Improvisational Dance As Enactive Cognition: What Do Novice Dancers Teach Us about Embodied Cognition in Dance?

We demonstrate the ways an improvisational dance workshop provided the opportunity for university students to be autonomous actors and engage in embodied sense-making through dance—two key parts of the conceptualization of enactive cognition. As part of a Design-Based Research project, we use Interaction Analysis to present examples of using autonomy in dance learning in a public art museum. We describe the interactions of one pair of novice dancers engaging in two designed dance activities, and how their improvisational dancing highlights the ways in which dance is a tool for sense-making. This research explores dance as both the content and context for learning, deepening the conceptualization of 4E cognition in dance education.