DISSERTATION Gesture Karola Lüttringhaus 2021

GESTURE & FULL-BODY GESTURING: EMBODIED KNOWING

“I'm not so interested in how they move as in what moves them.”
Pina Bausch

gestures are paralinguistic, they accompany language

 iconic gestures: represent a literal object
 metaphoric: symbolizing an abstract cocnept
 deictic: pointing to things, positioning yourself to people of places or things
 pragmatic: offering the floor to someone, or "don't bother me right now"
 beat: rhythm of gestures alongside the natural stress-patterns of speech, often beat category
gestures also fit into another type of category
 emblems: have meaning outside the context of speech, the form of the gesture is tied to the
established meaning, the meaning is learned, depends on culture, context changes it,

To make a gesture towards something: a gesture is often thought of as one specific act or a sort of
promise toward a fuller manifestation. 'Stop!'; a gesture is also often thought of as a sign, a
universally understood movement that stands on its own in the transmission of information.
Gesticulating is thought of as very broad and overly dramatic movements to illustrate specific things
in speech or performance. These examples are all part of the kind of gesturing I want to speak about
but they are not the core 'soul' of what I am after. The gesturing I speak of is spontaneous, complex,
multi-directional, non-codyfied movement of the body in accompaniment of verbal speech or in non-
verbal response to communication needs. The gesturing I speak of is what the body does when
expressing itself; for example the movements that the upper appendages make when talking to
someone, my fingers scratching my head when I don't know an answer, the many idiosyncratic
movements that my body does when I am moving my thought processes along, or when the action of
writing is stopped due to lack of a word or expression and I touch my face and slide my fingers slowly
across the opposite half of my jaw. The action of typing is replaced with the action of touching my
fingertips on one hand in a circular motion, or I step back from the computer to loosen some 'stuck'
muscles, or I slump over when I am tired, or even fall to the ground when I feel utterly defeated.

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I propose to regard dance (1) as 'full-bodied' gesture. Dance plays with the timing and amplitude of
these gestural expressions. Dance allows for a more complete embodied gesturing, in fact, dance is
the platform for unhindered full-bodied gesturing.

Gesture is a participant in the game of communication. When a person is gesturing while they are
speaking, we don't usually feel that these gestural movements are out of place; we accept them as
part and parcel of what is being communicated. Gesticulation emerges spontaneously and in parallel
with what the speaker is expressing. Movement of the appendages is under normal conditions
inseparable from speaking. Because of the physiological makeup of the body, gesture takes place in
the entire body. If I lift my arm the entire body is participating in this action and kinetic chains of
activity can be followed throughout the body in regards to shifts of weight, compensatory
movements, postural adjustments, and level changes. There are books about what gestures will
produce specific responses in interlocutors or audiences, but I find them artificial and annoying. To
plan one's gestures is contrived and is easily picked out as manipulative. Gesturing is spontaneous. It
is essential for holding meaning.

I think that gestures are often thought of as only involving the hands and arms because that's

where the emphasis lies, but I observe that gestures are always soliciting the entire body. Some

gestures are smaller, some are larger. All body parts contribute to the meaning of the gesture.

Definition of Gesture: movement that represents meaning, that carries information,

abstract, contextual, sensical, non-sensical. All movement is gestural.Generally we think of gesture

as a movement that is not done to achieve a goal, such as drinking water, or opening one's car. If

the glass or the car are removed and the movement is executed as if they are still there we have

pantomime and also gesture.

1 dance: There are many forms of dance and many reasons and methodologies for dancing and creating dances. The
dance I speak of here refers to my own process of choreographing and more generally to the kind of dance that is the
focal point of German Dance Theatre and related modern dance practices. I am thereby opening the possibilities for
dance to be what I describe if not fundamentally by nature of expression.
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Canadian illustrator Alex Chow (artofchow.com) says (*9) "Gesture is the foundation of every

character, object and literally everything that you do will consist of. it's the foundation. Gesture is

the essence of movement in any character or object or anything that you draw. gesture exists in

every lifeform possible, even synthetic lifeforms, even if you have a plastuc ibject thats man made,

you're gonna have gesture in them. (gesture) captueres the essence of what something is."

Dance is an amplifier of gesture. According to Geoffrey Beattie (6) researchers have distinguished
different categories of gestures. The qualities of the movements are indicative and directly
proportional to the quality of the desired response movement.

