The abstract for a forthcoming article by myself and Dirk vom Lehn, soon to be liberated from the stalled pandemic year R&R cycle. Draft available if you’re willing to give feedback!
Abstract
While dance has often featured in sociological theory, there are relatively few empirical studies that explore the social practices through which people learn to dance together. This paper takes as its point of departure the way that partner dance is often featured as a metaphor to illustrate theories about social order and interaction. We examine a corpus of video data gathered as part of a day-long workshop and explore how novice dancers learn to perform some of the basic steps of a social dance in time with their partner and with the rhythmical environment. The analysis shows how dancers use rhythm, bodies, language and other resources to organize their social interactions and shows how ethnomethodology and conversation analysis provide a critical standpoint for examining sociological theories about the relationship between the body and the social.
I’m presenting with Dirk vom Lehn on a panel organized by two fantastic EM/CA scholars Richard Ogden and Leelo Keevalik on ‘non-lexical vocalizations’. We’re using some great video data we collected featuring novice dancers in a Swing Patrol ‘Dance in a Day’ workshop as part of the dance as interaction project.
CA studies of assessments as distinct, sequentially organized social actions (Pomerantz, 1984) have tended to define assessments for the purposes of data selection (Ogden, 2006, p. 1758) as “utterances that offer an evaluation of a referent with a clear valence” (Stivers & Rossano, 2010). However, this definition may exclude evaluative practices where the ‘valenced’ terms of assessment are more equivocal. It also obscures how the valences that mark out an utterance as an assessment are produced interactionally in the first place. This paper follows Goodwin & Goodwin’s (1992) proposal that assessment ‘segments’ (words like ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’), and assessment ‘signals’ (vocalizations like “mmm!” or “ugh!”) are organized into sequential ‘slots’ that render both ‘segments’ and ‘signals’ reflexively accountable as evaluative ‘assessment activities’. Data are drawn from recordings of a novice partner dance workshop at moments where teachers’ pro-forma terminal assessments marking the completion of a dance practice session co-occur with students’ evaluative assessment activities. Analysis shows how students use non-lexical vocalizations as evaluative assessments after imitating the bodily-vocal demonstrations (Keevalik, 2014) of the teachers and completing an unfamiliar dance move together. Extract 1 shows one example of these non-lexical vocalizations as dance partners Paul and Mary complete a new dance movement while the teachers call out rhythms and instructions.
1 Tch1: tri:ple and ⌈rock step (0.8) BRINGING I::n. a::n rock step
2 Tch2: ⌊rock step tri:ple an tri:ple a::n ro̲c̲k step
3 Tch1: tri:ple (.) tri:ple.≈ 4 Mary: ≈⌈So̲rry. <(I’m a) little AUa:⁎U:h⁎ ((Shifts arm down Paul’s shoulder))
5 Tch2: ⌊(a::nd then sto:p?)
6 Paul: Ye:: sHheh a:̲h⌈- yeh. (.) ∙HEh UhUH ->
7 Mary: ⌊it⌈'s li- Au̲h- uh. ((Re-does and emphsizes arm-shift))
8 Tch1: ⌊ROTATE P::̲↑ARTne::::r::s::.
9 (0.8) 10 Mary: ⌈Eya̲a̲::: ((Makes a clawing gesture))
11 Paul: ⌊The bh- the bi̲:cep clench (°>dy'a know wha' I mean<°)≈ ->
12 Mary: ≈↑Y e̲a̲h̲h̲.⌈ it's- it's b- hh((Re-does and emphasizes clawing gesture))
13 Paul: ⌊HAH hah Ha::h °hah hah° ∙HHh Heh heh ∙hh
14 Tch1: SO: WITH YOUR NE̲W̲ P:̲A̲R̲TNE:⌈:r.
15 Paul: ⌊That's an odd way of descri:bing it.
The analysis suggests that non-lexical vocalizations provide a useful resource for evaluating the achievement of as-yet-unfamiliar joint actions and managing and calibrating subtle degrees and dimensions of individual and mutual accountability for troubles encountered in learning a new, unfamiliar partner dance movement.
References
Goodwin, C., & Goodwin, M. H. (1992). Context, activity and participation. In P. Auer & A. D. Luzio, P. Auer & A. D. Luzio (Eds.), The contextualization of language (pp. 77–100). John Benjamins.
Keevallik, L. (2014). Turn organization and bodily-vocal demonstrations. Journal of Pragmatics, 65, 103–120.
Ogden, R. (2006). Phonetics and social action in agreements and disagreements. Journal of Pragmatics, 38(10), 1752–1775.
