Abstracting Bulls
A Dancing Words/Writing Dance Workshop
Michele Root-Bernstein, Ph.D.
O
n the face of things, a dancer and a writer
are two very different beasts. The one does
not bother with words; the other has no
need of gesture. A dancer explores an evanescent
physical expression shared in the moment; a writer
exploits a vicarious mental expression shared at
a remove. The psychologist Howard Gardner has
even argued for the separate intelligence of each
and as well, a separate creativity. The dancer, he
tells us, is a kinesthetic thinker, the writer a verbal
one and how they create is equally distinct.1,2 Yet
there I was, in the fall of 1995, watching students
at the Happendance Dance Studio in Okemos,
Michigan, form of themselves a fantastic chimera.
Ready for class with teacher and director of the
studio, Diane Newman, seven teenage girls
sprawled on the floor, pored over a bunch of
pictures, took up pen and paper and began to write.
What happened then, and in the weeks that
followed, generally confirmed in an educational
setting the profound imaginative and creative
links between disciplines proposed some years
earlier by scientist-artist Robert Root-Bernstein.3
More specifically, the experimental dancing words/
writing dance workshop forged new possibilities
for integrating dance into a larger,
transdisciplinary educational experience, one
Michele Root-Bernstein, Ph.D., is an independent
scholar, writer, and educational consultant in East
Lansing, Michigan.
Address for Correspondence Reprint Requests:
Michele Root-Bernstein, Ph.D., 720 Gainsborough
Drive, East Lansing, Michigan 48823.
134
capable of reaching beyond the arts alone into the
academic classroom as well.
Toward a Universal Imagination
Newman and I had two immediate goals for the
workshop in mind. First, we wanted to encourage
maturing dancers to pursue multiple imaginative
endeavors as a strategy for creative success. Second,
we wanted to explore explicitly those imaginative
links that would generate a co-composition of writing and dance rather than a limited conversion of
one endeavor into another. Many studies of eminence
already argued that the most fertile minds across
the arts and sciences nurture many interests, acquiring along the way practical knowledge in making and doing a variety of things.4-7 Evidence suggests that successful individuals are almost
invariably multiply-gifted. Writers paint, painters
sculpt, sculptors dance, dancers write. Nor do the
multiply-gifted necessarily respect conventional divides between the arts, sciences, and technologies.
Many of the best artists were and are advanced in
their studies of anatomy, medicine, chemistry, mathematics, and other sciences. Many of the best scientists were and are excellent amateur musicians, artists, poets. Indeed, among scientists and other
professionals as well, the very fact of an intellectually stimulating hobby itself predicts success in the
primary career.8,9
We looked for an even closer connection between
writing and dance. We knew that for many multiply-gifted individuals, avocations in other disciplines
sometimes become purposeful; talents become correlative and synergistic. For years, Louise Nevelson
studied eurhythmics as a way to explore tension and
Journal of Dance Education
balance in her sculpture10; chemist and Nobel laureate Roald Hoffman writes poetry to penetrate the
emotions of scientific understanding11; Loie Fuller
designed costumes, mixed chemicals, took out patents on cloth wands and glass floors in order to forge
her unique integration of stage technology and dance
art.12 In the dancing words/writing dance workshop,
we wanted to explore a similar correlative stimulation between dancing and writing. Despite the formal differences between dances and texts, by focusing on their imaginative generation we anticipated
a world of similarity.
And we found it. Gus Solomons, Jr., dancer, choreographer, and writer, had already suggested an
affinity between the two arts in the compositional
process. “For me,” he stated, “writing and making
dances have a great deal in common: choosing and
putting together words in a way that conveys precisely the meaning you intend is like building a
dance.”13 Subsequently, Robert Root-Bernstein and
I would argue in Sparks of Genius14 that a commonly
used set of thinking tools generate this process. These
tools, each discussed at length in the book, include
observing, imaging, abstracting, recognizing, and
forming patterns, analogizing, empathizing, body
thinking (kinesthetic and proprioceptive), dimensional thinking, modeling, playing, transforming, and
synthesizing. In dance, each thinking tool has its
role.15 And, a point that cannot be emphasized
strongly enough, these tools are also used in every
art and science. In so far as all inventive activities
exercise and depend upon one or many of the same
tools, these imaginative skills are universal – like
universal joints or gears they are generally relevant
and unrestricted in application. They link creative
endeavors one to another. Martha Graham, like so
many choreographers, composed dance on and with
the body, though not without the input of tremendous visual imagination.16,17 Isabel Allende composes
narrative in a captivating flow of words, but not without first feeling what she wants to say in the tension
and disposition of the body.18 Dancers and writers
both observe, image visually, abstract, analogize,
think with the body, and so forth. Instead of tying
dancing and writing together by the arbitrary translation of words into movements or dance into narrative, Newman and I looked for a synergism based
upon a correlative exploration of one or more of these
imaginative tools and the generation of ideas and
expressions that might follow.
