Abstract

The dissertation contributes new scholarship to a breadth of discourse areas including dance and nonverbal communication studies, cognitive science, and historical documentation processes. The study argues for commensurate documentation strategies for the temporal, embodied and contingent practice of dancing. Reciprocally, this study posits embodiment's role as infrastructure for the production of oral history narratives. ;After defining terms of the research, the dissertation surveys dance's position or its lack in art historical discourses paralleled by a similar trajectory for oral history method in historical inquiry. The theoretical framework uses Laban Movement Analysis to extend existing cognitive science toward more sophisticated apprehension of dynamic movement. Methodological innovations propose temporal recursivity as criterion for segment selection, keeping units of analysis wrapped in the phenomenologically meaningful narrative as a whole. Four case studies comprise a qualitative analysis of spoken and embodied channels of communication with a cohort of narrators drawn from the spatiotemporal aesthetic of dance artist Twyla Tharp. LMA is rigorously applied to embodied communication channels in each narrator's life history, articulating complex dynamisms of movement and vocal production as they pulse and intertwine across emplotment of narrative. ;The study's findings articulate how dynamic movement metaphors drawn from LMA link phrased movement with the production of narrative. In so doing, the study forges connections between embodied practices and their representations in language. These links help remedy future gaps in the historical record for dancing in specific and for embodied practices in general. Advancing the field of oral history theory, the study argues its value for dance documentation and, by extension, other embodied practices. Oral history method's commensurate logic of practice provides dance with a documentation strategy that embraces rather than occludes its constituting elements. ;The study also suggests that dancing and oral history offer critical insights toward ontological awareness of Being. The study demonstrates both practice's investment in articulating temporality. Where they converge in oral history narratives about dancing, the study suggests opportunities for accessing ontological awareness through deep attention to how temporality informs, in Heidegger's words, "the Being of being."