Pomerantz, A. (1984). Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage, (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 57–102). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stivers, T., & Rossano, F. (2010). Mobilizing Response. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 43(1), 3–31.
A written-up version of a talk I gave at the 7th Language and Social Interaction (LANSI) Working Group Meeting in New York, September 2017.
Citation information:
Albert, S. (2017, September). Assessments in the service of rhythmical closings [Conference presentation]. 7th Language and Social Interaction (LANSI) Working Group Meeting, New York, NY, United States. /blog/assessments-in-the-production-of-routine-rhythmical-closings/
Have you ever been to a partner dance class?
In this post I look at data from this situation, a novice dance class, where people are working their way through joint movements for the first few times. Where novice dancers are unfamiliar with the mutual demands of these moves, they may only have their mundane, everyday interactional practices to fall back on, and the way they must use them to manage the contingencies of this situation can be very informative when you are investigating those mundane interactional practices. I am going to talk specifically about how the interactional practice of assessment is used in the closing of unfamiliar joint dance moves.
What I’m presenting comes from a long-standing interest I have in the relationship between conversational assessment sequences, compliments and compliment responses, in the sequential terms we get from Anita Pomerantz, and evaluative practices. I’ll review terminal assessments, then look at terminal assessments and performance evaluations in the dance workshop setting, looking at a variety of interactional resources, procedures and outcomes. Towards the end I’ll return to how this analysis, and some future work I plan in this area, relates to broader issues of valence and evaluative practice.
Assessments in routine closings and shifts
Assessments in conversation are often associated with the closing phases of routine interactional situations: ending phone calls (Antaki, 2002), concluding stories or topical structures (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1992), moving from one interview question to the next (Antaki, 2000), or a routine service-assessment sequence, such as when a barber finishes a haircut and presents the mirror to the customer for inspection, grinning, hopefully (Oshima & Streeck, 2015). More recently, video analyses have explored how the ‘closing-implicative’ function of these kinds of assessment provides methods for coordinating the closure of mobile group interactions, such as visitors moving between exhibits or shifting points of interest during guided tours (Broth & Mondada, 2013; De Stefani & Mondada, 2014), or drivers and passengers completing a manoeuvre and reaching a destination with a terminal assessment (De Stefani & Gazin, 2014).
These are highly routinised environments for what Wiggins and Potter (2003) describe as pro-forma ‘category assessments’ that are designed and produced to fit a ‘slot’ in a familiar interactional landscape where an assessment becomes sequentially relevant.
How do routine terminal assessments work?
“[B]y virtue of the way in which they appreciate the details of what has just been said without marking that talk as a prelude to something else, assessments are apt structures for doing terminal work on an extended sequence.” (C. Goodwin, 1986)
As Goodwin points out in relation to the familiar everyday sequential environment of a story-telling, routine terminal assessments are useful devices for ushering an extended sequence to a close, because they are primarily retrospective and may not lead to expansion beyond a second assessment, which may in any case only turn out to be optionally relevant following an ostensibly evaluative ‘first’ assessment. I’ll return to that later.
The situation I’m going to look at, the novice partner dance class, is a very rich source of these kinds of terminal assessment. Almost every time a class of novices completes a partner dance move together, the teacher does a terminal assessment and students evaluate their just-completed performance before trying the move again. What I find particularly interesting about these assessments is how students use them to coordinate the conclusion of a very unfamiliar set of interactional challenges, where they manage the contingencies of two untrained bodies moving together and reflect on and guide the course of ongoing practice.
The setting
Dirk vom Lehn and I recorded 4.5 hours of a novice Lindy Hop dance class. Lindy Hop is an African-American partnered jazz dance form developed in Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom in the 1920s and 30s. This workshop, however, was in London’s Brick Lane. It involved 20 people, mostly previously unacquainted, who registered as ‘lead’ or ‘follow’ dancers (traditionally these were gendered roles, although these days most people do both). The lead and follow students formed two concentric circles with teachers in the middle, and three camera angles captured two couples and the teachers. In this workshop situation, students take instruction from the teachers, practise, then the follow partners rotate around the circle.
You may hear my voice in there and recognise that I’m teaching the lead role with Simone, who is teaching the follow role. I promise that when I taught this workshop in 2013 I wasn’t sneakily producing terminal assessments for the purposes of this presentation. Those of you who have read Leelo Keevallik’s work on Lindy Hop workshops will recognise aspects of this same dance style and workshop room layout, although her work has tended to focus on far more experienced dancers (Keevallik, 2010, 2013; Broth & Keevallik, 2014).
