The Observed Movement Continues in the Body

Motor Imagery, Micromovements, and Shared Agency

The lights dim.

For a few seconds, no one knows exactly what will come next.

Then a body crosses the stage.

It runs.
It turns.
It leaps.

Your eyes follow the movement. Perhaps your chin rises slightly. Perhaps your feet press against the floor. Perhaps your breathing pauses for a moment, waiting for the artist’s body to meet the ground again.

The artist leaps.

Yet something also moves within you.

Let it come.
Let it be.
Let it stay.
Let it go.
Let it in.

Perhaps this is how a performance truly begins: not when the artist makes the first gesture, but when that movement encounters another body willing to receive it.

The Leap Crosses the Distance

Watching is not the same as physically performing the choreography. Yet watching does not mean remaining completely still.

As you follow a rotation, your organism estimates speed, direction, balance, and continuity. Your eyes search for the next point in space. Your posture may adjust. Your muscles may produce preparations so subtle that you never consciously notice them.

We call these changes micromovements.

A finger contracts.
The torso leans.
The breath remains suspended.
A foot silently follows the rhythm.

These movements do not prove the presence of a particular emotion. Paused breathing may accompany fear, fascination, attention, or surprise. A contracted muscle cannot reveal, by itself, what you felt.

But it suggests that the body did not watch from the outside.

The artist’s gesture found a passage.

More Than a Mirror

For many years, discussions about action observation became almost synonymous with discussions about “mirror neurons.”

The idea is appealing: when we observe another person acting, our brain would internally reproduce that action.

But dance does not pass through a spectator by means of a single neuron or one isolated network.

When you watch, you participate through vision, attention, memory, balance, imagination, experience, and feeling.

You do not simply copy the artist.

You predict.
Recognize.
Question.
Compare.
Imagine.
Resist.
Complete.

Action observation mobilizes visual and sensorimotor networks, but the meaning of the gesture depends on the history of the person watching.

An experienced dancer may recognize the preparation for a leap before it happens. A child may perceive only the joy of elevation. A person who has previously fallen may sense danger. Another may experience freedom.

The same movement enters different bodies and finds different destinations.

Rehearsing Without Moving

Close your eyes for a moment.

Imagine that you must turn while balancing on one foot.

Even before performing any movement, you may be able to imagine your body’s axis, the position of your arms, and the effort required to maintain balance.

This is motor imagery: internally experiencing an action without fully performing it.

While watching dance, motor imagery may arise without being invited.

The body on stage runs, and for a few seconds your own Body-Territory rehearses that run. The artist leans, and you follow the inclination from within. The performer falls, and part of you prepares to soften the impact.

Movement does not need to reach the arms and legs in order to exist.

Sometimes it dances only as a possibility.

Let it come.

The image arrives.

Let it be.

The body recognizes it.

Let it stay.

The experience begins to take shape.

When Gesture Encounters Matter

In the archaeological territory of Joinville, a lithic point associated with the Umbu tradition may be understood as more than a shaped stone.

Before becoming an object, it was movement.

Someone selected the material.
Held the stone.
Measured the force.
Struck it.
Observed the fracture.
Corrected the edge.
Tried again.

The archaeology of gesture investigates how motor sequences, learned techniques, and cultural traditions leave traces in matter.

The stone cannot tell us exactly what that person felt. We do not know whether there was urgency, fear, focus, hope, or exhaustion.

But we know that a body was there.

The lithic point carries signs of the hands that shaped it.

At the Joinville Dance Festival, the gesture does not remain in stone. It encounters another kind of matter: the body of the person watching.

The artist’s movement may remain in your breathing, posture, memory, or desire to stand after the performance.

The stone preserves the gesture that shaped it.
The spectator preserves something of the gesture that passed through them.

The First Feeling Has No Name Yet

The dancer leaps.

You hold your breath.

For a brief instant, there is no word.

It is not necessarily fear yet.
It is not yet beauty.
It is not yet joy or concern.

Something has simply changed.

In Feeling and Knowing, António Damásio helps us understand that consciousness does not observe the world from a neutral body. Everything we perceive takes place against a living background of breathing, balance, tension, comfort, fatigue, and regulation.

Within the BrainLatam hypothesis, this first alteration may be called a proto-feeling.

It is not a hidden emotion waiting to be discovered. It is the beginning of a change within the Body-Territory, before that change receives a name, an explanation, or a direction.

Perhaps you will never name it.

Perhaps it will disappear quickly.

Or perhaps it will encounter a memory, a word, or a desire to act.

The artist offers the gesture.
Your body offers a response.
Meaning emerges between the two.

This is one form of shared agency.

You did not create the technical structure of the leap. Yet you participate in the continuity of the work when it encounters within you a perception that did not exist before.

The Melody of Feeling

Not every mobilization needs to be explained immediately.

Some experiences simply need a path.

Let it come.
Let it be.
Let it stay.
Let it go.
Let it in.

Let It Come

To let it come is to notice that something has begun.

A tension.
An impulse.
A memory.
A desire to follow the rhythm.

There is no need to search for an extraordinary sensation. It is enough not to close the door on what has already arrived.

Let It Be

Rick Hanson and Forrest Hanson describe resilience as a capacity that can be cultivated. Rather than immediately fighting every internal experience, we can first recognize what is present.

Letting it be does not mean agreeing with it, enjoying it, or becoming trapped within it.

It means not interrupting the experience before understanding it.

Let It Stay

Some movements need to remain for a few moments before they can acquire shape.

