1 Introduction

Digitalisation is not a new topic in the dance and movement field; however, the pandemic unexpectedly made us speed up our transition into the digital realm by increasing the use of telematics. European Dance Network (EDN), which has 47 members in 28 countries, reported that online dance and movement training has accelerated over the last few years [1]. According to the previous report of EDN, during the first lockdown, 200 educational activities and more than 500 dance classes were organised in a short period only in member countries [2]. It expands the notion of physical training from traditional learning spaces, such as schools, studios, and classrooms, to our homes. While the use of telematics, mostly Zoom, makes these practices more accessible, it also fired up the ongoing discussion about whether the digitalisation of dance and movement experience is an opportunity or decreases the experience into a two-dimensional realm. In this article, I will look at the issue of ‘online movement training’ from an enactive perspective based on my ethnographic research outcomes.

In the summer of 2021, following the initial COVID-19 pandemic crisis, within the Choreomundus International Master in Dance Knowledge, Practice and Heritage program, I conducted ethnographical research in one of the physical training institutions that offer the Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies (LBMS) certification program in Germany. The LBMS training, one of the somatic practices, is designed to heighten and develop the awareness of bodily experience by inserting theoretical perspective into participants' movement experiences. In this way, the program intends to produce holistically “moving knowledge”. Unlike previous years, the training was held in a hybrid format using Zoom due to the Corona measures. Some participants were remote, and others were in the studio under strict pandemic precautions. While communication through a telematic system challenged how participants move, learn and teach movement, it also revealed our embodied knowledge production and shared-making meaning processes. Moreover, since the hybrid format brought remote and co-located participants together, the difference between online and physical interaction dynamics became more apparent during the training [3]. Despite the challenges of online classes, the participants and teachers did not consider online learning to be problematic. However, they did experience difficulties when it came to integrating physical and online participation in a hybrid learning environment. One of the online participants expressed her experience as follows:

‘…it was just a clash for me…I would be happier if it were only online. You see people…and you know what to expect. I could always see gallery people on Zoom; you are all equal….’

What the online participant describes as a clash stems from differences between online and studio participants’ experiences. The affordances of Zoom mediation and other technical equipment, such as speakers, projectors or cameras, were limited in transmitting dancers’ rich sensorial movement cues and spatial attributes of different locations. This created asymmetries in the learning environments, evoking feelings of inequality among the participants and leading to diverse training outcomes and shared meaning. One of the dancers, who started online but later attended in person, indicated that after she arrived in the studio, she realised that ‘what the online participants received was not the same as those in the studio’, even though they were provided with the same training materials. Another online participant also mentioned that so often, they felt left out. Not only online participants but also studio participants commented on differences and noted that they often had to put extra effort into maintaining their partner work with online participants. Those comments on inequality, feeling left out, and demanding effort raise questions about what causes experiencing clashes in the hybrid movement learning context.

In the article, I will use the term clash as an analogy to highlight asymmetries in participants' experiences. Starting from pointing out the studio and online participants’ discomforts, I will delve into details of those challenges from an enactive perspective and try to enlighten the underlying issues. In that way, I will explore how online participation through Zoom challenges participants’ sensorial experience and how remote interaction affects the shared sense-making process in the hybrid format setting from an enactive stance.

2 Theoretical background

Enaction theories that refer to embodied cognition constitute the basis of the research. According to the enactive paradigm, we as ‘autonomous’ agents do not passively receive stimuli from our surroundings and turn them into representations in our minds; rather, we actively generate meaning through our ‘experiences’ in the world [4,5,6]. This highlights the importance of interaction dynamics in the sense-making process and extends the concept of interaction from agents to agents-environment coupling [5, 6]. Thus, the enactive perspective lets us focus on the meaning that may manifest in different forms, such as feeling, impression, or image occurring here and now. This also suggests that all the components that enter agents-environment interactions shape perceptual experience, therefore emerging meaning. So, to better understand the impact of Zoom meditation in embodied learning, it is important to comprehend how technology intervenes in the sense-making process.

Here I want to barrow Stewart et al. [5] diagrams that explain sensory-motor coupling as the basis of our sense-making process. (Figs. 1 and 2) Those diagrams show how meaning emerges interrelationally with our environment through our actions.

