A post by Silvana Pani

“First thing to do is in your mind create a very simple, literal freehand sketch or drawing. [...] Choose a beginning on that sketch and then describe it physically or draw it – the whole thing rather than just an element of the whole thing.”
-- Wayne McGregor, choreographer

Choreography is one of the best examples of the hurdles and miracles of trying to put a plan into action. Over and above being a usually cooperative practice, choreography requires skilled coordination of verbal instructions with sensorimotor information. Verbal instructions are one main vehicle of the choreographer’s intentions and one way for dancers to think about movements. Sensorimotor information, on the other hand, is what verbal instructions are translated into and constrained by before and during movement performance.

From deliberation to actual enactment, the nature of thought processes underlying both skilled and ordinary bodily movements (like picking up a cup) is far from clear. Philosophers have often conceived of intentions as building blocks of plans. Our planning activity is thus responsible for deliberation and practical reasoning as well as for the preliminary rehearsal of actions (not all rehearsal of action happens at the planning level, though).

The idea that intentions are propositional states figuring in practical reasoning is a traditional platitude (e.g. Bratman 1987). The idea that motor representations, qua immediate antecedents of actions, are non-propositional in nature is a more recent view and quite widely accepted (e.g. Jeannerod 2006). The question of how differently formatted contents, that is, contents that are propositionally and motorically formatted come together towards the realization of some action goal or set of goals, such as a new choreographic work, has been dubbed the “Interface challenge” by Butterfill and Sinigaglia (2014).