Materials and methods

Our micro-ethnographic study (Streeck and Mehus Reference Streeck, Mehus, Fitch and Sanders2004) includes 21 hours of recorded interaction between two groups: choreographers from the company Forklift Danceworks and workers from the City of Austin’s Urban Forestry Division. We limit our scope in this article to a single routine with the forester Bobbie: his loader truck solo. (The full performance features forestry competencies and artifacts that are part of their daily repertoire: chainsaws, loader trucks, water trucks, and pole saws.) Bobbie maneuvers a loader truck as it distributes mulch as part of the maintenance of a pecan tree. The first author participated in and observed these interactions, recording footage at parks, studios, and offices belonging to the two groups.

Microanalytic methods (Bavelas Reference Bavelas, Jackson and Rushton1987; Heath, Hindmarsh, and Luff Reference Heath, Hindmarsh and Luff2010; Hepburn and Potter Reference Hepburn and Potter2021) involve scaffolded steps (see Ingram and Wallace Reference Ingram and Wallace2022 for a fuller account):

• • collecting interactional data

• • discovering marked-out actions

• • classifying marking moments

• • analyzing marking practices as they unfold in social interaction

• • transcribing and illustrating interactions and,

• • testing, confirming, and revising intuitions and analyses via data sessions and conferences.

We take up Goodwin’s (Reference Goodwin2017) semiotic philosophy of interaction; he treats social action as “co-operative”: human action and creativity are built on the accumulation and layering of past actions and experiences made accessible in interaction. We can analyze sense making through a combination of ethnographic exploration with interactional analysis of how people make meaning with dense semiotic systems: talk, gesture, tools, and environment—Goodwin’s (Reference Goodwin2017) semiotic approach does not prioritize one semiotic system (say language for example) over another; rather, an analysis of unfolding human action reveals the ways taken-for-granted knowledge (knowledge that is culturally accrued) becomes consequential and learned through humans’ interactivity and creativity. The organization of human action in a Goodwinian transcription system attends to the coupling between an interactional environment and the matrix of signs; how these relationships are presented through diagrams makes discoverable and investigable the ways their embodied actions often presuppose or entail professionalized ways of interpreting experiences (Goodwin Reference Goodwin2017; Dondero Reference Dondero2024).

A transcription system that examines the marking actions between the arborists and choreographers requires careful attention to how sign systems cluster and work in interlocking ways to translate and advance understanding in the interaction; this is something Goodwin’s (Reference Goodwin and Kita2003) semiotic system prioritizes. The way we transcribe and graphically represent these rehearsal interaction moments is based on H. H. Goodwin (Reference Goodwin1990) and C. Goodwin (Reference Goodwin2017) (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

A list of our transcription conventions.

One of the authors, an illustrator and an artist, also draws illustrations to visualize the imagery created in marking. There are dance-specific transcription systems (such as Laban Notation) that are well-suited for capturing the artistry of dance (see Farnell Reference Farnell2012); in the right context, they would be more suitable transcription methods. However, we are looking at distributed or extended thinking and improvisatory acts at the forefront of dance rehearsals, not in the final performance; therefore, our focus is on diagrammatic reasoning with dance phrases as they dialogue with one another. And the two groups found themselves experimenting and developing a makeshift system for notating movement across their differential experiences; our Goodwinian-adapted approach spotlights improvised meaning-making at the forefront of how marking signs are richly textured and combined within the actual and imagined environments the two groups inhabit. The graphic representations (formed through diagrammatic thinking) that the arborist and choreographers forge together produce commensurability (Dondero Reference Dondero2024): seemingly disparate worlds of the two communities can be translated into a semiotic object that helps them construct shared understanding as they transform parts of the dance. And our illustrations, which we craft using Goodwin’s approach, make poignant how this working across professionalized experiences and repertoires is learned and improvised via unfolding action assemblages.

Forklift Danceworks granted permission to include the actual names of the choreographers in our writing, though all other participants are kept anonymous, given the design of the IRB (No. 2014-09-0120) project approved by the University of Texas at Austin. The decision to keep the arborist’s names anonymized was a consideration made based on conversations with the Office of Research Support and Compliance at UT Austin and the public nature of the dance company; whereas the arborists, as people who do not necessarily identify as public dancers, should remain anonymous as the project was initially designed, and the arborists were allowed to provide their own pseudonyms. Before proceeding with our analysis, it is essential to clarify our terminology.

On marking and situated improvisation

The arborist-dancers and the choreographers must be able to navigate across different cultural communities, varied expertise, distinctive lexicons, accumulated knowledge, and inferable information in novel dance creation—they build what Clark (Reference Clark1996) refers to as “common ground”: our shared basis needed between people to accomplish joint actions in the world. The group establishes common ground in many ways during interactions (workday ride-along, rehearsal sessions, and practice meetings); however, rehearsals offer a fitting context to analyze this process: the two groups work jointly to establish and secure movement sequences as part of a broader expressive routine. The choreographer and the arborist engage in a set of heterogeneous choreographic practices (reflexive, communicative, social, kinesthetic, and cognitive) that aid in the dance rehearsal process commonly known in the dance world as “marking.”

