THINKING THROUGH DRAWING: PRACTICE INTO KNOWLEDGE 125
David Kirshthese constraints, here is what to count, and here is
what not to count.
Now I will take these two ideas and use them in
the third:
I did a big study, and am continuing to do it,
where we set up video cameras all around the stu-
dio in which the choreographer of the Royal Ballet
every year makes a new piece with his very con-
temporary dance company Random Dance. It takes
about 6-7 weeks to make a 1 hr piece. We set up
cameras to record from the moment it starts to the
moment they are ready to perform the piece. We
have captured all of that.
In this particular case this video clip is of a ran-
dom period of a dancer practising. What I would
like you to look at is Hans. What is Hans doing? He
is practising. This form of practice is called “mark-
ing”. They dance all day so they can’t be expected
to practise with full energy and full intensity. They
do a smaller version—this becomes an interesting
phenomenon to study. You can see that most of the
activity is going on in his head.
The question that stood forward was “do I get
anything more from marking than from mental
simulation?” Could marking possibly do more than
the mental projection of thinking about the action?
Why don’t I just mentally simulate it? Why bother
to move the body?
Marking is a universal phenomenon: tennis
players, cellists, Irish River Dancers use it, In acting
it called an “Italian run through”, when they per-
form a very quick version. It is a kind of modeling.
We did a study where we asked a dancer Antoine
to mark a phrase. The tempo was about right, the
movement was quite large. Then he did a smaller
version. He preserves some aspects but not others.
The question was what do you get from doing the
small stuff? You certainly can’t perform it. So how
could this possibly facilitate better performance?
To explore this we had dancers learn a phrase for
10 minutes. We graded them all on their initial per-
formance. Then one group lay down and mentally
simulated the full phrase they had just danced, one
group marked it, and one performed the full phrase.
We then graded them again and we measured the
improvement.
We were hoping to find that marking did some-
thing better than lying on the floor. To our absolute
surprise marking was better than full out perfor-
mance!
The conclusions with respect to marking are it
helps to manage attention—how would it do that?
Well, think about lithic illustrations, where you are
not taking the whole thing, the photographic result,
you are drawing just a fraction of it, so the mark-
ing is doing just a fraction of it. A lithic illustra-
tion says I know what to look at—it is helping me
attend to certain things. The marking, like a lithic
illustration, is helping me attend to what I want to
be thinking about, an aspect of the full out thing.
That’s one possibility of why it facilitates. Another
possibility is that if I am doing this I can project to
the outside better than I could in imagination alone,
like the first case with tic-tac-toe. I can project more
because there is an external structure to anchor it.
The third thing is when I mark I may think
about the timing, the extension, so there are all
these aspects. People study aspect by aspect and
then they have to integrate the aspects later but they
are studying aspect by aspect. If they practice full
out they have to do everything at once, so it could
be less good.
I am looking for people to tell me where there
is a theory of studying aspect by aspect, because I
think we do that in most everything. We pull things
out and exaggerate things.
And the other thing that could be an explana-
tion is that you get something for free—so if you are
going to the full extent, and all you are concerned
about the edges and the corners, some of it “comes
f o r f r e e ”.
I want to start here I want to end there, I don’t
think about the intervening stuff, I get it for free
by thinking about the end piece. So that it can be
something that reduces my cognitive load.
To summarize, there is only so far you can by
imagining before you need to project onto the
structure. Drawing can help us manage our atten-
tion i.e. it is a kind of coordinating structure that
directs you as to how you are supposed to do it.
Sketching lets us focus on aspects of things, aspect
by aspect. The idea of embodiment suggests that the
body itself could be used as a sketching instrument
—in fact dancers sometimes call it sketching. Mark-
ing is a kind of 3-d sketching with the body index.