Meaning In Motion

On dance and culture

The nine essays collected in this volume are based on the papers presented at the Forty-second International Congress of Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 2007.

An eminent psychologist offers a major new theory of human cognition: movement, not language, is the foundation of thought When we try to think about how we think, we can't help but think of words. Indeed, some have called language the stuff of thought. But pictures are remembered far better than words, and describing faces, scenes, and events defies words. Anytime you take a shortcut or play chess or basketball or rearrange your furniture in your mind, you've done something remarkable: abstract thinking without words. In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas. Spatial thinking even underlies the structure and meaning of language: why we say we push ideas forward or tear them apart, why we're feeling up or have grown far apart. Like Thinking, Fast and Slow before it, Mind in Motion gives us a new way to think about how--and where--thinking takes place.

"... I have used essays from the book to help dance graduate students push their thinking beyond the studio and their own physical experience and to realize the varied resources, approaches, and theoretical positions possible in writing about the body." -- Dance Research Journal "Choreographing History... assembles an impressive diversity of sites, disciplines and critical approaches... [and] includes not only historical bodies and discourses, but also the very bodies of the historians themselves." -- Parachute "This volume is not only full of gems (the very lineup of preeminent scholars is impressive), but is also a neat cross-section of the academic conventions and mannerisms of our time." -- Dance Chronicle "... [an] important step... in the ineluctable dance by postmodern historians across a bridge that spans the gaps among disciplines, between theory and practice, and betweeen present and past." -- Theatre Journal Historians of science, sexuality, the arts, and history itself focus on the body, merging the project of writing about the body with theoretical concerns in the writing of history.

This monograph considers (singular) surfaces moving by mean curvature, combining tools of geometric measure theory with ``viscosity solution'' techniques. Employing the geometrically natural concept of ``elliptic regularization'', Ilmanen establishes the existence of these surfaces. The ground-breaking work of Brakke, combined with the recently developed ``level-set'' approach, yields surfaces moving by mean curvature that are smooth almost everywhere. The methods developed here should form a foundation for further work in the field. This book is also noteworthy for its especially clear exposition and for an introductory chapter summarizing the key compactness theorems of geometric measure theory.

How and why to write a movement? Who is the writer? Who is the reader? They may be choreographers working with dancers. They may be roboticists programming robots. They may be artists designing cartoons in computer animation. In all such fields the purpose is to express an intention about a dance, a specific motion or an action to perform, in terms of intelligible sequences of elementary movements, as a music score that would be devoted to motion representation. Unfortunately there is no universal language to write a motion. Motion languages live together in a Babel tower populated by biomechanists, dance notators, neuroscientists, computer scientists, choreographers, roboticists. Each community handles its own concepts and speaks its own language. The book accounts for this diversity. Its origin is a unique workshop held at LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse in 2014. Worldwide representatives of various communities met there. Their challenge was to reach a mutual understanding allowing a choreographer to access robotics concepts, or a computer scientist to understand the subtleties of dance notation. The liveliness of this multidisciplinary meeting is reflected by the book thank to the willingness of authors to share their own experiences with others.

Mind-body wellness and fitness expert combines mantra, self-reflection, and movement into an accessible 14-day routine for manifesting your best self. Holistic wellness and fitness expert Erin Stutland harnesses all the body's mental, physical, and spiritual energy in her tri-fold approach to creating change. When you move your body while repeating mantras--speaking your desires aloud--manifesting is no longer a purely intellectual exercise or an occasional craft project. Instead, you are expressing your passion through your voice and your body, putting every ounce of your energy in service of what you want. Each chapter breaks down one mantra to use to focus on a key step to achieving your best self, including unearthing your desires, releasing resistance, and taking inspired action. Alongside each mantra, Stutland provides stories from her own life and those of her clients, a meditation or visualization, a journaling exercise, and an easy movement to accompany the mantra to help enhance its resonant power. And to put it all together, you are provided with a 14-day plan so you can design the life you want, infusing the power of movement, mantra, and self-reflection.