Fig. 1
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The sensorimotor coupling between an organism and its environment. The sensory inputs, S, guide the actions A; the actions A modify the sensory returns ([5], p.3)

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Fig. 2
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The basic scheme of Fig. 4 extended to include the mediation of sensorimotor coupling by technical artefacts ([5], p.19).

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In Fig. 2 [5], technical artefacts represented by the rectangle can be understood as any sort of tool, from the first human flint stones to the latest technologies, including software. In fact, it is almost impossible to think of human beings regardless of mediation in interaction, as represented in Fig. 1. As Gallagher and Zahavi indicate, from a phenomenological perspective, our interaction with the world is always mediated in some ways not only by tools but also by intersubjective realms such as history, language, others’ bodies, etc [7]. Moreover, in a material sense, not only technological devices like microphones, projectors, and music players but also clothes, socks, notebooks, pencils, and spatial qualities such as the size of the room, temperature, etc., enter our sensorimotor coupling process.

From a broader perspective, the sense-making process through sensory-motor coupling doesn’t only form individual experience but also constitutes an intersubjective shared world. For Durt et al., ‘participatory and broader collective sense-making processes manifested in dynamic forms of intercorporeality, collective body memory, artefacts, affordances, scaffolding, use of symbols, and so on’ ([8], p.2). It means that while cultural artefacts (including technologies), shared beliefs, ideologies, and patterned behaviour become integral to the sense-making process, emerging meanings enter the shared world and constitute the cultural realm [8]. It suggests that while each online and studio participant’s individual experiences varied because of the differences in their learning context and medium, this might have shaped their shared sense-making process. Throughout my discussion in the article, I will take interaction and meaning as emergent concepts while scrutinising participants’ discomfort in hybrid format movement training.

It is also important to briefly mention the scope of the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System to understand emerging struggles. LBMS is considered one of the branches under the somatic movement practices with varied modalities such as yoga, Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement or different massage techniques. In the 70s, Thomas Hanna used the term soma for the first time to describe his practices to emphasise the ‘experienced body’ from the practitioner’s perspective, not only as a physical entity [9]. One of the essential differences between LBMS and other somatic practices is that the system is built on both somatic and analytical perspectives. Bartenieff Fundamentals mainly creates its somatic characteristics, and Laban makes its analytical aspects. LBMS is a model to study how we move and interact with our surroundings. So, the training aims to teach how the body-mind works in its environment through exercises focusing on four major domains: to experience, observe, understand, and create movement [10]. In the training centre where I did my fieldwork, the LBMS pedagogy is constructed based on multi-modal characteristics of movement experience to produce ‘embodied knowledge’ (Fig. 3). In the training program, teachers use ‘demonstration’ with verbal instructions to show movement sequences. ‘Imaginary’ emphasises bodily connections or anatomical structures of the movement. ‘The hands-on technique’ is a specific pedagogical tool for tactile interaction. Participants study the movement themes through ‘touch’ to communicate, correct, visualise, and deepen their understanding. Moreover, individual and group ‘drawings’, ‘writings’, ‘discussions’ and ‘movement creations’ are part of the teaching strategy to enable participants to reflect on their personal and others’ movement experiences.

Fig. 3
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Multimodal pedagogy of Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies

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3 Methodology

This research uses ethnographical methods, including interviews, audio–video recordings, observations and field notes.

3.1 The overview of the fieldwork

Over a month, I participated in eight dancers’ intensive training, running 6 days a week. Five participants in training have professional formal dance training, and others have different educational backgrounds, such as music, tango and dance-movement therapy. Two to three participants joined the classes online via Zoom from their homes; the others were at the studio. The courses were run by three main teachers and three guest teachers, all certified movement analysts (CMA). A technical assistant was also responsible for dealing with Zoom and other technical equipment.

The training was held in two different studios (Figs. 4 and 5). In each studio, all participants were asked to move in their square (approximately four-square meters), which was marked with tape. When participants were asked to travel through space, they had to wear their masks. They kept their social distance in most activities and barely touched each other. During the training, this four-square meter marked space was called the ‘corona kinesphere’, referring to Laban’s concept of kinesphere. Laban defines the kinesphere as the sphere around the body whose periphery can be reached by extended limbs without stepping away from the spot [11]. Under the coronavirus circumstances, which limited participants’ mobility, the general and personal space -kinesphere- merged into the ‘corona kinesphere’ and participants executed exercises in their own ‘corona kinesphere’. Kate Elswit also uses the term ‘coronasphere’ to underlie how COVID-19 extended the kinesphere and contracted general space [12].