The audience’s silence allows this.
The continuation of the music does as well.

Letting it stay means giving duration to feeling without turning it into a prison.

Perhaps the gesture needs to remain only for the length of one breath.

Let It Go

David R. Hawkins, in Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender, describes letting go as a reduction of internal resistance.

Here, this contribution is used as philosophical and spiritual inspiration, not as proof of a specific brain mechanism.

At the Festival, letting go may be the exhalation after the landing. It may be the applause that offers an outlet for mobilization. It may be the relaxation that arrives when the body recognizes that the danger has passed.

Letting go does not mean erasing.

The movement may leave and still remain as memory.

Let It In

Something may also remain with us in another way.

A feeling of courage.
A new possibility for balance.
The memory of a gesture.
The realization that another body crossed what had seemed impossible.

Letting it in means allowing the experience to become learning, a resource, or a question.

The gesture ends on stage but finds another life within you.

Imitating Without Disappearing

Within the BrainLatam hypothesis, Extended Yãy hã mĩy describes a path through which the Body-Territory observes, imitates, learns, and transforms.

Imitate oneself into being in order to transcend oneself into being.

Imitation is not the final point.

You observe.
Anticipate.
Experience internally.
Perhaps repeat.
Perceive the result.
Transform.

The movement of another person opens a possibility, but it does not decide what you must become.

You do not need to disappear inside the artist’s gesture.

You may receive it and return it to the world in another form.

This extended use is a BrainLatam elaboration inspired by encounters with Tikmũ’ũn/Maxakali knowledge. It does not claim to completely translate their cosmology or reduce their knowledge to a neuroscientific explanation.

Indigenous knowledge remains living, territorial, and autonomous.

The Work Is Also Written by Those Who Feel

Perhaps you entered this text thinking only about the dancer’s body.

Now, however, your own body is also present.

How is your breathing?

Are your feet still in the same position?

Has an image remained with you?

There is no answer that everyone must provide.

Shared agency does not require artist and audience to feel the same thing. It allows the work to be completed through different paths without erasing the freedom of each Body-Territory.

The artist begins a gesture.

The audience offers presence.

The space returns silence, attention, tension, applause, and memory.

The work begins to exist between these bodies.

Movement Finds a Passage

When we observe another body dancing, our eyes follow trajectories.

Breathing finds pauses.

Muscles anticipate effort.

Memory recognizes gestures.

Imagination rehearses possibilities.

Feeling begins to emerge.

The Umbu lithic point reminds us that movement can cross time through matter.

Dance shows that movement can cross space through relationship.

You do not become a copy of the dancer.

You become a place of passage.

The movement comes.
It may be.
It may stay.
It may go.
And something of it may enter.

Perhaps it remains as a memory.

Perhaps it becomes desire.

Perhaps it is only a sigh that no one else noticed.

But if something changed within you, even for a second, the observed movement did not end on stage.

It continued in your body.

And you participated in the work.

In the previous text, we investigated how different Tensional Selves perceive the same performance in different ways. From here, we will follow what crosses artist and audience at the same time: music, rhythm, and mobilizations seeking expression, completion, and recovery.

References and Their Contributions

CHYE, Samantha et al. “The Effects of Combined Action Observation and Motor Imagery on Corticospinal Excitability and Movement Outcomes: Two Meta-Analyses.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2022.
Contribution: Supports the relationship between action observation, motor imagery, and modulation of the motor system without reducing observation to complete physical execution.

COUTINHO, Janaína Patrícia; MELLO, Paulo Jobim de Campos. “Arqueologia dos gestos na indústria lítica do sítio Colônia Miranda — SE” [Archaeology of Gesture in the Lithic Industry of the Colônia Miranda Site]. Revista do Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia, 2022.
Contribution: Supports the idea that techniques, motor sequences, and cultural learning can leave material traces in manufactured objects.

DAMÁSIO, António. Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. 2021; Portuguese edition, 2022.
Contribution: Helps relate bodily states, feelings, and consciousness, supporting the idea that a spectator may be affected before being able to name the experience.

FOSTER VANDER ELST, Olivia et al. “The Neuroscience of Dance: A Conceptual Framework and Systematic Review.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2023.
Contribution: Shows that execution, observation, imagination, learning, and collective interaction are related but distinct dimensions.

LIMA, Henrique et al. “Neuroestética da dança: uma análise neurobiológica do dançarino ao espectador” [The Neuroaesthetics of Dance: A Neurobiological Analysis from Dancer to Spectator]. Pensar a Prática, 2024.
Contribution: Offers a Brazilian synthesis of dance observation, sensorimotor networks, and the influence of the spectator’s previous experience.

RIBEIRO JÚNIOR, Roberto Romero. “Numa terra estranha: sonho, diferença e alteração entre os Tikmũ’ũn (Maxakali)” [In a Strange Land: Dream, Difference, and Alteration among the Tikmũ’ũn]. Revista de Antropologia, 2022.
Contribution: Preserves the autonomy of Tikmũ’ũn knowledge and prevents body, transformation, and Yãy hã mĩy from being reduced to brain mechanisms.

Conceptual References Published Before 2021

HANSON, Rick; HANSON, Forrest. Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness.
Contribution: Inspires the movements of letting be, letting go, and letting in, as well as the understanding of resilience as a capacity that can be cultivated.

HAWKINS, David R. Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender.
Contribution: Inspires the understanding of letting go as a reduction of internal resistance. It is used as a philosophical and spiritual contribution, not as neuroscientific proof.