The gestures I am referring to, and am comparing dance to, are the gesticulations that our body
makes without asking for permission or without questioning what we are doing while we are talking,
or when reacting to something. This happens almost constantly in a fascinating immediacy. We are
doing those movements to express ourselves, and to communicate all that which we want to
communicate and all of who we are at that moment. Much of the message exists only in the gesture.
Movements of lightness are intrinsically linked to feeling light, to seeing something light. Heaviness
is immediately understood when gestured. Within the contexts used they become tools for
expression of very specific, nuanced, states of experience and qualities. There is always a direct
connection. The two are deeply linked. By this we can access meaning through movement. As an
improvising choreographer, in the studio, with my colleague Lena, I am trying to open the channels
and allow for the flow and the connections to happen. I am trying to channel thought, situation and
emotion into movements. These are amplified, or, if the body is able and willing to move more fully,
as dancers are training to do, the movement can grow naturally. Like a poet or a writer, gaining
eloquence of expression, new, additional, different states of being and emotion can emerge, through
the dancer's ability to allow the emotion to travel further into the body, to dance inside the body and
play with the body.

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To remain within a movement language such as Ballet or Graham Technique is a tremendous

reduction in expressive potential. For Martha Graham, these movements were what came from her
body/mind. They were her, and she began to structure and categorize them to make a warm-up and
training technique to help her dancers express what she wanted to express in her pieces. She neede
them to move in very specific ways to 'move-speak' of the things she wanted to express. But one
language doesn't transfer to everything and everyone. The completeness of expression can suffer
when sticking to a set of signs. To some extent I think of the ballet language as an emblematic
language that can be jotted down in a 'connect the dots' sort of fashion. The expression of emotion
and narrative is told through everything else that goes on in the bodies of the ballet dancers while
going from dot to dot, from passé to arabesque to fouetté and so on. Like the child first unsing
isolated words, then adding connectors and descriptors, then metaphors, etc. What tells the story is
the ability of the dancer to channel the energies of emotion into the body through facial and full
bodied gestures that gently augment the dance, through texture, timing, delay, direction and
positioning in space in order to make the message come to life. Most of the movements are rigid
forms through which the dancers move and perform in ways that carry the meaning as much as
possible. Ballet, for example, is a highly stylized and abstracted, encoded, way of moving. Also,
within this, as a whole, it tells a story about who dances ballet, for who, why, and where.

MATCHING
What I attempt in choreography is to channel movements that are true to the person expressing the
narrative. The movements have to match the person. Unless I want to depict an inner struggle, then I
might deliberately explore movements that the dancer struggles to execute. The question is often
"How can I get you to experience what I am hoping to bring onto the stage? So that the audience
member observing you can get the feeling I was after, not the movement I created."

Geoffrey Beattie (6) highlights: " The traditional assumption in both the academic and the popular
literature is that they (non-verbal communication and speech) are separate systems of

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communication. But when you study people closely, you can see immediately that the two systems
are very closely connected..... ".

The gesture alters the meaning of what is said. The word alters the gesture as well. The two inter-
exist, and inter-are.

According to Beattie, emblem-type gestures are repeatable. The iconic/metaphoric gestures I am

talking about have no absolute standard form of lexicon, although there are underlying rules, as I
described earlier in the text. In talking, hand gestures are complex. They are generated
spontaneously. And they change. They are unconsciously produced. They have different phases,
preparation phases where meaning is sought, and then expressive phases where they support or ad
meaning to that which is verbalized. Beattie says that these gestures will tell us a lot about whether a
person is genuinely verbally aligning with what they are thinking about. Because there is this
underlying intrinsic language, contradictions can be detected. This concept has become very popular
on TV with shows such as "Lie to me" and others.

These gestures are not just an evolutionary relic of pre-language times, they are part and parcel of
our communication system, and they often connect to something like 'truth' more directly than
language does, perhaps because they are more intrinsically embodied. Language, because we spend
a lot more time with it, has perhaps become more rehearsed, more planned, crafted, and learned,
used as a social tool. Gesture is more immediate. There are attempts by differnet people throughout
history to harness the communicative power of gesture in rhetoric, politics, etc. Books are written on
how to convince your audience of your honesty and reliability, and how to make people do what you
want from them. But the craftedness and artificiality of rehearsed gestures can be very offensive, as
this shows dishonesty. Just like in a dance performance, people will pick up on the messages to
varying degrees, which connects to their training and ability to intuit connection to the body
language. This is where I think dance, and theatre, inserts. The actor/dancer learns to "repeat"
gestures in such honest ways that we believe their story. It is therefore in my process important that

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the dancer be involved with the narrative, with the emotions and the experience of the message
while dancing the movements, otherwise the incongruities will become visible.

Dance, the way I dance, taps into amplifying gestures, into exaggerating, embellishing, furthering
and elaborating on the messages. Dance allows the entire body to gesture. It can provoke language
and it can express things not captured in language and it can work with or against language to tell
specific stories.