Fig. 4
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The first studio where training started

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Fig. 5
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Technical equipment in the second studio

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Dealing with technical set-up during the long hours of classes created significant challenges for teachers and online participants. Projectors, microphones, computers, music systems (players, speakers), portable cameras, and extra speakers for online participants were involved in the training process. The Zoom screen was reflected on the wall in each studio. The assistant was behind the portable camera, following the teacher. Because of the regulations of social distance, most of the partner works were adapted to individual works. Hands-on exercises based on touch were mostly replaced with observations, additional anatomical explanations or self-touch practices. Instructors had to give detailed verbal descriptions of practices so that online participants could follow the movements. Even though most of the teachers pointed out extensive verbalisation as an effective way to keep online participants engaged, they also mentioned the difficulties of translating all the aspects of the kinaesthetic experience into verbal language. Although the training team took all the precautions for technical issues beforehand, the absence of touch, trying to keep a social distance, and limited interaction with the online participants were challenging for teachers and participants.

3.2 Data collection and analyses

Since this study was conducted as a part of the Choreomundus International Master in Dance Knowledge, Practice and Heritage program, I collected quite rich ethnographic materials over the month. I joined approximately thirty-five group classes, eight seminars, four one-to-one sessions, and twelve observation and presentation sessions, and I collected audio and video recordings for each session during my fieldwork. Yet, like other participants and teachers, I had to stay in my ‘corona kinesphere’ most of the time. This limited my mobility during the sessions, so the angles of my recordings and observations were mostly from one corner of the studio, where recording online and studio participants simultaneously was constricting (Fig. 6). Therefore, most of my video recordings focus on the studio or only on the wall where online participants were reflected. Moreover, my observations were mostly focused on studio conditions since I had limited access to online participants over Zoom. Yet, I had enough insights about their training process during the interview sessions. I interviewed three main teachers, two guest instructors, and each of the eight participants.

Fig. 6
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Data collection and observation process in my ‘coronakinesphere’

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I prioritised the materials from the first-person perspective throughout my data collection and processing. LBMS training has a self-observational stance embedded in the pedagogy. After each session, participants were often asked to reflect on their bodily experiences in the sharing circle. I used those reflections as my primary sources from the participants’ first-person perspective. I transcribed those feedback sessions and all interviews and analysed them line by line, along with video materials.

In this article, my main goal is not to present detailed descriptive ethnographic data from the fieldwork but to scrutinise the struggles that emerged in the hybrid learning context. Therefore, the theoretical discussions will be carried out as a main thread of the research based on my analyses, observations, and interpretations of the ethnographic data.

4 Outcomes of the research and relevant discussions

As mentioned earlier, being online in the movement training was not the biggest issue for participants, but bringing together online and studio participants created the most discomfort. Even though the program provided them with the same learning materials, and the teachers were quite responsive to their needs, online participants often indicated they felt they were missing something. That led them to describe their hybrid experience as a clash. Not only participants but also teachers pointed out their struggles in hybrid settings:

‘I teach online workshops or weekly classes. But I know the people before, so it is so much easier. The flow is much easier when you are just online. This mixture or hybrid is hard. Having people here in the studio and there… trying to integrate everyone into partner work… this is really a challenge…’

To better understand this hybrid challenge, I scrutinised the issue by making a model of learning spaces (Fig. 7). In Fig. 7, while the big box on the left side represents the studio, the boxes on the right represent the participants’ working spaces in their homes. During training sessions, two terms, “studio people” and “online people,” were used to differentiate between participants attending classes from different locations. Although all participants in different places are technically “online” for each other, the distinction between physical and online people has been made based on the location of the teacher and the majority of the group. This leads to two main issues in hybrid format classes that address why participants perceive themselves as unequal: how they access resources for learning and the importance of being physically present with others in the shared space.

Fig. 7
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The model of learning spaces during the training [3]

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These two inextricably linked issues of how the participants access the resources in the learning context and create shared experiences in co-located and remote locations will be core themes of discussions in the following sections. First, to unfold the issue of access to resources, I will look at how the limited affordances of Zoom affected participants' perceptual experience (4.1.The Struggles Caused by Affordances of Zoom). Later, I will examine how remote intercorporeality shapes the shared sense-making process. (4.2.Shared Perceptual Field and Remote Sense-Making Process).