The routine of practising a dance move
What you’ll see in the first video is the routine of practising a dance move:
Partners move one position around the circle.
Students greet their new partner.
The teacher instructs or demonstrates the move.
The teacher counts the partners in and calls the steps (clapping, clicking fingers or singing in a swung rhythm).
Students copy or perform the current move.
The teacher does an assessment directed to the class.
Students evaluate their performance (often together with the ‘rotate’ call).
The teacher either initiates a second practice session (back to 4) or calls out ‘rotate partners’ (back to 1).
First I’ll show the whole routine, which is too complicated to analyse here in full, and then I’ll show examples that focus on steps 4–7, especially the students’ performance evaluation. Don’t worry too much about following this closely, because we won’t see most parts of it again; just notice the phases.
((TchL instructs, then counts in snapping 1st 3 beats))
1 TchL: Fi̲:ve, (.) si̲x? (.) fi:̲:̲ve six se:̲:̲:ven a:̲:̲n?
2 ↓o̲n̲e̲ two three an fo:ur? five six seven an eight
3 ((... continues count, looking/turning around))
4 Fi:ve si̲x? se::ven an eight, (.) LO:VELY LET'S
5 ROTATE PA:̲:̲RTNE::RS≈
6 Dave: ≈Thank you.≈
7 Kath: ((smiles, head dip))
8 Sall: ≈↑Huh (.) ⌈>that easy.<
9 Geor: ⌊Thank you kHeh heh
((follows move around the circle, greet next partner))
Interactional resources in the setting
Let me run through a few of the interactional resources we can observe being used to coordinate the closing of each practice session. Firstly, there is the dancers’ physical arm connection, and the instructions they’ve been given that day (which we can’t see in each clip). What we can see, though, is how the teacher’s count-in also provides a regular rhythmical and prosodic structure that marshals the dancers with ‘five, six’, then tees them up to start dancing together, and how the dance call ‘rock step, triple step, triple step’ describes their footwork pattern. Here we see Anne’s appreciation of the ‘elbow thing’, a technique Paul has just shown her; their latched assessment sequences interleave with the teacher’s assessments ‘good’, ‘lovely’, ‘okay’.
One note before the clip: the ‘yep’ and laughter at lines 2 and 3 are part of the tail end of the previous performance evaluation. Now the teacher counts them in again and they practise, and then you’ll see their performance evaluation sequence in lines 5, 7, 9 and 10 interleaved with the teacher’s assessments. It’s also important to note that the teachers say things like ‘good’ and ‘lovely’ in this same slot after every practice session, almost irrespective of how well the students do, and that this provides a routine terminal resource for the students’ own closing.
It’s worth pointing out that the teachers are using the musical structure, the swing rhythm. This is two ‘phrases’ of a six-count footwork pattern, rock step triple step triple step, rock step triple step triple step. There are also eight-count footwork patterns that teachers and students use to project next actions and imminent closings. If you watch carefully for the last footfall here, you’ll see how the teacher’s call is exquisitely timed with the dancers’ footwork, and slows down to hit the precise point when they come to rest on ‘GOOD’. Watch the video above again – and look at their feet to see how closely timed this really is.
Neatly coordinated closings
Here’s a first example of a neatly coordinated closing, where everything seems to go just fine, and we can see the focal section of the move practice move neatly along: from step 4, the count-in and call, to the performance, the teacher assessment, and the student evaluation. Once again, note the close timing of the teacher’s ‘lovely’ with the final footfall of this practice session.
We can see the terminal function of the students’ performance evaluations most clearly when they appear in a deviant case, outside of their neat ‘slot’. Here Sophie says ‘great’ in the midst of an ongoing practice session, just at the end of one phrase of the dance call. George treats this as a terminal assessment: he stops dancing and looks up quickly towards the teachers, only to find them still dancing, while Sophie laughs. There’s a lot of ‘trouble-management’ laughter like this in these data.
TchL: Fi::ve? (.) six, (.) fi::ve six se::ven a::nd
BAck and front? a::nd BAck and back >>herewego<<
R̲o̲ck step tri̲::ple rock ba̲c̲k tri::ple fo̲:̲:rwards.≈
--> Soph: ≈Grea:̲:t̲. kHhuh he⌈he (0.5) hhEH
TchL: ⌊Ro̲c̲k̲ step tri:̲:ple (.) Ro̲ck step
tri::ple step.