Dancers schematize their dance movements in rehearsals using a reduced version of their actions (Kirsh Reference Kirsh2011); in our case, the arborists are dancing with specialized machine use that is an extension of their bodies, so when the choreographers and dancers mark, they use their bodies to represent aspects of the truck movement and actions in miniature. Mark foregrounds different perceptual or experiential dimensions of the dance: timing, tempo, formation, pathway, transition, and weight, to name a few. The benefits: marking practices reserve energy, prevent physical strain, and coordinate dance movements (Kirsh, Mutanyola, Jao, Lew, and Sugihara Reference Kirsh, Dafne Muntanyola, Lew and Sugihara2009; Kirsh Reference Kirsh2010a, Reference Kirsh2010b, Reference Kirsh2011, Reference Kirsh2012; Kirsh, Caballero, and Cuykendall Reference Kirsh, Caballero and Cuykendall2012). These embodied movements evoke an already established dance and make it shareable for reflection and evaluation (Perissinotto and Queiroz Reference Perissinotto and Queiroz2023). A dancer can “mark-for-self” (internal processing like working on memory or timing) or “mark-for-others” (external communicating about the choreography to others)—a distinction (Kirsh Reference Kirsh2011) highlights. Perissinotto and Queiroz (Reference Perissinotto and Queiroz2023) refer to marking-for-self as a metacognitive activity: the feedback is essential to choreographic thinking in and with movement. The latter—marking as a communicative function in groups—is of more interest to us in this article because in marking-for-others, we can observe and track the communicative exposition (in real-time)—each group engages in marking to revisit, reaffirm, or revise interpretations of a dance phrase (Ingram and Wallace Reference Ingram and Wallace2022).

While cognitive accounts of marking are the most prevalent, some scholars weave together the social, cognitive, and phenomenological dimensions of marking, turning our attention to the kinesthetic knowledge and empathetic relationships required (Warburton Reference Warburton2011; Warburton et al. Reference Warburton, Wilson, Lynch and Cuykendall2013, Reference Warburton, Overby and Lepczyk2014, Reference Warburton, Blair and Cook2016, Reference Warburton2017). When marking functions communicatively (Kirsh Reference Kirsh2011, 180) rather than introspectively, it becomes an embodied semiotic tool through which collaborators materialize understanding in real time. The material for marking is built on the dancer’s performed bodily actions and the language used to couch those actions into a structural sequence (Sofras Reference Sofras2019). Perissinotto and Queiroz (Reference Perissinotto and Queiroz2023) provide a particularly useful definition of marking: they characterize marking practices as an “embodied diagram”—relationships in the dance phrase, such as the timing or pathway of movement, are expressed through different schematic uses of the body (a cognitive artifact is forged in externalized structures). Our context differs from traditional dance, where the body marks kinesthetic experiences of a trained dancer in motion to internalize those movements or reflect on them; here, the marked-out actions are those of the foresters (nontraditional dancers), either of their own bodily movement or their actions mediated through machine use. The hands and body can serve as “surrogates” for the loader truck and its parts (e.g., the cab, bucket, and boom); the movements are intended for others to see the body as if it were the vehicle “moving” (Figure 2) Marks can be representational in another way: the movements may only isolate a particular aspect of what the loader truck does—the hands can trace the prior movements of the truck, creating an ephemeral inscription to be inspected by the participants.

Figure 2.

Top left corner: The choreographer’s hand serves as a surrogate for the loader truck bucket. The background contains contextualization of the relationship of the part-to-whole scene.

Müller (Reference Müller, Müller, Cienki, Fricke, Ladewig, McNeill and Bressem2014) aptly characterizes this representational distinction in her scholarship: gestural depiction is a form of visual and manual thinking whereby the hands can conceptualize something by “acting as-if” or “as-if representing”; the former involves the hands simulating or enacting actions, and the latter entails the hands producing a symbolic transformation to convey an idea or concept (abstract or metaphorical). (Clark Reference Clark and Hagoort2019 talks about something similar in his distinctions between “exhibited” and “performed depictions.) Marking practices can include both gesture and language; the choreographers often complement their marking sequences with vocal depictions or a type of sonic marking (Laguna and Shifres Reference Laguna and Shifres2022).

Although there are various depictive techniques for hand gestures (Streeck Reference Streeck2008), marking, at its core, is a schematic shortcut—a “condensation” (Clark Reference Clark2016) of a full-out dance phrase—and is specifically used for choreographic thinking and refinement. In our previous work (Ingram and Wallace Reference Ingram and Wallace2022), we were struck by the dynamic imagery that was forged between the choreographers and the arborist; marks were accumulated incrementally, building a shared embodied vocabulary. At the time, we did not refer to this as an embodied diagram; however, this term is useful in conceptualizing it as a dynamic interactional accomplishment—an improvisational one—involving the use of multimodal resources and tools for generating local creativity.

The dance rehearsals can be characterized as a “situated activity system” (Goodwin Reference Goodwin2017): talk, gesture, eye gaze, bodily movement, and vocalizations create a shared understanding of artistic ideas paired with mechanical expertise, and diverse semiosis takes place whereby the public environment is transformed for the purposes of reworking a dance across an epistemic divide. Goodwin’s semiotic approach is useful because it also engages with the notion of diagrammatic reasoning in his analysis of professionalized communities and in his transcription approach (see Dondero Reference Dondero2024). Goodwin (Reference Goodwin2017) is keen to point out that heterogeneous sign systems can work in tandem to create a graphic representation: these conceptual structures, albeit seemingly impermanent, are interactionally consequential and lead to ways of knowing deeply embodied knowledge.