4.1 The struggles caused by affordances of zoom

Marshall McLuhan categorises the media as cold or hot based on users’ contribution level in his book Understanding Media: The Extension of Man (1994) [13]. According to that, while hot media requires a low level of participation, cool media demands a high level of participant contribution. Therefore, they have different impacts on users [13]. If we think about Zoom in terms of hot or cold media, the answer will alter depending on its use in its context. If we use Zoom to contact our family or friends, then it can be considered hot media compared to a telephone. However, in the movement or dance classes, it becomes cold media because it doesn’t provide all sensorial cues of movement experience and demands so much contribution from participants for full engagement in the process. Therefore, the experience of being on Zoom for long hours has been described as 'deficit-laden communication' [14] or 'zoom fatigue' [15, 16]. Similarly, the participants of LBMS training reported feeling exhausted because they had to be multifocal all the time. Online participants also felt detached and lonely as they couldn’t be part of the group, and at times, they felt lost during the classes. In the following parts of the article, I will focus on how Zoom as a ‘cold medium’ has challenged participants’ perceptual experience in a hybrid format and caused those outcomes.

4.1.1 The digital representation and image consciousness

The most major discomfort in training emerged from encountering digital representation of others’ instead of ‘physical presence’. Zoom software provides two-dimensional flattened representations of the ‘self’ made of configurations of digital data 1 and 0 on the screen, which we can describe as ‘digitisation of self’ or ‘digital images of self’. The shape, colour, size and other characteristics are only ‘re-presentations’ of the presence, and they can change depending on the qualities of the devices, connection and resolution. For instance, the Zoom screen was reflected on the wall in the studio, so studio participants interacted with relatively bigger images of online participants. However, all the online people used their laptop screens and dealt with smaller images of the participants and the studio. A similar situation is also valid for the people’s sound. Technology gives us a digital representation of how people and their environment sound. Thus, Zoom only affords reduced information about other people and their surroundings, providing only an approximate sense of them. In this sense, studio people had more advantages since they interacted with the presence of others and physical learning space instead of digitised re-presentations. During the interview, the participant who was online in the first half of the training and joined the classes in the studio in the second half indicated that she was surprised when she entered the studio for the first time because it looked much bigger to her on the Zoom screen. She was dancing with this bigger image in her mind. She also mentioned how her impressions of participants in the studio whom she’s never met before were different on Zoom. Similarly, other participants and teachers often mentioned the challenges of dealing with approximate digital images.

Husserl’s different types of consciousness provide an interesting perspective into participants’ encounters with digital representations. Husserl elucidates our interaction with things actually present in person and things that are not here and now [17]. He indicates that we perceive our actual present through our senses, which he calls ‘presentation’, but we also have the ability to re-present our perceptual experience in different forms which tie us to the past, future and phantasy world, which he indicates as ‘re-presentational consciousness’ [17, 18]. In short, there is the perception of an actual thing (presentation) and a re-presentation of things that are not here and now. He describes two different types of re-presentation. The first form is reproductive re-presentation, which consists of memory, expectation, and phantasy; the second is perceptual re-presentation, which he describes as image consciousness. For my research, what he describes as image consciousness is important because it is a type of awareness that occurs when we encounter a photograph, movie or scenery ([17], p.XLVI). Since the materiality of the image has substance here and now, we really perceive some aspects of it. Therefore, Husserl takes image consciousness as a partial presentation, a special form of re-presentation, as ‘consciousness of inactuality’ ([17], p. XLVII).

