What Moves Us: Dance and Neuroscience Implications for Conflict Approaches

• Author: Emily Beausoleil,Michelle LeBaron
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/crq.21086
• Published date: 01 December 2013
• Date: 01 December 2013

What Moves Us: Dance and Neuroscience

Implications for Con ict Approaches

Emily Beausoleil

Michelle LeBaron

Despite its worldwide use in grassroots confl ict approaches, dance, and

the body more generally, remain largely unaddressed within confl ict

theory and conventional practice. We argue that the body is an essential

focus of confl ict theory and a ready resource for confl ict practice by

exploring the implications of compelling discoveries within the fi eld of

neuroscience. Examining the embodied dimensions of cognition, emo-

tion, and memory, the physical roots of empathy, and the relationship of

right- and left-brain processes to confl ict, we outline neuroscientifi c

underpinnings of dance-based approaches to confl ict and the range of

creative tools that arises from its use.

I’m not interested in how people move, but in what moves them.

Pina Bausch

Confl ict is—among other things—often accompanied by a sense of

inertia, a feeling of being bound up in discomfort, a visceral need for

a shift. While much confl ict resolution training and intervention is cen-

tered around cognitive analysis, a new wave of theory and practice draws

on the arts to inform choices and frameworks (Liebmann 1996; Zelizer

2003; Lederach 2005; Urbain 2008; Arai 2009; Ramsbotham, Woodhouse,

and Miall 2011). Because dance is an art that takes human agency and

relationship as its subject, it is especially suited as a resource for confl ict

educators and practitioners whose work reaches for the outer limits of col-

laborative possibility. Recent work by neuroscientists demonstrates the

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© Wiley Periodicals, Inc. and the Association for Confl ict Resolution

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) • DOI: 10.1002/crq.21086

134 BEAUSOLEIL, LEBARON

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potency of creative movement in evoking emotions and training the mal-

leable mind, thus buttressing the case for dance and providing a scientifi c

rationale for its application. In this article, we examine the potency of

dance for informing confl ict education and intervention and exploring its

applications to theory and practice. In doing so, we build on John Paul

Lederach’s (2005) call for embodied imagination and that of diverse social

scientists such as Judith Butler (1993, 2004) and Silvia Federici (2004) to

attend to the body in both theory and practice.

Around the world, dance and movement are being used as tools in

addressing confl ict and training third parties. From South Central Los

Angeles to Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and South Africa, dance

has been shown to galvanize marginalized communities, help assert agency

and dignity, and foster communication of ineff able complexities in intrac-

table confl icts (Román 1998; Zelizer 2003; Lederach 2005; Jackson and

Shapiro-Phim 2008). Despite the worldwide use of such practices, dance

has yet to be accepted into the canon of confl ict approaches.  is is not

surprising; since Descartes, Western thought has discounted, dismissed,

and overridden the very body that is foregrounded in dance. As a result, the

body, long considered “unthought and unthinking,” is “at once the most

solid, the most elusive, concrete, metaphysical, ever present and ever dis-

tant thing” (Dempster 1988, 15; Foster 1998, 20)—the site of thought,

action, and communication that is both closest to and farthest from the

thinking and practice of confl ict practitioners and scholars.

Yet consider how dance and movement might inform not only confl ict

intervention in the aftermath of war in a far-off African country with a

strong indigenous tradition of ritual and performance, but also a family

mediation training program. Or how public policy mediators might fi nd

their repertoires strengthened by training in dance and physical intelli-

gence. How can physical training and experience with dance help expand

mediators’ mental models, enlarge their maneuverability in practice, and

even serve parties in the midst of mediation? In this article, we explore

ways that creative movement in contexts of confl ict can be powerful and

bring the body in as an essential focus of confl ict theory and a ready

resource for confl ict practice. To do so, we examine the implications of

compelling discoveries within the fi eld of neuroscience and link them to

dance and confl ict. We present further implications of the practical appli-

cations of dance and movement toward the end of the article.

Neuroscientists have begun to explore the physiology of emotion, com-

munication, receptivity, attunement, empathy, and creative thinking, all of