological behaviour for the development of a corporeal environment capable of stimulating and reawakening the mind and body. With the current technologies available for analyzing human movement, this investigation probes human kinesis as an external force for the formation of space, and thus, cultivates a new theory towards making architecture move — choreographing an architecture of kinesthetic empathy.

Choreographing architecture

Our bodies are in constant dialogue with our built environment: we move to experience architecture, and in turn, are moved by its presence. Movement is intrinsically linked to the way we experience our buildings, yet the body in motion has not been acknowledged for understanding and conceiving architectural form. In this thesis, the phenomenon of kinesthetic empathy will be unleashed within the exploration of a choreographic architecture, where body, form and movement share an entangled relationship in the creation of an architectural composition. This approach investigates an architecture that embraces gestural and physiological behaviour for the development of a corporeal environment capable of stimulating and reawakening the mind and body. With the current technologies available for analyzing human movement, this investigation probes human kinesis as an external force for the formation of space, and thus, cultivates a new theory towards making architecture move — choreographing an architecture of kinesthetic empathy.

Insider Dynamics and Extended Audiencing

Drawing on theories of kinesthetic empathy and research on embodied cognition, insider dynamics is proposed as a theory of embodied affective engagement that occurs for spectators during immersive performance in four distinct phases: complicity, porosity, contagion, and inclusion. Insider dynamics occurs as spectators access their kinesthesia, and these dynamics function to guide the decision-making of audiences as participants during performances. Insider dynamics also makes it possible for immersion to extend beyond the boundaries of performances through communities known as fandoms. Reflecting upon their experiences of participatory engagement in highly sensory, choreographic performances, fans transform those experiences into creative responses such as fan fiction and art through a recursive process identified by the author as extended audiencing.

Kinesthetic Empathy in Sergei Eisenstein’s Film Theory

Chapter 4 explores Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of the audience’s corporeal empathy, evoked by actors’ movements and graphical, nonhuman “gestures”—that is, “movements” implied by the structure of the shot composition, editing, and other formal devices. In scrutinizing Eisenstein’s theory that spectatorship is, fundamentally, an enactive experience, this chapter traces the roots of his ideas and evaluates the aesthetic and political implications of his position. First, I analyze the filmmaker’s engagement with psychological theories of William James, William Carpenter, Vladimir Bekhterev, Alexander Luria, and Lev Vygotsky, as well as the 19th-century German theorists of empathy (Einfühlung). Special attention is devoted to one of Eisenstein’s major sources: Vladimir Bekhterev’s Collective Reflexology (1921), a seminal work of early Soviet psychology, which discussed nonverbal communication in crowds and argued that the processing of visual sensations by the brain instantaneously impacts motor networks. I argue that although Eisenstein’s model of spectatorship appears manipulative, it is also potentially emancipatory. Embracing the utopian spirit of the avant-garde, he was willing to subject himself and his audience to radical experimentation aimed at testing the sensory properties of cinema and demystifying the mass production of emotions.

Boom Bap Diplomacy: Connecting Cultures, Transforming Conflict

This chapter focuses on the cross-cultural artistic collaboration that takes places in hip hop diplomacy encounters. It reveals that hip hop can foster mutual understanding and conflict transformation across cultures through nonverbal communication and kinesthetic empathy. One case study examines the interactions between US rappers and a Moroccan gnawa ensemble, demonstrating both the risks and rewards of cross-cultural artistic collaboration. Another case study explores how conflict arose and was transformed in a dance workshop in Bandung, Indonesia in 2016 in which hypermasculine b-boys (breakdancers) and queer dancers (voguers) performed together. The chapter concludes that hip hop can serve as a model for productive people-to-people diplomacy.

Sensing ethnic difference: A kinesthetic reading of Proverbs 7.1-27

The historical identity of the נכריה‎/אשה זרה‎ in Proverbs 7 has been a vexing quandary in modern biblical scholarship. Although many proposals have been offered, there is, as of yet, no critical consensus. My aim is not to settle the matter once and for all, but to approach the problem from a different angle. This article offers a fresh reading of Proverbs 7.1-27 in order to shift attention away from who the Foreign Woman might be historically to how her foreignness is constructed ideologically. Specifically, the argument draws on kinesthetic theory to reexamine the pedagogical use of sensory data to enhance persuasion. As we shall see, the father deploys a visceral narrative that transmits the ethnicized and gendered otherness of the Foreign Woman in sensory fashion (e.g. aural, gustative, tactile, visual, olfactory). This pedagogical tactic functions as a strategic form of kinesthetic empathy that subconsciously inscribes social and religious boundary markers in the sensorium. In this way, the father’s instruction encodes an ethnic sensory that is neurologically wired, so to speak, to perceive Lady Wisdom as more appealing than the seductions of the Foreign Woman. By drawing attention to the didactic strategy of shaping wisdom in the sensorium, this kinesthetic reading highlights the critical role of sensory perception in mediating ideologies of difference.

Empathy with the Devil: Movement, Kinesthesia, and Affect in The Castle of Perseverance

In 1997 Claire Sponsler argued that, contrary to conventional interpretations, the anarchic, disruptive bodies of sin in medieval morality plays do not “unproblematically and unilaterally lead to the ratification of virtue over vice.” Instead, “the memory of the pleasures of misbehavior, of the satisfactions that come from unruly bodies allowed free rein” lingered with spectators to the extent that any “attempts made by these plays to bring misbehavior to a halt look highly unsatisfactory and incomplete.” For Sponsler, the powerful allure of vice performed was such that morality plays would have been unable fully “to negate the charms of misgovernance” they enacted. In this article, however, I want to argue against Sponsler's assumption and investigate how one English morality play, The Castle of Perseverance, understood very well the allure of performed sin and actively cultivated it as part of its dramaturgical and didactic strategies. All morality plays, as Sponsler observes, use representations of “disorderly behavior grounded in the misuse of bodies and commodities,” investing these figures of sin “with remarkable energy, interest, and vitality, so much so that the vices are … very seductive.” The Castle is no exception, and the vast majority of its roughly three thousand lines are spoken by the Three Enemies of Man and their affiliated Sins. In addition, the playtext also provides unusually rich, detailed descriptions of how these spiritual enemies and sins should move around the performance space. Drawing on the theory of kinesthetic empathy, I examine the kinesic dimension of these “unruly bodies” and argue, contrary to Sponsler, that it is their presence, and the audience's own embodied responses to them, that deepens and enhances, rather than detracts from, the play's moral message.

Body Rhetorics and Kinesthetic Empathy in the Video Game Bound (2016)

Dance is found in every known human culture as part of religious, social and healing ceremonies. The increased interest in the role of dance in western psychology corresponds with the creation of the American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA) founded by Marian Chace, and the beginning of the dance movement therapy (DMT). The Association introduced the dance and the dance-based movement as part of the therapeutic process, in order to explore the relationship between the expression of individual emotions and movement. Drawing both from the visual rhetorics approach (Patterson and Corning 1997) and the game studies (Fernández-Vara 2009) I will analyze the multiple narrative layers in the Bound video game (2016), pointing to the mutual relationship the player and the game have on each other (Keogh 2018) decoding the game as a metaphor for the therapeutic effects of dance.