Marking is not an exclusive cognitive skill unique to dancing alone (Fernandes, Evola, and Skubisz Reference Fernandes, Evola, Skubisz, Fernandes, Evola and Ribeiro2022); you can observe in other contexts where it is useful to create external structures for thinking that allow for creative generation and manipulation of that imagery; for example, architects working with design plans, or students brainstorming a film project (see Murphy Reference Murphy2005; Yasui Reference Yasui2013, respectively). What is perhaps unique to our context is the convergence of professional worlds: arborist-dancers and choreographers mark together to build embodied diagrams for the purpose of cutting across epistemic gaps.

Goodwin’s (Reference Goodwin2013, Reference Goodwin2017) semiotic framework is useful for making sense of complex externalized structures used in group activity, where professional knowledge is required or learned; his approach considers the richly textured cognitive artifacts forged in marking. When the choreographers and arborist-dancers mark together, they discover in these juxtaposed and scaffolded images potential problems and focus their attention on revisional dialogue. In Goodwinian terms, we can classify marking in groups not as a single act (one person marks), but as a “co-operative” act: the choreographers and arborists evoke already-made dance structures, and previously marked actions flow into multiple people’s turns (see Ingram and Wallace Reference Ingram and Wallace2022). Goodwin’s own focus on how professional communities generate graphic representations (diagrammatic structures for cognition) through deeply embodied knowledge and ways of seeing the world (see Dondero Reference Dondero2024) illustrates keenly how improvisation comes into play, specifically through Goodwin’s (Reference Goodwin1995, Reference Goodwin2017) concept of “situated improvisation.”

Situated improvisation is a fleeting concept in Goodwin’s scholarship, but it deserves subsequent elaboration. As Grommé (Reference Grommé, van der Ploeg and Pridmore2016) notes, “Goodwin coined the term to describe how an object of knowledge emerges through the interplay of the screens, common knowledge, lay theories, everyday artifacts, and professional repertoires” (167). In our context of dance rehearsals—where the choreographers and arborists are acquiring a shared language and gesture—marking together is highly improvisational: as they work through shortened forms of the dance phrase to maintain the flow of ideas toward the artistic goal, these marked-up actions help them discover contingencies through the reworking of the cognitive artifacts they create and manipulate. External structures manifested in interaction help the two communities “step into” each other’s professional world that they do not immediately share; they, in turn, establish a workable common ground, despite the complex cognitive mappings and inferences at play at any given moment (e.g., human body acting as a stand-in for the forestry equipment; the environmental space being mapped onto the real performance space; and the scaffolded dance phrases reworked in real-time). Situational improvisation describes an apt way to make sense of what marking together makes transparent for the choreographers and the arborist-dancer as a set of translation practices: reworking older materials to make way for the emergence of newly co-operative ideas. The improvisation taking place here is interconnected with what Sawyer (Reference Sawyer2003) has discussed in his scholarship of musical and theatrical group improvisation. He outlines several key characteristics in interaction: the importance of the way the creative process is contingent on past actions for next actions; the discovery of problems in the creative interpretive process; the moment-to-moment collaborative shifting through contingencies; and the way group creativity generates—and is only possible because of the group—something beyond the capabilities of the individual (Sawyer Reference Sawyer, Davis, Clemson, Ferholt, Jansson and Marjanovic-Shane2015, calls this “collaborative emergence”). Each participant’s embodied knowledge—partly opaque to the other—becomes perceived through the embodied diagram made manifest in improvisation, the relationships between the dance phrase, and the marked-out version propel their joint venture (the dance phrase), open a space for discovery, and generate a sustained system of shared creation.

Data analysis

Let us examine how marking practices engender situated improvisations in a series of episodes. In these interactions, the choreographers and arborist-dancers engage in creative dancemaking geared toward establishing working knowledge, building interactional rapport, and assuming the other’s perspective, involving the creation of a dance with a loader truck. We will see how Krissie (the choreographer) models the loader truck routine and how it could be reduced by one minute; she enacts several ideas that could streamline their dance phrases. And the subtracting and refining of the loader truck routine that takes place across this episode—and the subsequent ones—requires a series of translations expressed through signs, embodied knowledge consequential for the dance creation. The groups need to accumulate and secure common ground to overcome several contingencies:

• • The practice space (the mulch storage site) and the performance space (a popular city park) are different. In Govalle Park, the loader truck will maneuver around a grand pecan tree, so the team will have to take measures to protect the green space and the tree’s roots (danger to the tree includes the heavy weight and subsequent compacted soil on the tree rootline).

• • The arborists are the only ones with informed knowledge and authorized permissions to operate the loader truck safely, and they must make accessible to the choreographers the affordances and limitations (for example, the hydraulic system, the truck speed, and the turn radius).

• • The choreographers engage in anthropological dance methods to generate artistic material: they video the foresters’ daily routines; they participate in the urban forestry department’s activities, and they solicit the arborists’ stories concerning how they conceptualize and value their work. (The process is collaborative, iterative, and negotiated, and the arborists are socialized as primarily untrained dancers into dancerly thinking, and conversely, the choreographers are socialized as untrained arborists into arborist thinking.)

In this first episode (Figure 3), Krissie observed Bobbie performing the loader truck routine in full-fledged form (when Bobbie performed the phrase in rehearsal). They are discussing the challenges that arise in streamlining the flow and timing. In talk and gesture, Krissie marks the movement pattern—a figure eight—that Bobbie performed with the loader truck for this part of the dance routine; Krissie’s body emulates the perspective of Bobbie in the cab of the truck as it’s in motion, and she depicts the first of his earlier practice runs. Krissie creates a virtual model for inspection and discussion; it opens up an improvisatory space by making emergent contingencies known. Bobbie, in inspecting the marked-out phrase, seamlessly builds on her performance; as she looks at him, he, with his right hand, traces the second practice round and attempts to do a figure eight, which resulted in the discovery of a logistical problem: he had to back up in the second take due to the turn radius and spatial limitations around the two piles to make the figure eight possible. They must improvise to address the logistical and artistic contingencies and constraints.

