Agency
I have proposed the hypothesis that music encourages the experience of emotion without agency.
That is, feeling what it is like to have a problem, or not to have a problem, without thinking about how to do anything about it.
Dance
Dance is very strongly associated with music:
- When we hear music, depending on exactly what kind of music it is, we might want to dance.
- We hardly ever dance without music.
- When musicians perform music, they might also dance while performing.
- We hardly ever watch other people dancing unaccompanied by music.
Dance is so strongly associated with music, that we can almost argue that dance is itself an aspect of music, but it’s a visual aspect of music rather than an auditory/acoustic aspect.
That is, “music” is some general thing that extends beyond our normal concept of a thing made out of sounds.
The Agency or Non-Agency of Dance
If music is, as I have hypothesized, non-agentic, and dance is strongly associated with music, then we have to conclude that dance is non-agentic.
At first glance, this seems wrong – agency is all about doing things, and dancing is doing something.
So how can dancing be non-agentic?
To resolve this question, I need to give a more precise definition of what I mean by “agentic” in the context of my hypothesis about music and emotion.
In particular, I define agentic as follows:
- A person’s action is agentic if it is the result of the person thinking about what to do in response to a problem that the person wants to solve.
With regard to dance, we can observe that the action of dancing does not serve the purpose of solving some other problem. One dances for the sake of dancing – one does not dance for the purpose of solving some other problem. (There may be occasional exceptions to this, like dancing with someone you fancy at a social dance even though you don’t like dancing, but such exceptions don’t give us any major insight into the basic nature of dance.)
The Appearance of Non-Agency
If dance is truly non-agentic, then not only does it have to not be the result of thinking about how to do something in order to solve a problem, it also has to not look like it is the result of thinking about how to do something in order to solve a problem.
We can identify different aspects of dance that relate the the appearance of non-agency:
- Performance dance often includes unnaturally smooth continuous motion of body parts. Agentic behaviour on the other hand is determined by the practical requirements of the problem being solved, and the exact nature of the motion may change from moment to moment as the person has thoughts about the results of what they have done so far and what is the best thing to do next. Such behaviour will not in general be at all smooth or continuous.
- A person thinking and acting agentically will not be moving in a manner that is synchronised with the motion of other people. The only exception to this is if the specific problem being solved is the problem of moving in a manner which is synchronised with the motion of other people – which for the most part is a problem that only needs to be solved when you are dancing (which comes back to the observation that dancing is an action performed for it’s own sake, and it’s not the solution to any other problem).
- From my own personal experience of watching a variety of non-professional dance performances in my life, one thing I have observed is that one of the things you don’t want to do when you dance is pause and look around and give the impression that you are currently thinking about what it is you need to do next.