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Howard Gardner, who developed the concept of bodily-kinaesthetic

intelligence26 as being one of seven intelligences (logical-mathematical,
linguistic, spatial, musical, bodily-kinaesthetic, inter-personal, and intra-
personal) as part of his Multiple Intelligence theory, writes about dancer Martha
Graham’s bodily-kinaesthetic experimentations in his book Creating Minds:
The crucial bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence was represented in the course of its own
experimentation, its transformations and retransformations, rather than thought through
or encoded in a self-standing symbol system. As the dance historian Lynn Garafola puts
it: ‘Graham was her body; she became who she was because of it and through the
discipline that made it strong, eloquent and beautiful. What it could and could not do
defined the limits of her invention and prompted the exercises that became the basis of
her technique.’ Regrettably, no records of Graham’s experiments-in-movement exist;
one must rely on the recollections of individuals who danced with Martha Graham and
on the descriptions of successive dances as they were created in the middle decades of
the century. Those dances that were less successful, in particular, may be seen as drafts
of later, more comprehensive and more effective works (Gardner 1993a:296).

Gardner regarded Graham’s bodily-kinaesthetic observations and

experimentation as crucial to her artistic and technical development. Conducting
teacher James Hainlen has used dance instructors to help his students achieve an
understanding of physical movement, as Harris explains:
Hainlen also incorporates the practice and metaphorical use of physical motion in his
teaching and conducting. He explained: ‘We bring in a dance instructor every year to
work with the orchestra. I think (the students’) bodies should be able to create a musical
line by the way they move.’ This approach has proven to be a powerful tool for Hainlen
and he described an example that illustrated how the students transferred some of this
work to their musical performance. They were having trouble attaining the right feeling
with a particularly difficult passage in a Sibelius symphony, so he had them perform a
physical exercise jumping around chairs. This exertion caused them to pant, so he told
the students, ‘Okay, when you play this passage you should be metaphorically panting at
the end.’ He explained: ‘I never had to conduct that passage again, because their bodies
had a physical emotion to go with it’ (Harris 2001:46-47).

Hainlen indicates that kinaesthetic learning has proved the most effective form of
learning with his conducting students.
Schuller also believes that a conductor’s unique physical attributes profoundly
affect conducting ability, but that these can be trained through gestural
experience (Schuller 1997:9-10). From my own observations of conductor
training programs, many of the movements for conducting are taught in a ‘one
size fits all’ manner. As conductors are built in a variety of shapes and sizes it
seems illogical to teach all conductors the same way without taking into account
the variety of body types, as smaller built conductors will use gestures differently
from larger built conductors. This is acknowledged by conducting teacher

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For a detailed explanation of bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence, refer to Gardner’s chapter on this
subject in Frames of Mind (Gardner 1993b:206-237).