Figure 3.

The transcript of lines 1–18 illustrates the choreographer emulating the loader truck in motion in a full-bodied performance. The arborist marks out logistical concerns.

When Krissie traces the route of the truck in this interaction, she’s evoking the routine Bobbie and the choreographers have been crafting, the professional experience Bobbie made evident in the truck in the practice moments prior, and the artistic vision of the choreographers. The embodied diagram created in marking is co-operatively transformed (cf. Goodwin Reference Goodwin2013, Reference Goodwin2017): past actions, traces, depictions, and knowledge are brought together to forge the dance phrase—assembly, disassembly, and reassembly open a space for improvisational insights and trajectories for the routine.

Krissie starts by re-enacting Bobbi’s truck operations; her language and body become mutually reinforcing semiotic resources (she stands up straight and extends her arms outward) to emulate the truck’s figure-eight movement pattern (her hands emulate the truck bucket). (Krissie references the performance term “upstage” to indicate that Bobbie started his movements on the imagined stage section that is furthest from the audience.) While Krissie emulates the truck (Lns. 1–8), Bobbie, seated in the loader truck above her, attends to her enactment as she makes visible her potential revisions and general queries. Krissie proposes an alteration: eliminate the figure-eight movement around the two mulch piles: “you don’t have to finish your figure eight” (Lns. 1-2); this appears as a seamless proposal with only minor ramifications for the dance phrase.

The problem: to even consider that proposal, Bobbie must be able to quickly compare her marked-out iteration with the full-fledged drive of the routine just performed minutes prior to successfully identify any logistical concerns that may hamper this artistic proposal; the dance phrase could be streamlined by Bobbie performing a partial figure eight—the looping to perform the complete figure eight, however, figure eight provides an aesthetic that neatly transitions into the next part of the phrase: he uses the bucket to lift and dump mulch. Additionally, figure eight can hold multiple symbolic significances (among them flow, continuity, and duality); foremost, it can be used as a method of contextualizing how the truck is used as a universal symbol and maps it upon the current landscape, a practice space filled with mounds of mulch. The figure-eight movement enables the truck movements (one that might not appear on the offset as particularly agile) to highlight the technical skillfulness one can gain to maneuver such a vehicle. (Our interpretation here is based on video footage of the choreographers watching the arborist use the loader truck and discussing its artistic potential.)

The embodied diagram fostered in marking is especially effective for this situational challenge; Krissie marks out what she saw Bobbie do in his last practice run: coming upstage from behind the left mulch pile to initiate the figure-eight pattern. The truck’s path can be efficiently generated through a mimetic bodily representation: Krissie’s body becomes a stand-in for Bobbie maneuvering the loader truck. Mimetic operations in marking enable Krissie to selectively strip away, through abstraction (Calbris Reference Calbris2011), some aspects of the actual rehearsal minutes prior to, and to selectively home in on the track pattern of the truck in this dance sequence. And although Krissie has never driven the loader truck, she can make use of shared indexical knowledge of the world and emergent conventions (LeBaron and Streeck Reference LeBaron, Streeck and McNeil2000) that the two groups are building to transparently evoke a path schema with her bodily construed as the driver and the truck. Furthering this interpretation, we can turn to Streeck (Reference Streeck2008) who reminds us that the gestures are “abstractive actions,” Krissie can employ bodily knowledge and schemas already present to conjure up a workable image: her hands—semi-equidistant and relatively frozen in shape—can simultaneously serve as the representation of the loader truck and bucket as well as the driver holding the steering wheel, and their vertical formation marks out a path to which her body (the back truck) follows suit (Lns. 3-4). A dense, semiotic image is forged and made manifest through a rich gestural idea—a type of “gestural condensation” occurs here, borrowing Streeck’s (Reference Streeck2017, 217) notion: the body holds multiple significances as it emulates the truck’s design, maneuverability, and path all in one embodied miniature. She traces the movement patterns of the dance phrase, which are crafted for Bobbie (likely also self-marking for her own bodily reflection and evaluation); he gazes down at her from the cabin of the loader truck as she enacts it. Mutually monitoring (Goodwin Reference Goodwin1980) is essential in marking sequences; Krissie and Bobbie attend to (and take up) each other’s vocalizations, verbalizations, and gestures as they gain significance in the semiotic context—gaze playing a vital role.

The synchrony in this interactional moment is prominent: Krissie finishes her figure eight, and, as she turns the corner, directly faces Bobbie; Bobbie seamlessly extends Krissie’s full-bodied enactment—he uses pointing to take up where she left off. At this point, Bobbie is highly attuned to the iteration she’s marking; in fact, he seamlessly transitions to her proposal’s conclusion—there is no noticeable pause between her enactment and his enactment, and they become part of a co-operative set of actions (Lns. 5–7). He co-produces the same movement pattern as she maneuvers her body through the last part of the figure-eight pattern: he “steps into” her actions (as Goodwin Reference Goodwin2017 argues is possible through co-operative action), demonstrating deep attunement, mutual alignment, and a comprehensive understanding of the routine. His pointing gestures take on context-dependent meanings as the diagrammatic imagery unfolds; his points are what Goodwin (Reference Goodwin and Kita2003) refers to as “situated pointing” because they are indexically layered onto the immediate ambient and acquire meaning only within it. Bobbie’s language (deictics “this way” and “that way”) and pointed tracing become mutually enforcing semiotic resources for his imagistic choreography (he is also recycling Krissie’s language; “you came upstage” is transformed to “I came”). The movement pattern is enacted and marked with their respective bodies; yet, the relation to the idea or image created is slightly different.