Furthermore, Husserl describes image consciousness as a ‘consciousness of conflict’. Those conflicts derive from the image’s physical support, its surroundings and its subject ([17], p.XLVIII). We can look at the discomfort of working with digital representation in training in terms of ‘conflicts of image consciousness’, which I already give details above. From Husserl’s perspective, the first conflict emerges from the physical support features of images on Zoom. In the studio, the wall where the Zoom screen is projected, the light which creates animated two-dimensional figures, and the sound waves comprise physical supports of the image that we perceive actually in reality. The second conflict emerges from the tension between the image’s surroundings and the surroundings where it is perceived. This conflict is fundamental for Zoom because the surroundings of digital images are different for both studio and online participants. So to speak, participants’ physical environments are different from online participants’ surroundings. There is no unity of environment in the perceptual sense from both perspectives. The third conflict stems from the difference between the subject and how it appears as an image. For Zoom, it corresponds to the difference between participants’ actual features and their images on the Zoom screen, such as the size, colour shape, etc. Husserl indicates that those conflicts overall enable us to perceive the image as an image, not as real [17]. However, in our case, despite those conflicts, participants still interact with those images as ‘real’, as the present. In other words, while Husserl posits that despite the image’s actual, present qualities, we perceive them as not real (thanks to the conflict), in the case of Zoom, despite the unreal qualities, we perceive the digital images as if they are real. Moreover, while Husserl considers presence as here and now, which is spatial and temporal immediacy, Zoom provides relatively temporal simultaneity but not spatial togetherness. Still, it is enough for participants to apprehend and interact with the images on Zoom as they present here and now.

4.1.2 Authenticity, memory and verbalisation

Kappas and Krämer bring interesting discussions about representations of interactants in videoconferencing systems. For them, advanced software systems may cause the problem of authenticity in terms of identity, attributes and behaviour for interactants ([14], p.8). During the LBMS training, the authenticity problem emerged in the different layers. As I’ve underlined in the previous chapter, the difference between digital and physical features was one part of the problem. Yet, the most critical issue about authenticity emerged at the behavioural level. Online participants admitted that they sometimes just ‘pretended’ or ‘faked’ when they felt lost in the class. From the studio perspective, it was not always clear to understand when they lost their engagement. Teachers also indicated in the interviews that it was hard to ‘read’ online participants. One of the teachers expressed that as follows:

‘In the studio, I know them, so I know where I have to take care of, where is the right moment to give a correction… But if I don’t know them before, it is really hard to get them online. Where are they? Are they willing to go with me? Where is their resistance? This year, I didn’t know them before, so it was hard… I would like to know people first and then have online class …you know... sensing them…then it is easier.’

In the teacher’s comment, two crucial aspects come forward. The first is the difficulties of reading non-verbal cues online, which happened many times during the training. Nonverbal cues can appear as eye contact, gestures, facial expressions, feelings, body postures, etc., and they play an essential role in social interactions and the flow of the learning process. In the studio, I encountered several moments when teachers realised that there were unclarities in participants’ understanding, and they stepped in to clarify the process accordingly. However, for online participants, the teacher had to ask verbally whether everything was clear. During the training, verbalisation became the main modality of communication. Teachers had to describe every exercise more explicitly with the words, even if they demonstrated it bodily because people on Zoom could not access the shared bodily realm. Thus, online participants did not only move mainly with teachers’ verbal instruction but were also asked by teachers to convert their bodily experience into words to understand if they could follow the class.

The second essential point highlighted in the comment is that teachers rely on their previous experience with participants to overcome the two-dimensionality of Zoom. It became easier to anticipate if they had worked with online participants. In other words, teachers recall their memories to fill the perceptual gap in predicting the situation. From Husserl’s perspective, both memory and expectation are forms of consciousness. While memory means ‘the consciousness of what is past’, expectation refers to ‘the consciousness of what is future’ ([17], p.XXXIV). So, here, the teacher indicates that she uses the memory of the participant, which refers to a modified re-presentation of what she perceived about the participant ([17], p.LVII) and carries this impression to the future when all the aspects of the participant are not available for her over Zoom. During online mediated classes, re-presentational consciousness helped teachers stay connected with participants in their presence.

4.1.3 Dealing with three different spaces in one place

Another major challenge in the hybrid format has occurred related to the perception of space. Participants needed to deal with at least three different physical spaces during the training: studio and online participants’ private rooms (See Fig. 3). Each space has a different size, floor quality, and light or temperature properties. When moving into their space, participants had to anticipate other spatial conditions. For instance, the participant who experienced both online and studio conditions indicated that she was surprised when she saw the studio because it was bigger than it looked on Zoom. While online, she moved with this smaller image in her mind during her partner-work. The physicality of the spaces, invariable features such as shape and the size of the room and variable measurable characteristics such as lighting, temperature and even sound enter our perception of physical space. For instance, in the 3rd week, studio participants had a hard time because of the high temperature of the studio. They had to shift to a smaller studio for a few days, and it dropped the energy and motivation level of the training, while online participants were not affected by the issue. Also, two online participants had to move on the carpet since they participated from their rooms and struggled with some of the floor-works because of the friction factor of the carpets on the ground. That affected the flow quality of their movement. All those small details mattered since they directly shaped participants’ bodily experiences and, therefore, entered the embodied knowledge production process.