Toward Workshop Practice
Like many a dance, this workshop was also made
on the body. At the Happendance School, student
dancers begin learning the principles of dance com-
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2001
135
position as early as eleven years old. Through
middle school and high school they take on more
and more responsibility for making modern dance,
so that by the time they reach their last years of
high school and advanced composition, they create entirely on their own the small group and solo
pieces performed at the year-end recital. At the
time of their participation in the advanced composition workshop, Chrissie Hill, Katy Luethge,
Julia Oates-Ulrich, Jennifer Palmer, Jessica
Turner, Christy Weber, and Alissa Westervelt were
in the 10th through 12th grades and most had been
Happendance students for years. This creative
experience stood the girls in good stead when challenged with verbal expressive forms less familiar
to them than dance. It stood Newman and me in
good stead, too, as we tried out different “steps”
we hoped would lead us where we wanted to go.
As it turned out, the student dancers took us on a
surprising journey that evolved of its own accord
from dancing poems to creating haiku in words
and gesture to abstracting the complexities of real
movement into a moving art.
To begin with, we read short, sharp, surprising
poems of all kinds, many to be found in the excellent compilation, Talking to the Sun.19 The students
danced individually and extemporaneously to William Wordsworth, Gertrude Stein, Robert Herrick,
D.H. Lawrence, Gary Snyder, Edna St. Vincent
Millay, Eve Merriam, William Carlos Williams, and
many others. Sometimes they danced to the poem
as it was spoken, taking their cue from the
rhythms of speech; sometimes they listened first
and then danced to the images and meanings that
still reverberated in the mind’s ear. In the second
half of these first few classes the dancers worked
in groups of three and four to dance somewhat
longer poems, often of five or six stanzas. Usually
about twenty minutes were spent in composition,
the dancers working cooperatively to communicate
in shape and movement the verbal expression.
These compositions were then shared with the
whole class.
We believed that if the dancers understood explicitly what they were doing intuitively, they could
learn to manipulate their creative process purposefully. So we asked them, what was going on in their
heads when they improvised a short dance sequence? Did they see what they wanted to do in
the mind’s eye? Did they feel it? Were they internalizing the mood and movement of an object or
thought? I made an effort to label these imaginative efforts in terms of thinking tools in order to
provide the students with a vocabulary for selfpractice and group communication. Stated briefly,
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Journal of Dance Education
Volume 1, Number 4
imaging refers to the recall of sense (in this case
visual) impressions in the absence of external
stimulation. Body thinking images muscle
memory, gut feelings, emotions and body movement. Empathizing involves an external projection of feeling, becoming one with the object of
study. The students were given time to record in
their class journals what they remembered of the
thinking tools they had used and the imaginative
process they had gone through to make their
dances.
These journals were a revelation. At the start
of our workshop we had asked the students to write
in their journals the words of Jean Piaget: “To
understand is to invent.” We discussed the inherent reciprocity between these two inter-linked activities. Little did we expect in the very first class
that Piaget’s observation would be put to the test!
Two very different poems had been chosen for
group composition: the Hottentot Song for the Sun
That Disappeared Behind the Rainclouds and
Allan Kaprow’s Rain Washes Away. One poem is
full of narrative images, a story of a people’s lamentation cleansed away by light and hope. The
other is primarily a list of recondite images linked
by mood and rhythmic chant. What tools would
the dancers use to put words into motion? “I tried
to imagine visions that went with the lines...” wrote
Jennifer Palmer. “[I tried feeling] as if I was that
item described and how I would move...”* This was
good evidence of visual imaging, empathizing, and
body thinking. How would the students then dance
these poems?
Song for the Sun, so literal and so comprehensible, was danced metaphorically. “[W]e chose not
to take every phrase literally,” Chrissie Hill wrote.
“We worked with the images and imitated them
with our bodies.” Christy Weber agreed, “We
danced the main idea of the poem, instead of each
event.…” This dance was well-conceived, tightly
organized, and true to the poem it expressed. One
might have expected Kaprow’s poem to be danced
in the same non-literal way, using movement and
shape to convey the mood and rhythm of the piece.