READING GESTURE - FEELING GESTURE: an example

As an experiment, and as part of the process for writing this essay, Lena and I picked out videos of
people talking about something. Anything. We picked videos that lent themselves to learning the
gestures, and body position; meaning: people had to be gesturing enough to be easily copied and we
needed to be able to see at least their heads and arms. Lena would start. She would play the chosen
video on her screen, which i couldn't see. I could only see Lena. She would copy the gestures and
facial expressions as good as she could, simultaneously with the video subject, staying close to timing
and positioning of body parts. We each performed the gestures to one another in this manner (via
zoom).

The 'spoken'
The task for the other person was to try to guess what kinds of content was connected to the
gestures, and what kind of person the speaker was. Maybe even who they were. We could fairly
accurately guess what the talks were about, and what kinds of people the speakers were. Of course
we knew each other fairly well and we were, inevitably, also guessing what sort of person we would
pick for this experiment. So we had that advantage. I picked my video person based on their

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elaborate and vivid gesticulating, Donna Haraway talking about the "humanimal". Her gestures are a
dance, truly! her hands are extremely expressive and very 'loud'.

The 'speaker'
When I learn someone's gestures, when i move with them as they talk, copy their gestures, I can
embody who and how they are at that moment and how they are relating to what they are saying.

Movement is instantaneous. Speaking comes about slower. In an instant I have a gesture to express
my feeling, my thought, my opinion. My body has already responded, my language and my cognitive
realization of this response are a bit slower.

In our experiment, I picked out Donna Haraway (6a) in an interview on the 'humanimal'. I picked her
because she is an extremely vivid gesturer. Her gestures are beautiful and bold, wild, all over the
place, intriguing to watch. There is an intensity in her gesturing that comes through in this interview.
She talks about the merging of words and species but her hands are clashing, literally. I think that it is
difficult for her to fully believe herself that we are one, that the humanimal is possible the way her
intellectual mind wishes it could be, and arguably needs to be. Or perhaps she illustrates how difficult
it is for humans to want to merge with the animal. Her forceful moving is perhaps also reflecting on
the force she uses to make the merging happen. She thinks that they have to come together, but
really, they almost repel one another. The merging she gestures is not a gentle meeting, it is almost a
war, almost an artificially provoked genetic experiment. When she talks about the humanimal as 'a
hybrid word' she turns her fists outward, smashing the medial sides of the fists together, like
slamming your fist on a table, but edge of hand to edge of hand. Two fists gesture two hard, enclosed
entities and she makes them meet end to end. Her thumbs are facing outward, away from one
another. No facing one another, no gentle melting and shaking hands. She doesn't attempt much of a
physical connection to the interviewer. She remains in her world although responding and talking.
Her whole body tenses up when the species finally merge, the backs of the hands are smashed
together, fingers facing her, all in the same direction; They are stuck to one another and look rather

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awkward in this new togetherness. When she speaks of linguistics she softens a bit and her fingers
are allowed to flow with the directionality of her breath towards the interviewer, which, to me, feels
like she can assist the difficulty of the merging by writing and speaking of these topics. Much of her
gestures, including those where she talks about history and the making of history, are gestures of
holding, and supporting. But her hands also, whatever they would hold, could only hold for a short
while as the contents would run through her opened fingers. She gestures about sensitivity,
fingertips touching, hands missing one another. She also enforces her gestures, raising her
ideas/gestures and voice as a wall between her and the interviewer, in a moment where she wishes
not to be interrupted in her thought. I feel that she intensely identifies with her work with her
theories. I could write about her movements in this 2 minute long interview for a long time. And
these gestures could serve as inspiration for a dance to embody the emotions and thoughts that
evoked them in her.

The process of sensing meaning is a process of observing, registering, and describing. The actual
doing of the movements provides depth of information, as we can experience what the movements
feel like.

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GESTURE 11-14-2021

I feel that gesture is not something that we will understand by dissecting the movement flow and
categorizing and archiving etc all that takes place.
I feel that rather we can understand gesture through doing, and through looking at the connection
pathways and the qualities of execution.

I feel that gesture speaks with us, to us, through us, and for us.

It might be helpful to reminisce and remain with a gestural moment, repeat it, think about it, like
stopping at a word of a sentence to analyze what it means, but all in all, the meaning seems to be
hidden in the orchestration and the emergence that all gestures, sound and dynamics, etc create.

It helps to look at certain body parts to understand their anatomy and how they contribute to the overall
wholistic expression, but the magic lies in the togetherness, in the fluidity, the flowing, the changing.