Moreover, different sensorial systems (visual, auditory and tactile) and motor systems operate together to produce the sense of space, as Jennifer M. Groh posits in Making Space [19]. She also indicates that ‘what you can see, hear, and feel at any given moment, the movements you made to get there, and your memory of those movements and knowledge of local geography all contribute to your sense of your position in the world’([19], p.4). In other words, our sense of space is based on environmental background information such as light, pressure, sound or temperature and our sensorial system’s measurement of those qualities. Most importantly, Groh underlies that memory and knowledge not only help us understand where we are but also where we are prompt memories and knowledge. ([19], p.4) Therefore, while different spatial qualities led to distinct spatial perceptions for online and studio participants, they also impacted the learning outcomes of the training. Because this spatial qualities are directely part of our felt experience. 

4.1.4 Autonomy

So far, I have tried to demonstrate that Zoom-mediated communication does not provide the whole dimension and richness of multisensorial cues as in encounters in physically shared spaces. The features of Zoom and other technical equipment also shaped participants’ autonomy levels. During the training, what online participants see and hear was depending on the camera’s and speakers’ positions. Many times, online participants asked the assistant to change the camera angle to be able to see or asked the speaking person to come closer to the microphone so that they could hear. From enactive perspective, we are autonomous agents who do not only react to an external stimulus with appropriate actions but ‘actively and asymmetrically ‘regulate’ the conditions of our exchange with the environment’ [5]. This exchange happens in our perception of the world without consciously thinking about it, corresponding to what Merleau-Ponty describes as the ‘optimal or maximum grip of the world’ [20, 21]. For instance, to get the best view of a painting in the gallery, there is an optimal distance, and we tend to move our bodies accordingly ([20], p.316). Our bodies move in the space with a ‘perceptual attitude’, determined by our intention to have the optimal grip of our surroundings ([20], p.316). So, in the LBMS training, studio participants had more advantages in adjusting themselves to the situation to grasp the maximum. For instance, participants in the studio could change their spots to see the reflection of the PowerPoint on the wall from a better angle, or they could get closer (keeping social distance) to the teacher to hear her. While moving in the studio, participants could switch between senses from listening to seeing to have the best grip on the situation. However, online participants were limited to the camera angle, the perspective of the person behind the camera, the software, devices or connection quality. Therefore, online participants’ autonomy was disrupted by the Zoom mediation.

Yet, it doesn’t mean that involving a technical set was only disruptive for participants. In the training, some participants used their cameras as a creative opportunity. For example, they travelled through space while moving or used the Zoom screen as a frame to decide what to show and what not to show. Therefore, even though their autonomy was interrupted at a perceptual level, they could compensate for it from a different perspective. Moreover, the interruptions did not prevent their creativity.

4.2 Shared perceptual field and remote making meaning

So far, I have mainly talked about how online and studio participants’ individual experiences differ on a perceptual level. Yet, it is essential to mention that perception is not a private experience but occurs and operates through practical actions within the interpersonal realm [20, 22]

‘In the studio, when you don’t understand the task or even if it does not make any sense at that moment, we still do that. Because there is a group, we just imitate the others or just do…It still works, by the way, but it is more… sub-information; I call it social stress or collective unconsciousness.’

As the online participant expresses here, dancers still move with the group in the dance or movement classes when they get lost. However, in the hybrid setting, the reason online participants expressed that they couldn’t follow or they easily felt lost in the class because they couldn’t fully access the perceptual field created by others. What happens here is not simply copying what others do. The phenomenon of ‘distributed perception’[22], described by Brain L. Due, provides an interesting perspective on what the participant describes as sub-information, social stress or collective unconsciousness at the perceptual level. For Due, perception may be distributed, practical, and publicly recognisable by other agents [22]. It means that sensory information provided by others’ actions in certain situations creates a perceptual field; within the same situation, we rely on this perceptual field created by others to construct our actions. For instance, a visually impaired person can achieve a walking task with the guidance of other agents’ tactile and verbal descriptions. The guidance’s perception-related actions constitute a distributed perceptual field in which a visually impaired person can act and navigate himself in the space accordingly [22]. For Due, distributed perception is essential for interpersonal communication and how we create solutions for new, unexpected situations. And for him, we can co-operate on perception-related actions regardless of sharing a similar understanding. As long as there is multisensorial communication related to workable body-object-space relations, our bodies can be positioned for perception ([22], p.153). The concept of distributed perception widens our understanding of ‘optimal grip’ [20] towards a more intersubjective interaction level.

