Dancing to Learn: The Brain’s Cognition, Emotion, and Movement by Judith Lynne Hanna (review)

Philosopher Jaana Parviainen argues that, “The dancer wrestles with sensations and images of movement, its meaning, quality, shapes, and textures, struggling to capture some half-grasped or intuitive complexity of visual-kinetic form” (2002, 13). Dance knowledge, in philosophical terms, foregrounds procedural, versus discursive, knowledge; that is, of what it is like to know how to dance, versus knowing something about dance. Dance scholar Anna Pakes distinguishes this difference by using Gilbert Ryle’s (1963) oft-cited example of riding a bicycle: “Knowing how to ride a bicycle is clearly different from a theoretical knowledge of how the bicycle works [. . .] Factual and theoretical knowledge of the latter kind is not going to help the aspiring cyclist learn to ride—that can only be achieved through practice” (Pakes 2009, 11). Knowing how to dance “essentially concerns the body’s awareness” (Parviainen 2002, 13). Dance knowledge of this type “means becoming bodily sensitive in the respect of the kinaesthetic sense and one’s own motility” and “the ability to find proper movements through bodily negotiation” (Parviainen 2002, 20). This is not to make the claim that dance is only a bodily way of knowing, and negate discursive knowledge only accessible through language, or to claim dance as some authentic “physical, transient, non-classifiable” type of knowledge (Klein 2007, 29). Rather, it is to argue that dance knowledge has a relationship with language, but also has its own discursive forms, such as intersubjective communication via the body (Klein 2007; Parviainen 2002).

It is important to continue to proclaim the significance of bodily dance knowledge. As dance scholar Gabriele Klein points out, knowledge is fundamental to the establishment of social, political, cultural, and economic relations and, as new forms of knowledge gain social significance, “new forms and distributions of power develop and become established within state and society” (2007, 26). The argument for dance as a valuable form of knowing needs to be continually declared, to politicians, academic officials, and the public, in the face of economically based ideologies that put pressure on dance for not producing a concrete, measurable commodity.¹ As Parviainen notes, a great deal of work still remains to be done in the nature of dance knowledge and our means of attaining and communicating it (2002, 23).

Judith Lynne Hanna’s Dancing to Learn: The Brain’s Cognition, Emotion, and Movement aspires to contribute to this domain. The book aims to cover the cognitive aspects of learning to dance and to “[reshape] our understanding of dance based on profound shifts in knowledge about the brain” (x). Dance is defined as a form of “exercise plus,” because “dance adds cognition—thinking processes—and emotion to the physical” (xi). The goal, Hanna states, is “to illuminate and demystify dancers’ inner processes of learning, creating, performing—building their complex cognitive, emotional, and movement skills needed to hone and execute the dancer’s craft” (xxii).

Dancing to Learn brings together a host of relatively recent research in the area of neuroscience and dance, particularly in the first two chapters of the book. The final half of the volume covers “the brain’s cognition, emotion, and movement” principally by presenting a taxonomy of dance education programs, several examples of dance learning as “personal development,” including a discussion of technological tools, and a selection of case studies that are categorized as issues of dance learning related to personal and/or cultural identity (116). Hanna covers an array of perspectives regarding how dancing to learn or learning through dance relates to neuroscience, general education programs, the motivation and change of disenfranchised communities, and one’s sense of self related to community and country. Her goal is difficult to achieve when covering such an extensive range of perspectives on dance. There is so much material covered in this text—taking a dance class, watching a community dance event, studying dancers’ brains—that the task of arguing a distinct point about the...