RESEARCH - HEARTBEATS AND THE ARTS: A HISTORICAL CONNECTION

I was thinking about the self as a constant marker of identity and being alive and started to think about what else physiologically are constants throughout life that a person can feel/hear, which led me to breathing and heartbeats. Breathing is something I've already used within my choreographic practice with the dancers as a driver for creating contact movement, doing improvisational warm-ups stemming from breathing into each others' backs and how they can send energy from the great between them and breath into different body parts. This was inspired by part of our choreographic process on residency with Patricia Okenwa, where she gave us similar tasks to get in touch with our bodies in the space and between each other in developing contact work. Knowing my dancers weren't as experienced in contact, I thought that would be a good starting point in establishing a relationship and genuine connection between the dancers. 

With heartbeats though, I immediately started thinking about music, as I regularly listen to a few songs that use heartbeats as representations of anxiety/humanity, such as The Archer by Taylor Swift; "One notable element of “The Archer” is its slow build. The rhythmic, plodding beat of the drums combined with highlights of synth seem to signal an eventual beat drop. However, the song never crescendos, leaving intrigued listeners with a sense of incompleteness" (McKinley-Parsons, 2019). Especially with the song mentioned, I feel a sense of human connection to the lyrical narrative enhanced by this heartbeat in the background; It's used in a sense of building anticipation and waiting for a beat to drop that never does to get across the sensation of a panic attack musically. Somewhat inspired by this, within my piece I want to have a piece of music that has a steady beat to represent the idea of a heartbeat going along constantly with the self and driving the tempo of movement as something that centres the dancers. I further want to visually represent this with the lights pulsing in and out with the beat. 

This led me to research the connection between heartbeats and music, and I found an article called Heartbeats and the Arts: A Historical Connection (Arozqueta, 2018). 

This hypothesis by Herophilus (in 335-280 BC) felt quite human to me and speaks to an almost universal experience of connection to music that personally is quite a big influence in my life. I really like this idea that there's an internal music that drives the self, and the beat of a heart being connected makes sense; if any aspect of a human is to be compared to music, it is the beat of a pulse, that can both be felt vibrationally and heard in different ways. 

This next quote describes different categories of music defined by Boethius (480-524 AD) describes different types of music, musica mundana which seems to relate to the natural world, and musica humana which connects that music to the body. This led me to think about how the wider world influences the ticking of the self and how I want to explore how the experiences of the external self impact the stability of the internal self, just as external stimuli can quicken heartbeats seen in physiological reactions like fight or flight. I want to look into how we can represent through dance the feeling of the external self being overwhelmed with varying stimuli and how that then impacts the internal.

The article goes on to describe how the recordings of pulse and heartbeats have been used in many ways of fine art and music but doesn't talk about dance. I'm interested in exploring through an aspect of this piece how the different constants of the human system can support the movement we create in creating a genuine and realistic relationship to portray on stage.

Arozqueta, C. (2018) ‘Heartbeats and the Arts: A Historical Connection’, Leonardo, 51(1), pp. 33–39. doi:10.1162/LEON_a_01152. (Accessed: 28/04/2024)

McKinley-Parsons, R. (2019) A Breakdown of Taylor Swift's New Song 'The Archer'. Available At: https://studybreaks.com/culture/sounds/the-archer-song-analysis/ (Accessed: 28/04/2024)