It is possible to think of partner works or group works in the movement or dance classes in terms of distributed perception. Dancers may make their movement choices according to the perceptual field constructed by others’ actions. From this point, if we think about partner works in a hybrid format class, each mode of partner work (online-online, studio-online, studio-studio) would create a different perceptual field. All sensorial modalities (seeing, hearing, smell, tactile, etc.) were available for partners in the studio. This means that partners could create a richer perceptual field together in which they could execute perception-related actions. However, only audio-visual sensory information provided by individuals was available for partners in online encounters. Thus, the distributed perceptual field constructed by partners were limited to audio-visual modalities in online interactions. Therefore, it impacted how partners move and react to each other during the partner work. Overall, it affected their movement choices and how they produced them. During the partner-work process, these differences became more apparent. As partners in the studio improvised, they changed directions, levels, and planes more frequently in their kinesphere and around their partners’ kinesphere. And they were more attentive to moving towards the space created by their partners’ movements. Basically, they shaped the space together three dimensionally. On the other hand, in the zoom-mediated coupling—in online-online or studio-online partner work- the only stimuli they got from partners were audial and visual cues. They tended to look at the screen most of the time during their improvisation to maintain the connection. That gave spatial intention to their movement, which shaped their movement dynamics.

The diverse perceptual fields did affect not only participants’ bodily interactions but also their mutual sense-making process. From the enactivist perspective, ‘sense-making is largely a collective activity through which our environment becomes a world of shared significance’. ([8], p.2). ‘Mutual interaction’, which has been defined as a ‘coordination between intentional and embodied agents’ ([23], p.467) is the key component of constructing a shared world. In the training, during the remote interactions, each item for technological mediation (camera, screen, cables, etc.) impacted participants’ attention span and direction of their attention. In Zoom-mediated interaction, participants had to pay extra attention to be visible on the screen or heard by their partners. Loussouran [24] has also addressed this issue. According to her, on Zoom, dancers had to be filmmakers or camera operators framing and presenting their own movements on screen. Whether intentional or not, how dancers frame themselves on the screen inevitably shapes how others experience their movement and how dancers experience theirs [24]. During the LBMS training, this fact forced participants and teachers to be multifocal. Especially in the studio, it was easy to forget about the camera angle in the flow of the class in the big studio. Most of them indicated that it was tiring to try to stay in the camera frame and, at the same time, pay attention to movement dynamics and stay connected. The issue of being multifocal when dealing with technical set-up turned out to be a bodily outcome for some participants. Some online dancers noted that they gained different forms of awareness of their bodily perception because they differentiated ‘to see’ and ‘to be seen’, which they never pay attention to when they dance in the studio.

Moreover, technical issues such as the instability of the internet connection or cuts directed participants to focus on the medium rather than the experience. During the feedback sessions after each class, online and studio participants’ comments also addressed how the direction of their attention differed and how that affected learning outcomes. While studio participants’ feedback was more about their bodily experience and felt qualities, online participants’ feedback was related to how they received the information and the small adjustments they made to follow the exercises.

Besides that, online-mediated couples had problems anticipating their partner’s intention. Participants indicated that intention needs to be ‘overly stated’ and ‘clear’ when they get together to maintain the interaction. From a studio perspective, it was not easy to understand whether online participants could follow the class or not unless they articulated it verbally. Likewise, remotely, it was hard to anticipate what bounds they created between each other. I argue that emerging dissimilarities in attention, intention, emotional level and differences in interaction dynamics impacted the co-creation of common meaning among participants in a hybrid format.