Instead, the dancers tried to dance each image
“word for word.” These images were so disparate
the dancers had trouble with transitions from one
to the other. The dance was flat and monotone, like
the repetition of “rain washes away” without the
waxing or waning of a storm. Quite simply, the
dancers did not understand the poem and there*Student statements from individual class journals have been reproduced with the permission
of the students that participated in the workshop.
2001
fore could not invent beyond the words given. As
Julia Oates-Ulrich remarked about her own improvisations: “I didn’t understand the poem so it
was hard for me to dance it...I felt I could dance
more of the meaning when I understood it myself.”
The interpretation of the words of others is, indeed, problematic. It is much easier to know what
one means oneself. We showed the students a series of photographs and asked them to write what
they saw, both literally and figuratively. The writing was kept short and modeled on the haiku form.
Three brief lines were to alternate short-long-short
in length, describe the essential sight, and then
leap associatively to another vision. The first
evening we spent nearly all our time writing and
none dancing. This did not feel right in a dance
class. Thereafter we linked written and dance expression more immediately in time. The following
week students wrote and then danced what they
had just written, or danced and then wrote what
they had just danced. Working in small groups,
they composed short dances to a sequence of haiku
written by the members of each group. Finally, each
student danced one of her own haiku (without revealing the inspiring photograph or words) while
the others wrote haiku in response to the dance.
This involved the transformation of expression
through several mediums – visual, verbal, and kinesthetic. How much “information” would be lost in
this party telephone line? Palmer danced her words:
Black puddle
drowning leaves of autumn
life sucked out by evil
Reacting to that dance, one of her group members,
Jessica Turner, wrote:
a test of balance
trying like a bird
I hide
and Oates-Ulrich wrote:
Quivering with life,
drifting to a far off land,
dying
The commonality of image and mood was remarkable, especially in the two poems written in response
to the dance. The fall of leaves, danger, death, were
all there, transmuted through a momentary language of body. Even the “black puddle” remained, in
the “far off land” and the place, perhaps, where the
poet “hides.” A great deal of the original vision had
been retained, providing insight into how explicitly
communicative dance can be.
Journal of Dance Education
The haiku focused class attention on observing,
or honing sense perception, and on visual imaging, both important tools for thinking. Can we
learn not just to recognize, but to see a thing in
the real world each time as if for the first time?
Can we recall that thing seen with our mind’s eye?
Can we recreate personal vision in words or in
dance, so that others may see what we see? One of
the more interesting verbal tasks at this point was
to get the students to be specific and literal with
their words, rather than general and vague. One
photograph we showed caught a toad in a little
girl’s hand. Not one of the dancers mentioned the
toad, so intent were they on finding the words for
their emotional response to the picture. We discussed whether or not it was possible to create an
image in language without using concrete words
referring to tangible qualities, actual gestures. Was
it possible to dance a vision without specific images in mind? “No truth but in things,” said the
poet William Carlos Williams, and this, we soon
learned, applied not just to verbal language, but
to dance.
We asked the students to be as specific and literal in dancing as poets in writing. We asked them
to dance the idea of flight by visualizing some particular kind of flight: for example, the soaring of a
hawk, the straight descent of a plane, the random
drift of dandelion seed. But dancing the real movement of bird or leaf was not easy for dancers who
had spent years working with the emotive, rather
than the imitative, powers of dance. They wanted
to move as the leaf feels, rather than feel how it
moves. To dance the actual gestures of a bird in
flight seemed too much like beginner’s work. As
far as these girls were concerned, there had to be
a point to such mimesis, a connection between
dancing image and dancing emotion that focused
upon movement for movement’s sake. That connection, they learned, is abstracting, a thinking
tool based in intellect as well as feeling.
Abstracting
What is abstracting?14,20 Abstracting begins with the
real world and all the wealth of sensations that we
experience of (in) it. We naturally pay attention to
certain of our sense impressions and dismiss the rest.