Krissie sees the routine performed and can present it with choreographic focus; the routine’s aesthetics can be appreciated, and the larger performance is taken into account. There is, however, a different relationship to this external structure for Bobbie: he is the operator of the loader truck; he knows its limitations; and he can scrutinize this externalized embodiment. Bobbie’s right hand depicts the truck’s movements, and with his deictics, he secures Krissie’s gaze. In her performance, Krissie only marks one of the practiced iterations, so when Bobbie says, “I come here, then I went back around this way,” (Ln. 5), he is quick to craft a second depiction that illustrates the other eight-formation pattern. Bobbie’s perspective differs from that of Krissie’s; he is sitting in the loader’s cab a good distance above her. Since Krissie is wrapping up her marking, her gaze turns away from Bobbie; hence as he recalls the other interaction, he says, “The-the first figure eight I came this way?” (Ln. 7). As he utters this, Bobbie moves his right hand with the pointer finger extended outside the cabin door, pointing in the direction of the mulch pile. His pointing is also a situational directive (Goodwin Reference Goodwin and Kita2003); it establishes a mutual gaze focus (Goodwin Reference Goodwin1981) on the two mulch piles as he traces patterns upon them like a real-time graphic illustration. Although Krissie maintains her gaze toward Bobbie, it is evident that his actions are being layered onto the visible mulch piles to the left of Krissie and in front of Bobbie. Krissie’s string of confirmations overlaps with Bobbie’s talk; he continues by substituting his hand for the loader truck with his finger, tracing the path the truck will follow. His marked-out version of the figure eight highlights the distinctions between the first and second iterations performed, and it also holds a different relationship than Krissie’s marked-out version. His finger traces the alternate figure-eight pattern, informed by his workplace knowledge.

Although they share similarities, Krissie and Bobbie’s respective marking renditions exhibit their own idiosyncrasies. The starting location of the figure-eight simulation is different, even though it indexes the same dance phrase. Krissie happened to start with Bobbie’s second iteration just practiced. There are now two marked-out movement patterns that are juxtaposed; the side-by-side projections facilitate the possibility for Bobbie to cast one iteration as more feasible. An augmented virtual landscape becomes perceivable and salient in a public discourse moment—externally represented through marking (Kirsh Reference Kirsh2010b, Reference Kirsh2011). Because of these semiotic tracings and juxtapositions, Bobbie is able to pinpoint a particular problem for him as the operator of the loader truck and, potentially, an issue in carrying out the artistic idea: he did not have a good turn radius around the mulch pile, forcing him to back up to realign with the mulch pile for the next part of the dance phrase. This iteration is not preferable, either logistically or artistically, since it takes longer. A translation of “professional vision” (Goodwin Reference Goodwin1994) is made visible in and through the diagrammatic structures that emerge in marking together, and this leads to a “situational improvisation” (Goodwin Reference Goodwin1995, Reference Goodwin2017): Krissie’s walking/driving out of the figure-eight sequence, and Bobbie’s subsequent layering via pointing and tracing, is an improvisation where unpredictable outcomes and are addressed. Situational improvisation is an actionable and pointed performance where participation, talk, gesture, and the environment (a “contextual configuration” Goodwin Reference Goodwin2017 would likely call it) become attended to and meaningful as a conceptual object for creative and actionable negotiation—negotiation at the juncture of aesthetics and utility that requires both parties’ informed input.

Bobbie is the one dancing with the truck in the performance, and he is also the only participant present in this context with a license to use the vehicle; therefore, he has the embodied expertise required to attend to the loader truck limitations in performing the dance phrases. And even though Krissie watched and recorded Bobbie doing a run-through earlier, she might not be able to perceive the technological and logistical drivers for that action; situational improvisation engenders this possibility. Bobbie explains in lines 9–12 that “and I-and circled around that way; I had more room to turn around there.” Overlapping with Bobbie, Krissie reuses his talk to confirm her understanding: “Oh, you had more roo:m” (Ln. 12). These improvisational moments, where professional expertise is made interactionally appreciable, lend to key refinements and the ability to inhabit—if only partially—the embodied logic that informs each other’s interpretation of what the phrase should and could be.

Immediately, following her talk, she pivots and points to the mulch pile while retracing the figure-eight pattern that would cause Bobbie trouble in preparing for the next dance phrase. The two past performances, put into conceptual juxtaposition and made perceptible through Bobbie’s hand tracings, enable Krissie to see that Bobbie has more room to move around the piles in the first iteration. Bobbie makes their logistical problem discoverable: he had to back up in the second take due to the turn radius and spatial limitations around the two piles to make a figure eight possible. Bobbie and Krissie accomplish a socio-cognitively complex feat: they use language, gesture, and their environment (the practice space that is their actual location and the imagined park space that is where they will perform the dance) to iteratively revise a dance phrase through externalizations being mapped in real-time—images lodged in the minds of the participants made ephemerally public (yet semiotically workable for the participants). (All of this is 17 seconds.)

