Improvisation in dance and embodied cognition. An enactive semiotic perspective on thermoception
By: Giulio Galimberti
| ARTICLE INFO: Volume: 12 Issue: 01:Summer 2026 ISSN: 2459-2943 DOI: 10.18680/hss.2026.0010 Pages: 189-205 Lic.: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 |
KEYWORDS: Thermoception Enactive semiotics Gaga technique Embodied cognition Improvisation |
ABSTRACT
Ιn contemporary dance scholarship, improvisation is a privileged site for examining the relationship between embodied cognition and meaning-making. From the perspective of “enactive semiotics” (Paolucci 2021), improvisation cannot be reduced to a purely individual expressive flow, but must be understood as a situated practice in which the body functions as an agent capable of exploring and actualizing movement potentials within a material, social, and cultural environment. Within this theoretical framework, this article extends the semiotic analysis of improvisation through the study of Gaga dance practice, introducing a largely underexplored experiential dimension: thermoception, understood as the set of sensations of heat and cold that traverse and modulate the moving body. Through an analysis of Gaga’s metaphorical and pedagogical language, the article shows how verbal imagery activates thermoceptive awareness, thereby reorganizing sensorimotor dynamics in real time during improvisation. In this account, thermoception does not function as a mere physiological background condition, but as a regulatory and generative dimension of embodied meaning-making. It participates in the co-emergence of physiological dynamics, affective attunement, and expressive and interpretive processes, operating as an active variable in the microgenesis of movement in improvisational performance.
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