ABSTRACT
Dance as an art form is rich in metaphorical representation. This arises from the human capacity to explore and communicate ideas through the body. As babies, we learn about the world around us through our interactions with it, we see, hear, taste, smell, and both touch and physically manipulate our environment. We move and are moved by it, a principle that is at the root of grounded and embodied cognition.
The connection between concrete bodily experiences and metaphor is subject to extensive ongoing investigation, growing in part out of Lakoff and Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory. However, although bodily experience is seen to be fundamental to many aspects of cognition, dance, which in some forms is built around the exploration of meaning through movement, has been largely ignored as a tool or subject for research in embodied cognition.
This chapter joins the conversation by introducing the Concentric Circles Model, a tool to aid and enrich dance analysis, creative, educative, and therapeutic practices through unpeeling metaphors and their broader relative, analogies. This will be presented in the context of existing theories and practices within research across diverse modalities. The extended goal is to learn more about the role of bodily movement in the very human endeavour of creating and understanding metaphors and analogies.