Marking together—as we have argued elsewhere (Ingram and Wallace Reference Ingram and Wallace2022)—is not a simple reiteration or reduplication of the dance phrase from one bodily perspective or repertoire: it is an interactional achievement where cultural ways of knowing can be provisionally inhabited and evoked through embodied diagrams emergent in interaction. A physical form of thinking (Warburton Reference Warburton2011, Reference Warburton, Overby and Lepczyk2014) is involved in marking (especially more classical dancing, where the body is the artistic tool for artistic form), whereby professionalized insights are made accessible to each other in the here-and-now landscape. And although the imprint of the marks made by the group does not remain visible in the physical space, fleeting like a trace in sand, the choreographers and arborist-dancers orient to and react to the repurpose of accumulative actions as though a map: the dance phrase and its infinite potentials are right in front of them.

A type of situational improvisation (Goodwin Reference Goodwin1995, Reference Goodwin2017) emerges in this interactional episode. The mechanical equipment, the semiotic landscape, the embodied resources, the perceptual intuition, and the physical space contribute to an imagined reworking of the dance routine and its unfolding phases. But more importantly, it is through this semiotic juxtaposition of language, gesture, space, and technology that they can make a logistical problem even open for scrutiny in the first place, as it potentially interferes with an artistic idea. The products of marking—these images conjured up and projected and anchored onto the here-and-now landscape—are accumulatively layered and virtually made juxtapositional through their in-situ creative process, and it is this layering of community-based dance rehearsal that leads them to discover what is ideal when utility meets artistry. Krissie—more informed about Bobbie’s expertise—can start to anticipate the degree of alterations that foster coherence between artistry and forestry (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

The transcript of lines 19–35 illustrates how the choreographer and arborist discover through marking together.

With the agreement that at least one version of the figure-eight dance phrase could be logistically problematic, Krissie returns to her original proposition: “The other ↑Option is that you don’t finish your figure eight” (Ln. 19). To model this new dancerly idea, Krissie marks the figure eight once again, with a slight alteration: “Tha’ya < come this wa::y – (0.5) and this way – (0.7) (smacks lips) And could you come right at it here?” (Lns. 23–27). Krissie and Bobbie solidified the figure eight image that includes the comparison of two ideas: now, she solicits his input as to whether her new idea holds merit. She suggests that Bobbie might not have to “finish the figure eight” (Ln. 22) She uses her hands to guide her body (mimetically enacting Bobbie in the loader truck), she illustrates the truncated figure eight and forecasts the next action in the dance routine that they are both familiar with: picking up the mulch from the pile and dumping it slowly. The depictive “construal” (Streeck Reference Streeck2008) is essential; she takes an already-made phrase, reuses its co-constructed marked rendition of the loader truck tracing the figure-eight motion, and recasts it in a version that includes a slight—yet precise—subtraction. Elongated speech and leveled pitch mutually reinforce her marking gestures, making the continuity of the phrase both seen and heard. Krissie’s marked-out actions become a virtual model (an embodied diagram) as she transitions to “perceiving in the hypothetical mode” (Murphy Reference Murphy2005, 117). She acts out a figure eight while stretching her discourse to match the length of her turn maneuvers. In this hypothetical miniature, the relationship between previous iterations of the dance phrase is evoked and layered onto a hypothetical potential aimed at cutting the figure eight short and transitioning quickly into the next part of the routine. The situation compels improvised trajectories to meet some artistic and practical demands in the co-presence of the machine, the driver, and the practice landscape.

The idea presented, however, is short-lived. Krissie now solicits Bobbie’s take on her suggestion: “Is it harder?” (Ln. 29). Bobbie responds quickly and tersely while leaning out of the cabin with a “yes,” then proceeds to elaborate. The truck maneuver would require more clearance to drive around the mulch piles, so Bobbie depicts this issue: “ > Yes. < Yea:h I am gonna have to go out a little bit more to-to get right to the pile,” while tracing around the mulch piles two times with his index finger. During his second circle, his hand gesture transitions into a pointing gesture, and then, he finishes the circle around the mulch pile. Again, the depictive power of gesture is important in this moment because Bobbie’s first circular gesture—showing the hand as he drives the truck—is quick and sharp: it establishes the movement around the mulch pile. The second circular gesture uses the first gesture as a reference point, and he then gestures outside the cabin and his eye gaze to extend it further, mutually elaborating on one another to emphasize and highlight the projected distinction. Finally, as he is bringing the final circle back around, his thumb and forefinger create a track that the loader truck would take, aligning it directly with the mulch pile and assuring enough space is available. The limitations within the cab only afford Bobbie a certain depth with his movement; this is contrasted with Krissie, who is relatively unrestrained. Bobbie’s “track gesture” is semiotically poignant; it takes into consideration its relative position in relation to the actual mulch piles. When Bobbie marks out the turn radius and physical space needed for the loader truck to accomplish what she is asking, he is simultaneously making use of the visual projections layered onto the actual mulch piles. And, when he swipes his hand as a stand-in for the truck moving to align with the pile, his directionality can make subsequent use of the actual pile to which Krissie then turns her gaze, recognizing the issue with “Okay” (Ln. 34). Two professional knowledges are brought to bear on this rehearsal moment so the two can co-shape the phrase’s future trajectory. Bobbie conveys to Krissie the continued issue that arises with the constraints of a heavy-duty hydraulic truck, using the virtual and actual space to do so (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

The transcript of lines 36–48 illustrates how the choreographer enacts the loader truck, walking out the entire route.