Assessments designed for continuation
We also see how performance evaluations can be designed for continuation. In the midst of this dance practice, Paul issues a performance evaluation after they complete a new move for the first time within a practice session. He does this very quick ‘so far so good’, slotted into the end of the teacher’s six-count call on line 3, and Liz reciprocates while continuing to dance, also rushing before the next phrase starts with ‘BASIC’. Later, they produce an orderly performance evaluation following the teacher’s terminal assessment and rotate-partner call in line 9.
Delayed terminal assessments may occasion equivocal evaluations
We can also learn more about the contingent relationship between the teacher’s terminal assessments and the students’ performance evaluations when the teacher’s assessment comes a little later than the completion of the dance call and practice session. Here there is a one-beat gap before the teachers say ‘Good’ in chorus. The students’ performance evaluations reflect a degree of uncertainty as to the success of having completed this unfamiliar move. Sally (on the left) issues a tentative ‘o::kay?’ on line 6, and Dave, dancing with Kath on the right, rallies to produce a performance assessment that Kath reciprocates with a shrugging, nodding movement that, we can at least say, does something less than enthusiastic agreement. So the teacher’s routine assessments may cue the performance evaluations, and give students unfamiliar with the trajectory of the action, how it should look, when it should end, and what it should feel like, some warrant to positively evaluate their just-prior performance.
Normative accountability in performance evaluations
Before summing up, I want to point to a few hints as to what else might be happening in these performance evaluations. Let’s look again at the practice session we saw earlier, and notice how we not only have a neatly coordinated closing of this move, we also have a neat balancing act in the performance evaluation sequence. Paul has just told Anne about this ‘elbow thing’, so the way she starts the evaluation is with a ‘you’re right’ and then an assessment of the ‘elbow watching’ move Paul has just taught her. Paul’s response deals with Anne’s evaluation of the move he’s taught her by doing more than just agreement: he inserts ‘it does isn’ it’ before the agreement ‘yeah’ on line 7, with a stress on the copula ‘does’, to which Anne then responds, recalibrating ‘works’ to ‘works really well’, which now just gets a ‘yeh’ from Paul.
Without saying much more, from this and many other student performance evaluations in these data, we can observe a delicate balancing act between evaluating their performance, their individual contributions, the question of whether the assessment is a compliment, who is the accountable recipient of that compliment, and which contingencies follow. All I have time to say here is that these performance evaluations move from joining in with the work of terminal assessment towards doing more normative, evaluative and moral work.
I’ve only scratched the surface here. I haven’t even shown you people dancing to music; that work remains to be done. What you’ve seen is a focus on a small segment of the routine activity of the class, and the role of terminal assessments in that segment. But to give you a sense of where I’m planning to go with this research and this data, here’s an extract I analysed for a presentation with Dirk vom Lehn, which we used for thinking about how novices display and recognise, apologise for, and account for troubles in dance practice, and how they work to deal with them and move on. The thing to pay attention to is the final student-assessment phase, where Sally, who comes into the frame from the left, apologises to us, the viewers, into the lavalier microphone on George’s chest, claiming some degree of accountability for the total train wreck of a dance practice session that is about to unfold.
How do terminal assessments work here?
A few points to summarise. In structural terms:
Terminal assessments usher an unfamiliar activity to a routine close.
Student performance evaluations shift the participants from dancing to talking.
However, where things go wrong:
Student assessments begin to do more normative, evaluative work.
They do ‘balanced’ or reciprocal assessments of each other’s performances.
Assessments can be treated as compliments and reciprocated as such.
In a disaster, this evaluative work deals with issues of accountability.
What can we learn about assessments here?
There are some issues with how CA studies have tended to analyse assessments that I think this project might begin to address. Many analyses draw on Pomerantz’s (1984) observation that first assessments, where the ‘referent’ is expectably accessible to all parties, tend to occasion a reciprocal second assessment:
“When a speaker assesses a referent that is expectably accessible to a recipient, the initial assessment provides the relevance of the recipient’s second.” (Pomerantz, 1984)
Many examples of this practice deal with reports of past events and activities (Lindström & Mondada, 2009) or routine ‘category assessments’ (Wiggins & Potter, 2003). This led me to explore situations where the ‘referent’ is co-produced but unfamiliar, and possibly even inaccessible, inchoate, or only partly intelligible to all parties to the assessment.