I feel that by listening to all the academic dissection of gesture, I am losing the main point, the main
experience of life. It wants to be lived, not found out about, and taken apart. We have cooperating,
interconnected parts that form a whole. It is this wholeness we should be feeling.

I feel that perhaps through the work of Bergson on intuition we come closer to what I am talking about
in the experience of gesture.

Alan Cienki (*1) speaks of gesture as an act of metaphore. He refers to a definition of metaphor by
Lakoff and Johnson (1980 5): "The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing on kind of
thing in terms of another."

Dance to me is an extension of smaller gesture. Dance allows for the gesture to be experienced more
thoroughly, more extremely, to fully embody, to fully take over the body to experience it. Dancing then
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could be thought of as a kind of dwelling, or ruminating, or deeper thought about a thing, or events,
concept, etc.
Dancing is the full bodied experience of a gesture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

(*1)Alan Cienki
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-9XEPDMKnw

Gestural Theory, https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/hg3040-2014-7/?page_id=192#:~:text=The%20Gestural

%20Theory%20states%20that,adopted%20by%20non%2Dhuman%20primates. from: Gestures, Speech
and Sign Language in Language Evolution blogs@NTU – a service by NTU Libraries Singapore

Armstrong, gestural theory of language

wikipedia on 'gesture': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesture

International Society for gesture Studies: https://www.gesturestudies.com/

http://journals.rudn.ru/linguistics

more articles on gesture: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28240923/

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(1) Bausch, Pina, quotes from and interview with Bausch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=f04Tk1pqQok&feature=youtu.be) @26:06

(2) exercise, definition etymological definition of the word exercise, from

https://www.etymonline.com/word/exercise#:~:text=%22exercise%2C%20execution%20of
%20power%3B,exercise%3B%20practice%2C%20follow%3B%20carry

(3) Bausch, Pina, quote from https://www.azquotes.com/quote/698272

(4) Jerome Bel in 'Le Dernier Spectacle', https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aVhozKZDks ,

exampels @ 08:23, 13:00, 17:51 all 3 dancers dancing a section originally choreographed by Susanne
Linke

(5) Rumi, 13th century Persian poet Rumi

(6) Bausch, Pina, quote from: https://www.quotetab.com/quote/by-pina-bausch/when-i-first-began-

choreographing-i-never-thought-of-it-as-choreography-but-as-e

(7) Bergson, Henri, "Introduction to Metaphysics", page 2: (http://www.reasoned.org/dir/lit/int-

meta.pdf)

(8) Bausch, Pina, interview on the balcony, youtubevideo; https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=f04Tk1pqQok&t=1575s; @26:06:

(9) Bausch, Pina , interview on the balcony, youtube video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=f04Tk1pqQok&t=1575s; @26:06: about Cafe Mueller

(10) Bausch, Pina , interview on the balcony, youtube video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=f04Tk1pqQok&t=1575s;

(11) quote by Pina Bausch from https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/478344-to-understand-what-i-

am-saying-you-have-to-believe#:~:text=%E2%80%9CTo%20understand%20what%20I%20am
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%20saying%2C%20you%20have%20to%20believe,not%20existing%20forms%20of%20dance.
%E2%80%9D

(12) Hunter, Lynette, "Ways of knowing and Ways of Being Known: An Introduction"

(13) Chomsky, Noam, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg1bHzBoggk

"Noam Chomsky Language's great Mysteries" @00:30

(14) Beattie, Geoffrey, https://www.youtube.com/watchv=2nyxuiua-JM)

(15) Beattie, Geoffrey, https://www.youtube.com/watchv=2nyxuiua-JM)

(16) Haraway, Donna Haraway, video, talk about the 'humanimal', https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=BUA_hRJU8J4

(17) Noe, Alva, talk, https://youtu.be/HOt4vcBV_fk

(18) Bausch, Pina, quote from https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7640514-there-are-situations-of-

course-that-leave-you-utterly-speechless#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThere%20are%20situations%20of
%20course%20that%20leave%20you%20utterly%20speechless,where%20dance%20comes%20in
%20again.%E2%80%9D

(19) Bausch, Pina, quote from https://www.pinabausch.org/en/pina/what-moves-me

(*9a) Alex Chow (artofchow.com) youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=QTFgJiMtJmg&t=608s

(*9b) "Vollmond" by Pina Bausch, video on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=hnyjdPIsKTg&feature=emb_logo

(***7) Ben Spatz https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10462937.2021.1908585 "Artistic

research and the queer prophetic" (1. Knowledge and form)
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Scott, Tom, Why Do We Move Our Hands When We Talk?

categories of gesture in linguistics: introductory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=gGMkHzWXjI8

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