Different perspectives are being brought into the conversation regarding the efficacy of the figure-eight phrase, and it has to do with how the two are thinking about the dance phrase. For Krissie, she’s still envisioning a version that involves a truncated figure eight while trying to attend to the spatial limitations that Bobbie raises. To ensure that he understands her idea, Krissie marks out the dance phrase with more enhanced precision in lines 36–48. And in this marking sequence, Krissie utilizes both the virtualized version of the routine and the physical mulch piles in her production.

First, Krissie steps out into the middle; she’s semi-equidistant between the actual mulch piles. Figure eight, conventionalized, is easily re-represented and re-referenced with a brief finger point and a swipe back and forth; the depictive condensation (Clark Reference Clark and Hagoort2019) enables her to skip or jump right to the selective segment in the phrase. The transition from the highly condensed section to the fuller-bodied production goes through an iteration of a more significant, two-fingered swipe that aligns with her actual position and the loader truck’s position in this scenario and allows her to speed right up to the section she wants them to scrutinize further. The “environmentally coupled gesture” (Goodwin Reference Goodwin, Duncan, Cassell and Levy2007) is only understood in that it evokes the figure-eight pattern with keen precision: it starts at the iteration where Bobbie comes from the back left of the figure-eight pile when looping around. However, the indexical evocation could be enhanced with a more elaborate demonstration or depiction (Clark Reference Clark1996, Reference Clark2016, Reference Clark and Hagoort2019) of the alteration’s completion, which involves Bobbie stopping the figure eight halfway through. Therefore, Krissie resorts to mutual elaboration and semiotic layering of the virtual onto the actual; her body emulates the truck, and she walks/drives out the appearance of stopping short of the whole figure eight. “If you came at it HERE? .hh And what if you went to the pile here” (Lns. 41–43). Krissie’s original idea (Lns. 23–28) is now proposed in a more imposing form as she quickly schematizes the figure-eight motion and marks out the hypothetical component in a more full-bodied performance. The first condensed hand marking sets up the transition to loop around the actual mulch piles. And as she walks the dance phrase (still marking since she’s not actually repeating the movement in and with the truck), she makes a trumpeting sound as she nears the pile. Although speculative, the trumpeting sound can likely serve several significances:

1. 1. the sound mimetically mirrors or produces a perceptual stand-in (although not equivalent sounds) for the sound the truck makes while it moves;

2. 2. the trumpeting through the marked-out movements extends her turn, which takes longer for her body to walk out than the truck would take to drive out; and

3. 3. vocalization iconically represents forward movement in space and time.

The sequence culminates when she projects the forthcoming dance phrase involving the vehicle, and she is now aligned in front of the mulch pile with the ability to “scoop up” the mulch required for the next dance phrase: “If you don’t figu-fini < (0.3) finish the figure eight?” (Ln. 48). (She swings her arms—stand-ins for the loader bucket—back and curves upward as if to scoop up the mulch). Again, soliciting Bobbie’s feedback, Krissie turns and starts to walk back to him in the loader truck.

Marking—at different scales—enables them to reflect on the figure-eight dance phrase to date, theorize about a possibility whereby part of the action is maintained in a truncated form, and coordinate through the transition to the next part of the phrase that addresses part of their timing concerns. The fact that they can improvise via these embodied graphic representations shows that bodily marking has made their abstractions intelligible and augmentable to the choreographic task at hand: there is an attunement taking shape as they quickly make sense of the associative part-to-part or part-to-whole relations made investigable in the contrast between the dance phrase sequence and the marked-out movements in embodied diagrams (Perissinotto and Queiroz Reference Perissinotto and Queiroz2023).

When Krissie initially marks out her proposed transformation of the routine, Bobbie is quick to bring up a logistical issue with the turn radius. Krissie, then wanting to confirm that he understands her vision endpoint, elaborates on it in a more full-bodied fashion and turns their attention to the endpoint of the truncated figure eight; the fact that if he loops around but does not complete the second loop, he could position the truck—potentially—in an ideal position to now use the bucket to pick up the mulch: “You know what I am saying? If you don’t figu-finish (0.3) the figure eight?” (Lns. 47-48). Embodied diagrams drive this nuanced elaboration between the real and the imagined—the physical site is imbued with semiotic materials to make sense of the dance phrase as it was or could be performed. The semiosis taking shape is only meaningful with full knowledge of how the actual practice space has been used in previous practices.

Krissie’s repetition of her marked-out version enables the emergence of a new elaboration, one that is more of a hypothetical proposal, focusing narrowly on a particular movement. Her proposal is geared toward securing Bobbie’s expertise and feedback as the operator, and one of the ways this distributed form of thinking takes place is through semiotic layering (Goodwin Reference Goodwin2013). The decomposition of previously marked iterations creates a moment of situated improvisation, whereby a hypothetical idea (dependent on the phrase already available) and alteration to the dance phrase already established can be scrutinized with painstaking detail, taking into account the turn clearance of the truck while maintaining the intended artistry. As they try out trajectories to cut down the time, marking is an ideal form of bodily semiosis—those externalized structures, seemingly fleeting as they appear on the surface, become what Hutchins (Reference Hutchins2005) refers to as “material anchors”: physicalized marks enables complex visual-spatial transformations that stabilize choreographic and aboristic ideas. Only through co-operative actions—building on past conceptualizations as they are shored up and agreed upon in interaction—does this enable the two to improvise in a way where they can generate new insights or relational knowledges via imagining that does not require immediate practice with the truck, which would be more cumbersome on time and resources at hand. The selectivity of depictive communication (Clark Reference Clark1996) in marking is vital in this interaction so the accumulation of dance patterns and forestry knowledge of the routine can, as they build it out together, be presupposed at times, enabling the two to focus in on additions or subtractions without retracing all the elements of the entire phrase, and in doing so, these seemingly ephemeral bodily-informed diagrams are cognitively salient and interactionally long-lasting externalized structures (Ingram and Wallace Reference Ingram and Wallace2022).

