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For a Choreography of Emotions: Spatiotemporal Phenomenology

Today's post is by Helene Cæcilie Mørck, co-written with her fellow authors, in which they address their latest article, For a Choreography of Emotions: Spatiotemporal Phenomenology, published in Psychopathology on July 28, 2025. 


Helene Cæcilie Mørck

 

Helene Cæcilie Mørck 

I draw on my twenty years as a choreographer, as well as my lifelong lived experience with altered states related to schizophrenia. During several hospitalizations for psychosis, I found that my training and embodied knowledge as a dancer and choreographer provided me with methods to navigate the emotional chaos I was experiencing. 

I developed an inner choreographic map, using my embodied knowledge to structure the emotional turmoil and altered states I experienced. In close collaboration with Giovanni and Veronica, we have been translating this knowledge and deconstructing the language of dance and choreography into practical tools that potentially could be used to test the Choreography of Emotions method. 



Giovanni Stanghellini

 

Giovanni Stanghellini 

 My contribution is about the need to help people, including patients, to recognize their emotions and distinguish them from other bodily sensations in an age of emotional illiteracy. 

Building on and extending the idea that an emotion is a bodily coenaesthetic (bodily feeling) and kinesthetic (feeling of movement) state which motivates movements (ex-movere, literally 'what makes one move'), in this and other essays we try to construct a map of the bodily feelings and feelings of movements associated with each emotion to make it easier for those experiencing that particular emotion to recognise it. 


Veronica Boniotti

 

Veronica Boniotti 

My contribution to the paper draws on my dual background as both clinician-researcher and artist-choreographer. I sought to bring these two perspectives into dialogue, exploring how the embodied, choreographic understanding of emotions can enrich both phenomenological research and clinical practice. 

By focusing on the lived, bodily dimension of emotional experience, I aimed to explore how talking and feeling emotions in terms of movement and spatial-temporal awareness can foster a sense of connection and empowerment in patients, helping them feel more autonomous and attuned to their experiences, and enabling them to talk about and understand emotions more clearly. This perspective also opens new possibilities for training clinicians to perceive and accompany emotions in an embodied way.” 


Georg Northoff

 

Georg Northoff 

My contribution is the spatiotemporal approach that emotion and movement are about time and space, how we create time and space through our own initiative, and how that impacts our emotions. 

Slow speed is often tied to a sad mood, while faster speed to a happy mood, hence there seems to be an intrinsic connection of speed as processed in the brain and mind with mood. This is one example of what we call spatiotemporal neuroscience and psychiatry. 


Ankelika Wolman

 

Ankelika Wolman 

I'm fascinated by the neuroscience of emotions and their dynamics because they reveal how deeply our minds and bodies are connected. Dance therapy, as a movement-based form of expression, offers a unique lens through which emotional processing can be understood and transformed. 

Exploring how emotions arise, shift, and are embodied during dance helps illuminate the brain-body connection and its therapeutic potential.


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