In representing our experience we can choose which
of those impressions to recreate or reenact. We work
to pare away all the unnecessary details of those
impressions in order to see or hear or feel only what
is essential to a thing. This is abstracting. All of us
make and use abstractions everyday. When we draw
a smiley face we abstract the most important of human features. When we read the television guide we
Volume 1, Number 4
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137
depend on an abstraction of plot to evaluate a movie
or a show. When we hum our favorite melody we
abstract a complex music of words and tones. However, it is one thing to abstract unconsciously and
quite another to understand consciously how to abstract. In the dance/writing workshop we learned
how by studying two sequences of prints, one by Pablo
Picasso and the other by Roy Lichtenstein,* and exploring in dance not the final artistic images, but
the imaginative abstracting that generated them
(Fig. 1).
Both visual artists began their series with the
realistic representation of a bull. But step-by-step
realistic details were dropped and only certain, essential attributes of the bull were developed. Picasso
chose the bull’s line; Lichtenstein its organization of
mass and space. In both cases, only a suggestion of a
tail or a horn tied the final, essential bull to the original. But tied they were – by the process of abstraction. In order to learn how abstraction might work
for them in dance, the students sought kinesthetic
equivalents for each stage of the process. They each
tried to imitate the realistic bull, not as easy as it
sounds. One dancer pointed out that she had no feeling for what it meant to be a bull. No problem, you
do not have to “feel” the bull, just imitate its movements, we told her, and the rest will begin to follow.
Another dancer confessed that she had never really
seen a moving bull in the flesh – a problem. But
soon enough, all the dancers had advanced to the
next stage: choosing one movement and/or one shape
from their “bulls” and dropping the rest of their realistic representation. Each dancer then portrayed
the whole bull by one of its parts: several chose the
pawing action of the front hooves or the shape of the
horns, another the massive bulk, another the whipping action of the tail.
Now Newman urged the dancers to explore the
various kinetic elements of these movements and
shapes. They had been trained to use body, space,
force, and time. Which of these might be altered in
order the carry the “line” or the “mass” of the bull in
simple, essential directions? The pawing of the hoof
had at first been imitated with the pawing of a foot.
What about some other body part? What about the
size of the motion? Did it have to take place at the
level of the floor, or vertically up and down? Was a
strong attack necessary to maintain the idea of hoof
or horn or tail? Could the tempo of real movement
be slowed or quickened? How to best express, most
*Four of Roy Lichtenstein’s six prints are reprinted in color in: Rosen R: Prints, The Facts and
Fun of Collecting. New York: EP Dutton, 1978,
plates 20-23.
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Journal of Dance Education
Volume 1, Number 4
2001
Figure 1 Pablo Picasso, The Bull, 1947. Clockwise from upper left: second, fourth, eighth, and eleventh states.
Copyright 2001 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Reproduced with permission.
simply, the force and the body of a bull?
The dancers were asked to create short (one or
two minute) solo pieces, based on this abstracting
process. And what exciting pieces they were! Despite an initial discomfort dancing imitatively, the
narrow focus at the start lent their subsequent
abstract movements the power of originality and
truth. One dancer became the tail, in her legs, in
her arms, in her whole body whipping, snapping,
random pathways harnessed by the physics of the
whip, the will of the bull. Another dancer took the
pawing hooves on high, her arms circling and recircling one another like perfect, mad wheels of a
bull-machine. Still another explored the square
bulk of the bull as a balance boxed that tumbles,
falls, reasserts the weight of its space. What
worked was not more significant than what did
not work. One student was frustrated, her dance
did not develop. She could not feel the bull, could
not feel the pawing of his hooves, so could not dance
them to her satisfaction. We had presented abstracting as an intellectual process of stripping
away unnecessary detail until the underlying es-
sence or order is uncovered. Clearly an intuitive
understanding – a feeling – for what to strip away
and what to retain also played a major role.
The students had modeled the abstraction process in dance. The next step in our workshop was
to repeat that experience in language, with a final goal for the dancers of dancing their own verbal abstractions. I realized quite quickly that I had
to do some transforming of my own. What was the
equivalent in written language of the realistic representation of a bull? Where does the process of
abstraction in written language really begin and
end? We took as our endpoint spare and simple
statements, such as William Carlos Williams’s
measured description in Poem of a cat navigating
furniture – “first the right/ forefoot” – one careful
paw at a time.
But where did he, and we, start? I likened our
first realistic representation of an experience to the
thoughts and feelings we might express pell-mell to
a friend in conversation or in an unguarded letter.