Pomerantz also points out that the second assessment is normatively ‘upgraded’ in valence, but it’s not always clear how that ‘valence’ is constituted in situ, interactionally, rather than ascribed to particular familiar terms or ‘slots’ by analysts. This leads to a more basic methodological point: in CA we tend to locate assessments by looking for terms like ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’, where there’s a conventionally associated valence to upgrade or downgrade, i.e. utterances “that are positively or negatively valenced through use of specific lexically assessing terms” (Thompson, Fox, & Couper-Kuhlen, 2015, p. 139; see also Ogden, 2006). But as Goodwin and Goodwin (1992) point out, there’s no inherent relationship between what they call assessment ‘segments’, words like ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’; assessment ‘signals’, noises like ‘wow’ and ‘mmm’; and the social actions through which these methods constitute an accountable, evaluative practice.
These issues have led some scholars to suggest that assessments, as we have characterised them in CA, might not always involve the kinds of routinely corresponding initial and subsequent components that can be analysed in sequences of adjacency pairs (cf. Stivers & Rossano, 2010). Our reliance on the ostensible relationship to conventional ‘lexically assessing terms’ may be a case, as Garfinkel (1967, p. 70) puts it, of seeking descriptive theories of a phenomenon but then settling for normative ones because they are more readily amenable to analysis.
“We are concentrating, not on the words ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’, which are entirely uncharacteristic, generally just subject and predicate (‘This is beautiful’), but on the occasions on which they are said, on the enormously complicated situation in which the aesthetic expression has a place, in which the expression itself has almost a negligible place.” (Wittgenstein, 1967, p. 2)
What I’ve shown is just a starting point, but by focusing on these specific terminal assessments I’ve tried to take Wittgenstein’s advice from his lectures on aesthetics, psychology and religious belief. He says that we shouldn’t concentrate on the terms ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’, but on the “enormously complicated situation in which the aesthetic expression has a place”. That’s what I attempt here: to look at a situation where the establishment of a convention, and the expected course of a body’s movement towards the completion of some new, unfamiliar joint activity, is being mutually accomplished for the first time. I’m treating this particular moment as a perspicuous setting for seeing how terminal assessments are used in unfamiliar courses of action, and whether and how novice dancers work to manage and constitute accountable methods for evaluation.
A note on rhythm
I didn’t have time to discuss how music is used as a resource, and how different rhythms in the music function as pacing resources for both teachers and dancers. I’ve written about this before (Albert, 2015), where I used a framework of synchrony from the ‘tapping’ literature, which investigates human and animal sensorimotor synchrony, to explore rhythmical methods of coordination between professional dancers and audiences during a performance. What I would have tried to show with an analysis of these musical rhythms is how aperiodic (causally related but non-periodic) events and periodically spaced events provide very differently organised analytic and interactional resources. A related point is made by Schütz (1951, pp. 90–94; see also Weeks, 1996) in ‘Making Music Together’, drawing on Husserl’s phenomenology of time and the series of polythetic steps that must be taken before meaning and intelligibility become available as a ‘monothetic whole’.
Some more recent reference points (since I gave this talk)
Since this talk (2017), several lines of work have developed exactly the themes it was reaching for, treating assessments less as verdicts than as devices for segmenting and timing an activity. Lindholm (2024) analyses positive assessments by their placement against an ongoing task, marking attempts, progress and completion, which is close to the ‘warrant’ role described above. Ivaldi (2019) shows that explicit assessments (‘excellent’) close down a learning dialogue while performative ones (‘that’s closer’) open it up, a direct parallel to the closing-versus- continuation contrast. Ehmer (2021, 2025), working on Argentine Tango instruction, shows how a vocalisation timed to a movement marks its accomplishment, which is very similar to the footfall-timing argument I make here. And Szczepek Reed (2023) and Ro and Lee (2025) extend the analysis of how instructional turns project continuation rather than closure. On ‘category assessments’, Edwards and Potter (2017) and Wiggins (2023) restate the category/subject-side framework, with Oshima (2025) and Svensson (2025) carrying it into new settings. I’m just putting this here to remind me to update the references if I ever write this up!
References
Albert, S. (2015). Rhythmical coordination of performers and audience in partner dance: Delineating improvised and choreographed interaction. Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa, 3, 399–428.
Antaki, C. (2002). “Lovely”: Turn-initial high-grade assessments in telephone closings. Discourse Studies, 4(1), 5–23.
Antaki, C., Houtkoop-Steenstra, H., & Rapley, M. (2000). “Brilliant. Next question…”: High-grade assessment sequences in the completion of interactional units. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 33(3), 235–262.
Broth, M., & Keevallik, L. (2014). Getting ready to move as a couple: Accomplishing mobile formations in a dance class. Space and Culture, 17(2), 107–121.
Broth, M., & Mondada, L. (2013). Walking away: The embodied achievement of activity closings in mobile interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 47(1), 41–58.
