Kinesemiotic Body

Professional ballet dancer Junor Souza wearing a motion-capture suit at the English National Ballet headquarters in London
© Rachel Cherry/English National Ballet

The Kinesemiotic Body is a joint research project funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in cooperation with the English National Ballet (ENB). The project brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers with the aim of evaluating whether a description of dance discourse informed by multimodal discourse analysis and visualised through enriched videos can capture the way dance communicates through a flow of choreographed sequences in space, and whether this description can support the interpretative process of nonexpert audiences. The theoretical framework of the research project is based on an extended dynamic theory called segmented discourse representation theory (SDRT) and on the Functional Grammar of Dance Movement created by Project Investigator Maiorani. Project's long-term goal is to develop an interdisciplinary area of research focusing on movement-based communication that can extend beyond the study of dance to other movement-based forms of communication and performance and foster the creation of partnerships between the academia and the institutions that host and promote such disciplines.

Loughborough University

Dr. Arianna Maiorani

Principal Investigator

School of Social Sciences and Humanities

Arianna Maiorani is Reader in Linguistics and Multimodality in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University, UK, and a former professional ballet dancer, teacher and choreographer. Her research focuses on Multimodal Semiotics, Multimodal Discourse Analysis and the application of the Systemic Functional Linguistics and Social Semiotics frameworks to the study of socio-cultural phenomena and multimodal communication. Her most recent books are Kinesemiotics: Modelling How Choreographed Movement Means In Space (Routledge 2021), which features her Functional Grammar of Dance model, and Space and Place as Human Coordinates: Rethinking Dimensions across Disciplines (Cambridge Scholars 2021).

Dr. Russell Lock

Co-Investigator

Computer Science

Research of Dr. Lock at Loughborough University has focussed broadly in the area of software engineering, with emphasis on sociotechnical systems modelling, evaluation and evolution. He has built up working relationships with those in different fields, including politics, sociology & drama, and have worked closely with a number of organisations, including Babcock Analytics, BAE Systems & QinetiQ.

Prof. Massimiliano Zecca

Co-Investigator

Wolfson School of Mechanical, Electrical, and Manufacturing Engineering

Professor Massimiliano Zecca is Chair of Healthcare Technology and leader of the Wearable BioRobotics research group in the Wolfson School of Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering of Loughborough University. He is based in the STI, the Sports Technology Institute of Loughborough University, and is a member of the NCSEM, the National Centre for Sport and Exercise Medicine, both located in Loughborough.

Chun Liu, MA.

Research Assistant

School of Social Sciences and Humanities

Chun is a Research Associate in Multimodality at Loughborough University on The Kinesemiotic Body project. Her research interests include multimodality, pragmatics and translation. Chun is in the final stage of a PhD with the University of Leeds, where her work presents a new way of conceptualising and analysing (translated) (im)politeness phenomena from a multimodal perspective.

Bremen University

Prof. John Bateman

Principal Investigator

Applied Linguistics

John Bateman is a full Professor of Applied Linguistics in the English and Linguistics Departments of Bremen University and an expert in the empirical study of multimodality and the use of corpus-based techniques for research on discourse organisation across modalities. He has over 30 years of experience administering research projects as PI and Co-PI with the US NSF, the UK ESRC, the German DFG and BMBF, and the EU and is head of the Bremen internal faculty institute on transmedial textuality research (BItT).

Dayana Markhabayeva, MSc.

Research Assistant

Applied Linguistics

Dayana Markhabayeva is a research assistant at the Department of English and Linguistics at Bremen University. Having educatonal background in Computer Science, she has focused her research interests in the areas of Multimodality, Multimodal Semiotics, Multimodal Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image.