In the dance/writing workshop we worked first with
experiences and animals remembered, then with
Journal of Dance Education
natural objects we could see and touch. I asked the
dancers to discuss with each other what they were
seeing, thinking, feeling about these things. Then I
asked them to pick one aspect of that thing and write
it down. This was the first stage of verbal abstraction, one hardly recognized by proficient writers. Yet
a great deal of unnecessary “chatter” had to be eliminated and there had to be a point, a piece of information, conveyed by the words. Watching the dancers struggle in a medium they had not yet mastered,
I was forcefully reminded of the many writers who
write in order to know what they think, who invent
in order to understand. Thinking-expressing involves
abstracting in process.
Once the students had words on paper, I asked
them to simplify. Get down to one sentence, I said,
that means something real to you about that experience or that object. I gave them examples:
There is no horizon to mark the dawn but
one minute the streets are still too dark
to feel safe alone and the next it is day.
Their fundamental statements accomplished, I gave
them room for flights of fancy. Much as they had
taken the bull’s tail or its hooves from one level, one
manifestation, to another, I showed them how association and metaphor in particular could expand
their thoughts’ horizons. I had them take one aspect
of their short statement and liken it or link it to something else. Again, I modeled the process:
[There is no horizon to mark the dawn but]
one minute the streets are still too [dark
to feel safe alone and the next it] night
and then light like a flock of startled birds
and dark is day.
Finally, we strove for the utmost simplicity, such
as William Carlos Williams had achieved in Poem
or in his Locust Flower in Bloom. Choose only the
most essential words in your statement, I told the
dancers, and write them one after another on a
line or arrange them one word to a line. Play
around with placement, find the sequence that
means the most to you, as in this final language
abstraction:
One minute the streets are still too night
and then light like a flock of startled birds and
dark is day. horizon-beyond / then-before-until
Too night still before until beyond startles
dark into day.
Too
night
still
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2001
139
before
until
beyond
startles
dark
into
day.
Because this was, primarily, a dance class, all
of this writing was interwoven with dance. The
students danced each stage of their language abstraction, sometimes dancing first, sometimes
writing first. When the last stage was complete,
the dancers performed their dance language abstractions for each other, either solo or in small
groups. Sometimes the “poems” were read before
the dance, sometimes after. On the spur of the
moment Newman asked the students to incorporate the spoken word into their dance. The writing was now no longer a pretext, but an integral
part of the dance.
Our last assignment was meant to combine as
much of what had been learned as possible. We
asked the students to take their inspiration from
a natural object, to write very simple abstractions
about those objects, to combine written abstractions within each group, and to compose cooperatively a dance abstraction that retained at least
one kinetic reference to the real object and made
spoken use of one or all of their written words.
The results were striking.
Hill and Weber composed upon the “body” of an
unusually marked stone:
I
A stone’s eye cries salty tears
II
This cheese impersonator
It’s true color makes the
rodent’s belly growl
Together the girls danced the shape of the stone,
its grief in the eloquent gesture of a hand or a
tear. And they danced the ridiculous rat, whose
uttered hunger pangs proved a proper foil for the
rock’s disdain.
For their part, Katy Luethge and Alissa
Westervelt danced the twisted finger-spokes of a
giant California pine cone as the predator, greed,
grasped the innocent prey:
I
gnarled fingers
gripping sap crystals
like a banker holding money
140
Journal of Dance Education
Volume 1, Number 4
II
like a lifeless porcupine
the cone spikes the red leaf
stuck in crystallized ooze
Like the dancers before them, this duet worked
with recognizable metaphor, both in language and
in dance.
Finally the last two dancers, Palmer and Turner,
examined the thick bark of a dead tree like pathologists taking cryptic notes:
Dirt crevices
like black hole
cold
leaves hide
shelters
colors
longer
intricate wrinkles
charcoaled waves
layers of mind
fall
Around the shape and line of the ravaged bark,
this duet danced a pattern of abstracted associations held together not by image, but by mood.
And yet there was no sense of random movement
or unfocussed intent. Each spoken word of their
language abstraction was complemented, more,
conceived anew, by their movements in dance.
This duet, indeed every duet, fulfilled the assignment in ways that could only have been told
in the doing.
The Universality of the Creative
Process
When we began nine weeks earlier Newman and
I had hoped that by exercising tools for thinking,
first in one medium, then in another, the students
at Happendance School would learn for themselves
the universality of the creative process. More, we
believed that if they could recognize how other
creative individuals used these tools, they could
learn for themselves new ways of inventing. When
it comes to imagining and creating, writers and
dancers are not such different beasts after all.