De Stefani, E., & Gazin, A.-D. (2014). Instructional sequences in driving lessons: Mobile participants and the temporal and sequential organization of actions. Journal of Pragmatics, 65, 63–79.
De Stefani, E., & Mondada, L. (2014). Reorganizing mobile formations: When “guided” participants initiate reorientations in guided tours. Space and Culture, 17(2), 157–175.
Edwards, D., & Potter, J. (2017). Some uses of subject-side assessments. Discourse Studies, 19(5), 497–514. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445617715171
Ehmer, O. (2021). Synchronization in demonstrations: Multimodal practices for instructing body knowledge. Linguistics Vanguard, 7(s4), 20200038. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2020-0038
Ehmer, O. (2025). Marking action accomplishment with non-lexical vocalizations. Interactional Linguistics. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1075/il.25001.ehm
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Prentice-Hall.
Goodwin, C. (1986). Between and within: Alternative sequential treatments of continuers and assessments. Human Studies, 9(2–3), 205–217.
Goodwin, C., & Goodwin, M. H. (1992). Assessments and the construction of context. In A. Duranti & C. Goodwin (Eds.), Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon (pp. 147–189). Cambridge University Press.
Ivaldi, A. (2019). Explicit versus performative assessments in music pedagogical interactions. British Journal of Music Education, 36(1), 69–86. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265051717000262
Keevallik, L. (2010). Bodily quoting in dance correction. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 43(4), 401–426.
Keevallik, L. (2013). Here in time and space: Decomposing movement in dance instruction. In P. Haddington, L. Mondada, & M. Nevile (Eds.), Interaction and mobility: Language and the body in motion (pp. 345–370). De Gruyter.
Lindholm, C. (2024). Positive assessments, monitoring of activities, and dementia. Discourse Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614456241279961
Lindström, A., & Mondada, L. (2009). Assessments in social interaction: Introduction to the special issue. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 42(4), 299–308.
Ogden, R. (2006). Phonetics and social action in agreements and disagreements. Journal of Pragmatics, 38(10), 1752–1775.
Oshima, S. (2025). Evaluating in interaction: Subjective-side and objective-side assessments in design review. CoDesign. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2025.2568510
Oshima, S., & Streeck, J. (2015). Coordinating talk and practical action: The case of hair salon service assessments. Pragmatics and Society, 6(4), 538–564.
Pomerantz, A. (1984). Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 57–101). Cambridge University Press.
Ro, E., & Lee, J. M. (2025). Assessments in L2 conversation-for-learning discussions. Language Teaching Research. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/13621688251352274
Schütz, A. (1951). Making music together: A study in social relationship. Social Research, 18(1), 76–97.
Stivers, T., & Rossano, F. (2010). Mobilizing response. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 43(1), 3–31.
Svensson, H. (2025). Claiming and attributing (dis)taste: Issues of sharing a meal as a competent member. Appetite, 205, 107546. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2024.107546
Szczepek Reed, B. (2023). “Go on keep going”: The instruction of sustained embodied activities. Discourse Studies, 25(5), 692–717. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614456231153578
Thompson, S. A., Fox, B. A., & Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2015). Grammar in everyday talk: Building responsive actions. Cambridge University Press.
Weeks, P. (1996). Synchrony lost, synchrony regained: The achievement of musical co-ordination. Human Studies, 19(2), 199–228.
Wiggins, S. (2023). How infant food likes become established as knowledge: Parental food assessments during infant mealtimes in the home. Appetite, 184, 106489. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2023.106489
Wiggins, S., & Potter, J. (2003). Attitudes and evaluative practices: Category vs. item and subjective vs. objective constructions in everyday food assessments. British Journal of Social Psychology, 42(4), 513–531.
Wittgenstein, L. (1967). Lectures and conversations on aesthetics, psychology and religious belief (C. Barrett, Ed.). University of California Press.
Expert dancers can move together in seamless flows of joint action. They initiate and complete sequences of movement, and anticipate and counterbalance the momentum of one another’s bodies in ways that can appear both effortlessly coordinated and spontaneously responsive to changes in the music and their local environment.
While this close coordination is a compelling spectacle, it is designed to be difficult to analyze: audiences are not meant to see how it is done, so analysts of joint action have tended to focus on rehearsals or classes that involve teaching and learning to dance together. However, most studies have focused on advanced students (Keevalik & Broth, 2014) or professional dance rehearsals (Muntanyola-Saura, 2015) and the teaching and learning practices they develop for achieving complex choreographies. This talk explores the coordination of the first few moments of initial steps learned by novices at the start of an introductory partner dance workshop. Using qualitative video analysis and by studying the procedural structure of interaction during the workshop, we show how novice dancers’ joint actions are coordinated using mundane conversational practices and rhythmical entrainments, suggesting a similarly interactional basis for expert dance coordination.