Collaborative idea construction (Yasui Reference Yasui2013)—taking place through marking in this context—yields a more comprehensively formed product, one that is drafted through different forms of knowledge (one about urban forestry, the other about artistic dance creation), which can come together in unique ways through incremental operations performed on the virtual landscape concerning the actual practice space. Although, as we’ve seen, Bobbie is quick to bring to Krissie’s attention a proposed artistic idea that does not align with the standard, logistical, or safety concerns of operating an approximately 12.7-ton vehicle.

In the final segment (Figure 6), we see the real payoff of these improvised interactions. Bobbie is able to discern more carefully how his everyday actions and the routine they are creating can impact the actual performance space and the audience that will be present at Govalle Park. In essence, they are applying each other’s professional vision (Goodwin Reference Goodwin1994) in novel ways that provisionally occupy each other’s contributions to this emerging dance structure and story. In the last sequence, we do not examine a particular marking moment; rather, we generalize about what marking together enables them to do, eventually, in their collaboration.

Figure 6.

Contingencies that emerge in the rehearsals are layered onto the map they have co-created thus far; the arborist begins to incorporate the choreographer’s artistic way of seeing the routine.

After recasting her proposal by walking part of a figure eight around the physical mulch pile, Krissie starts to walk back to Bobbie, providing him time to think about and respond to her question; hence, seeing if he thinks there is merit in her idea and that it’s feasible. Again, we see the different expertise of these two individuals emerge and come into dialogue. Instead of answering her questions in lines 47 and 48, he adds a third layer to the artistic world being conjured up. At this point, they’ve been working in the practice space and conceptualizing the dance routine in this location; however, the final performance will take place in a public park, and the mulch piles will be positioned around a large pecan tree. Unlike the current location, several restrictions are placed on Bobbie when performing at the park:

1. A. The loader truck must drive carefully around the tree, as excessive pressure from the truck could impede the tree’s critical root zone and cause unintentional damage.

2. B. The park has a sidewalk upon which Bobbie has to drive over to reach the tree and bring the mulch across; hence, a makeshift bridge will be needed to ensure the truck does not cause damage.

3. C. The audience will be positioned in a semi-circle around the front of the tree, and unlike the practice space, there are limbs and parts of the tree that could obscure the audience’s view.

4. D. The audience’s position, other foresters, any climbing equipment, and the mulch pile location need consideration regarding his driving route and the contingencies he may face.

Bobbie brings these issues to the forefront by mapping their performance and marked-out segments to bear on the actual performance space: “You know another thing is:: so are we gonna put these PILES (0.2) close now that we don’t have to push um together?” (Ln. 50–52). Krissie defers to Bobbie on the matter he raises (Ln. 53), and he starts to clarify his position, “You want each side-no I am saying where each side can see what we’re doing?” (Lns. 54–55). The entire sequence comes full circle: each member can co-opt more fluently, and each other’s professional repertoire contributes to choreographic decisions. Bobbie reminds Krissie that his driving path, turn radius, and the endpoint are in flux, leaving contingencies that need to be squared up. And, in their conversations, Krissie realizes that, given the elimination of the figure eight, the mulch piles can be further apart and positioned on both sides of the pecan tree. “(F-RO::W) we could have them further apart, right?,” Krissie utters as she gestures away from her body with both hands to represent the mulch piles and their distance from the pecan tree. This final interactional episode demonstrates how all of the different dance routines (e.g., routines like tree climbing and chainsaw use) are co-operatively built through the accumulation and the shoring up of professional experiences.

In the first set of interactional episodes, Krissie recognizes the local and technological contingencies that inform what is possible and characteristic of the loader truck. When she inquires, weaves in, and dialogues about Bobbie’s contributions to the phrase, she learns each time how to better square up an artistic idea with the forester’s habit. Something similar can be said about Bobbie. He recognizes the choreographic structures and stakeholders that guide the aesthetics of the performance. Although no marking takes place in this episode, it was the iterative accumulation of marked-out ideas that encouraged Bobbie to push beyond the local contingencies of the forester’s habit and think more aesthetically: he essentially maps the practice iterations onto the actual performance with an inquiry into how the loader truck routine might work in the city park in front of a live audience. The improvisatory actions that emerged in their marking together allow for this type of future imagining and scaffolding, and as Krissie implies, this distributed thinking can be extended further: she can take the dense semiotic package they’ve shored up through the dance phrase creation and refinement and share these insights with the production designer who oversees the stage and audience considerations (Lns. 61–63). Although the figure-eight version they ended on looks different from the final version, the distributed work and improvisational thinking that took place in these segments (and in those prior and after) directly informed the final performance. Externalization of the dance phrase made it possible to parse up movements and manipulate Bobbie’s use of the loader truck in the virtual space, then later in the actual performance space in the park; the result was a performance well-timed and artistically rich for the audience.