However, they do have to learn to recognize their
imaginative skills, to exercise them, and to communicate what they imagine to one another in a
common vocabulary or language. Many statements
in the dancers’ journals and in the questionnaire
they completed at the end of the course indicate
that this kind of learning indeed took place. Turner
wrote that she liked “to write first and then dance
because the sounds and meanings gave me a dif-
2001
ferent edge to invent new shapes.” Weber revealed
that her workshop dances “were a little different
than other dances because knowing the actual
process gave me a new way to explore and change
my ‘normal’ movement.” As for Palmer, she “liked
exploring a new way of creating dance.” Writing
and dancing have much in common, Luethge commented, “because you’re coming up with something
new and different from anything anyone else has
done.” Learning about other thinking tools would
be useful, Hill agreed, because “composition is all
about thought and the more diverse my thought
processes are the more diversity my compositions
will have.” Dance was indeed composed with body.
“When you dance feeling it just seems to come out
of your stomach,” wrote Westervelt. It was also
composed with mind. “When you dance thought
you think about it before hand.… I loved learning
a whole new aspect of expression.…”
Toward a Transdisciplinary Curriculum
Is there a point to abstracting bulls? Absolutely. It
is the first step toward a transdisciplinary education that unites disparate fields of endeavor by
creative process, forging links between subject
matters that content-based studies cannot connect.
Asking “how” do we make dance, how do we make
poems, we transcend the differentiating “what” of
learning. Some dancers and dance educators have
expressed concern that any intellectual understanding of the creative process in dance threatens to destroy that creative flow.21 But dancing to
and with words does not necessarily inhibit body
image and movement. In this workshop the students did not force dance to illustrate verbal conceptions, nor did they render written language
“word for word” into communicative gesture. That
indeed may have resulted in awkward, unidiomatic translation. Rather, they transposed verbal
expression into physical expression, not by referring words to gestures, but by referring word and
gesture to the imaginative thinking tools that precede both forms of expression.
A tools-for-thinking approach to education enables dance educators to link their expressive
medium to other arts and to the sciences and
humanities that form part of the regular school
curriculum. Dance has already entered the classroom to illustrate various kinetic concepts in
math and physics or to embody environmental
and social narratives such as the water cycle or
the underground railroad. As such it “tells the
story” of what is learned in other fields. But it
can do so much more. By focusing on the imaginative tools that underpin even non-kinetic
Journal of Dance Education
ideas in science or math or history, dance can be
used to explore, expand and synthesize any and
all knowledge with the intuitions of body. Observing, imaging, empathizing, and abstracting
are as essential to language arts, mathematics,
earth science, and history as they are to dance.
It makes as much sense to explore abstracting
simultaneously in arithmetic and in dance, in
meteorology and in dance, as it does in writing
and dance. On the one hand, the body thinking
so inherently a part of dance expression naturally meets the kinesthetic learning style needs
of many students, young and old. On the other
hand, any learning environment that promotes
transformational thinking between disciplines
prepares today’s generation for the challenges
that lie ahead.
In a world of splintering arts and sciences and
increasing specialization students must be prepared to overcome the relentless, ongoing fragmentation of understanding and consciousness. It
matters little if we, as teachers, cannot see all there
is to do. Only assure the young they can and should
unite feeling and thinking, writing and dancing,
the arts and the sciences, and they will. By the
end of our workshop at the Happendance School a
handful of young dancers had thoroughly integrated dancing and writing. They had transformed
abstraction in visual art into abstraction in words
and in dance; they had transfigured the body language of dance into a dance of verbal language.
The creative moment was wholly theirs.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
Acknowledgments
I wish to acknowledge and thank Diane Newman, for
offering me the opportunity to explore writing and
abstracting in her dance class; the Happendance
School students, Chrissie Hill, Katy Luethge, Julia
Oates-Ulrich, Jennifer Palmer, Jessica Turner,
Christy Weber, and Alissa Westervelt, for giving me
access to their journals; and Lynette Overby, Professor of Dance at Michigan State University, for reading earlier drafts of this essay.
16.
17.
18.
19.
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Root-Bernstein RS: Tools of thought: Designing an
integrated curriculum for lifelong learners. Roeper
Review 10:17-21, 1987.
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21.
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2001
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White RK: The versatility of genius. Journal of Social Psychology 2:460-489, 1931.
Seagoe MV: Terman and the Gifted. Los Altos, CA:
William Kaufmann, 1975, p. 221 ff.
Root-Bernstein RS: Discovering. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1989.
Hjerter D: Doubly Gifted: The Author as Visual Artist. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1986.
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