References:
Broth, M. & Keevallik, L., (2014), Getting Ready to Move as a Couple: Accomplishing Mobile Formations in a Dance Class Space and Culture, 2014, 17, 107-121
Muntanyola-Saura, D., (2015), Partnering in dance rehearsals. The place of listening and rhythm Etnografia e ricerca qualitativa, Società editrice il Mulino, 8, 429-45
Dances – like everyday physical interactions – are built from a constrained repertoire of possible bodily movements. It’s a useful activity to study because the performers, learners and audiences of dance can be observed managing the production and evaluation of movements specifically as dance.
A Figure from a forthcoming paper on timing and balance in novice partner dancers. The figure compares how Jim (in green) falls over after ending a move in a teetering position with how Paul (in fuchsia) has a more balanced stance.
This presents participants with interesting and observable challenges. How do they move from dancing to non-dancing, and how do they show each other that they are making these switches? How do audiences decide when and how to applaud, and how do they demonstrate their sensitivity to particular parameters and relevant moments of evaluation during a dance? And what is distinctive about bodily movement that makes it function as dance?
This research forms part of an overall exploration of social/aesthetic practices and activities including learning, teaching, and performing dance, and body-oriented psychotherapies that involve people in doing and evaluating of dance movements. For example, Dirk vom Lehn and I have collected a large amount of video showing how novice partner dancers learn during workshops, and have been analyzing these alongside video of professional improvised dance performances.
Publications
Albert, S., & vom Lehn, D. (2023). Non-lexical vocalizations help novices learn joint embodied actions. Language & Communication, 88, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2022.10.001
Albert, S., & vom Lehn, D. (2026, September). How novices learn to embody (idio)culture in action [Seminar presentation]. Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden.
Albert, S., & vom Lehn, D. (2018, August). The First Step is Always the Hardest: Rhythm and Methods of Mutual Coordination between Novice Dancers. 113th American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA.
vom Lehn, D. & Albert, S. (2018, July). Producing ‘joint action’ in Lindy Hop Dance Lessons. Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction 2018, Lancaster, UK.
Albert, S. (2015, June). Dancing through time and space. Paper presented at Revisiting Participation: Language and Bodies in Interaction, Basel.
Albert, S. (2014, June). Interactional resources and their use in learning the Lindy Hop. Paper presented at the 6th Ethnography and Qualitative Research Conference, Bergamo.
Albert, S. (2014, June). Interactional choreography. Paper presented at the 1st EMCA Doctoral Network Meeting, Edinburgh.
What can audience members’ embodied, rhythmical movements tell us about their experience of a musical dance performance? And what do their responses reveal about the composition, organisation and production of the performance itself?
This important distinction – which if you think about it, is very difficult to describe in theory – can be made in practice by tracking how participants deal with moments where the rhythmical coordination of (in this case) the audience’s clapping, the musical structure and the dancers’ joint movements seems likely to break down.
FIGURE 2. Visual depiction of the proposed definitional framework, from Ravignani, A., Bowling, D. L., & Fitch, W. T. (2014). Chorusing, synchrony, and the evolutionary functions of rhythm. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1118. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01118
The whole paper consists of a single case analysis of a 10 second clip from a now-classic Lindy HopJack and Jill competition performance by Michael Seguin and Frida Sehgerdahl. Here’s the dance in question – the clip starts at 1 minute in, but really – watch the whole thing.
The systematic ways participants in this situation manage disruptions to the audience’s rhythmical clapping in relation to the dancers’ movements shows how they all work to uphold the relevance of normative patterns of mutual coordination. That’s a fancy way of saying that what is considered ‘good’ in this particular partner dance is not some fixed model of perfect dance movement, but the threat (and eventual narrow avoidance) of screwing up. This kind of analysis reveals how dancers initiate, sustain and complete distinct phases of spontaneous movement as embodied social actions.
The analysis in the paper uses detailed, empirical examples of rhythmical coordination to show how dancers and audience members combine improvisation and set-piece choreography. Here’s an example from the conclusion that shows just a few of the rhythmical patterns we can derive from a detailed analysis of just 10 seconds of dancing.
The audience’s clapping mapped to the clapping of a specific member of the audience (Jo Hoffberg!) and the footfalls of each dancer.
This kind of analysis may not tell us much about the qualitative detail of the dance. However, it provides a clear empirical resource for further analytical work – which can then be analysed in relation to more everyday forms of rhythmical coordination. This provides a starting point for analysing the dancers’ activities and the audience’s response in a way that draws on empirically observable materials that also focuses on the methods the participants themselves use to make sense of those materials.
The approach proposed by this paper shows how people use whatever materials are available including visible, audible and tactile bodily actions as part of a communicative environment. It shows how they can combine these resources in an ad-hoc fashion to coordinate and communicate their movements – much as we do in everyday talk in interaction.
For example, here’s a diagram that shows some of the empirical distinctions we can make about rhythmical coordination in various everyday activities.
Patterns of rhythmical coordination in everyday activities, derived from Chauvigné, L. A. S., Gitau, K. M., & Brown, S. (2014). The neural basis of audiomotor entrainment: an ALE meta-analysis. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 776. http://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00776
Based on this kind of analysis, the paper maps out all the available rhythms in that particular 10 second clip – and shows how they are organised in clearly distinctive patterns.
Coupled and uncoupled forms of rhythmical coordination in the 10 seconds of dancing in Michael and Frida’s Jack and Jill.
The purpose, and overall take-away from this paper is that when people talk about the ‘language of dance’, it’s not just an empty idiom, or a transposition of linguistic/semiotic theories onto bodily movements. Dance, seen in its broader social and interactional context, and especially in vernacular dance practices actually functions much like language. In fact, it may be quite difficult to draw clear empirical distinctions between dance, sign language and other forms of communicative social action.
Of course this paper doesn’t go that far – it is intended to set a course for future work as part of a larger project on partner dance as an interactional practice. It suggests that a good place to start understanding the ‘language of dance’ is to look at vernacular practices – where improvisation is combined with set-piece choreography through ad-hoc embodied social action. In particular, the paper suggests that rhythm is one way we can begin to look at dance – and other socio-aesthetic practices – as everyday interactional achievements.
If you just saw a presentation of this paper, here are the references for the talk – there are more in the paper linked above.
Atkinson, J. Maxwell. 1984. “Public Speaking and Audience Responses: some Techniques for Inviting Applause.” In Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, edited by J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, 370–410. Cambridge University Press.
Boden, MA. 2003. The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms. London: Routledge.
Broth, Mathias. 2011. “The Theatre Performance as Interaction Between Actors and Their Audience.” Nottingham French Studies 50 (2): 113–133.
Broth, Mathias, and Leelo Keevallik. 2014. “Getting Ready to Move as a Couple: Accomplishing Mobile Formations in a Dance Class.” Space and Culture 17 (2) (\#jan\#): 107–121. doi:10.1177/1206331213508483.
Chauvigné, Léa A. S., Kevin M Gitau, and Steven Brown. 2014. “The Neural Basis of Audiomotor Entrainment: an ALE Meta-Analysis.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00776.
Clayman, Steven E. 1993. “Booing: The Anatomy of a Disaffiliative Response.” American Sociological Review: 110–130.
Gardair, Colombine. 2013. “Assembling Audiences.” PhD thesis, Queen Mary University of London.
Goodwin, Charles. 2007. “Interactive Footing.” In Reporting Talk, edited by E Holt and Rebecca Clift, 16–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jackson, Jonathan David. 2001. “Improvisation in African-American Vernacular Dancing.” Dance Research Journal 33 (2) (Winter): 40–53. doi:10.2307/1477803.
Keevallik, Leelo. 2010. “Bodily Quoting in Dance Correction.” Research on Language & Social Interaction 43 (4) (\#nov\#): 401–426. doi:10.1080/08351813.2010.518065.
Puri, Rajika, and Diana Hart-Johnson. 1995. “Thinking with Movement: Improvising Versus Composing.” In Human Action Signs in Cultural Context: The Visible and the Invisible in Movement and Dance, edited by Brenda Margaret Farnell and Drid Williams, 158–185. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press.
Ravignani, Andrea, Daniel L Bowling, and W Tecumseh Fitch. 2014. “Chorusing, Synchrony, and the Evolutionary Functions of Rhythm.” Frontiers in Psychology 5. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01118.
Sacks, Harvey, and Emanuel A Schegloff. 2002. “Home Position.” Gesture 2: 133–146. doi:10.1075/gest.2.2.02sac.
Schober, Michael F., and Neta Spiro. 2014. “Jazz Improvisers’ Shared Understanding: a Case Study.” Frontiers in Psychology 5 (August) (\#aug\#): 1–21. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00808.