5 Discussion: access to resources and remote sense-making in hybrid setting

Here, I want to go back to my main question of what caused the experience of clash in hybrid format movement training. If we think that the teacher (and teaching) is the only resource for learning, it will be easy to assume that online participants will miss some part of the content since they have less access to the teacher compared to people in the studio. Furthermore, the information they receive is also limited depending on the quality of the online channel. However, Wenger challenges the idea of taking the teacher as a main source of the learning process. In his book Community of the Practice [25], he indicates that teaching is only one of the many structuring resources of learning. This is because he considers learning as an emergent, ongoing process [25, 26]. Then, ‘instructions do not cause learning, but it creates a context in which learning takes place, as do other contexts’ ([25], p.266) It also means that what is taught and learnt may not always match, and what is learnt may differ from the pedagogical intention. For instance, one online participant who is a professional dancer with a high-level dance technique said that she gained some surprising insights even though it was challenging for her to be online. As a professional dancer, she expressed that through online classes, she realised how many times she moved ‘subconsciously’ in the studio and just followed the others. However, on Zoom, she indicated that she was more conscious and aware of whether she felt moving at that moment with the task. Clearly, the awareness she gained was not directly intended in the LBMS’s pedagogy. Still, it emerged in that specific situation as a result of all the components of the learning context, such as the computer, the quality of the internet connection, chosen activities, verbal instructions, her position, space, etc.

Maturana and Varela’s approach to communication from a biological perspective also provides important insight into how learning occurs. Their book, The Tree of Knowledge [27], indicates that there is no ‘transmitted information’ in communication biologically. Each time communication occurs, there is behavioural coordination in a realm of structural coupling ([27], p.196). It means that ‘the phenomenon of communication depends not on what is transmitted but on what happens to the person who receives it. If we deploy this understanding into the LBMS training setting, we need to revisit our assumption about the main issue of receiving information from the teacher in the studio and online. It means that the distinction among content (or information), the transmission process and our situation at that specific moment become blurred. In other words, there is no independent content from our own experience. That expands our focus from the issue of access to resources to the situations of participants when learning experiences occur. So, the realm of structural coupling for online and physical people was different. In other words, what happened to online and studio people was not the same. As a result, the learning experience or what was gained varied based on their ‘sensory-motor coupling’ differences, which points out the perception–action unity. Participants’ diverse spatial conditions, differences between their technical equipment and internet quality, and limited access to the perceptual field created in different locations through bodily cues and movement shaped their experience.

Here, it is also essential to mention two separate modes of interaction with tools that Stewart et al. defined [5]. While the first mode describes when the tools are being used (in-hand mode), the other mode refers to when they are dissociated from the body (put-down mode). During the in-hand mode, our attention is not on the tool but on the world, so it fades from our consciousness. On the contrary, in put-down mode, the tool itself has the focus of attention. ([5], p.18–19). The reason for online participants’ discomfort lies in those two modes. While physical participants mainly dealt with the tools (clothes, technical devices, etc.) in hand mode, which they did not even have to think about, online participants couldn’t switch from put-down to in-hand mode. Technological tools, such as cameras, microphones, speaker, and even Zoom software, were continuously part of their perceptual coupling process. Zoom’s unstable technical quality and its limitation in capturing and mediating the complex dimensions of movements made it difficult to disappear from online participants’ attention. Since our sensorimotor coupling mediated by tools constitutes our experience of the world ([5], p.19) online and studio participants’ training experiences differed. Therefore, the distinction between their experiences did not develop from the online participants’ inability to ‘access the learning resources’ but stemmed from differences in their perceptual experience in their diverse conditions.

From here, I will argue that creating ‘mutual intention’ emerged as an issue during the hybrid format training. This is because participants had a problem sensing the intention of their partners since they had limited access to their partners’ movement dynamics. Intentionality is an essential part of the sense-making process. First of all, it is because it constitutes the idea of the autonomous agency that freely chooses to regulate her actions in the world based on her needs or situation ([28], p.212]). Secondly, the intention gives direction to the agency’s action and is readable to others. Not only from a phenomenological perspective but also at the neural level, our sensory-motor systems, through mirror neurons, can sense the intentions of other’s actions even before the action is completed [29, 30]. Thus, the intention of our actions enters the intersubjective realm. I argue that emerging dissimilarities in attention, intention, and asymmetries of sensorial cues impact the co-creation of common meaning among participants in a hybrid format. Therefore, it was not surprising to hear in the feedback session that online participants often expressed their feelings as ‘lonely’, ‘detached’, and ‘outsider’. Those emotions did not occur for people in the studio. Besides that, online and studio participants created distinct interaction dynamics because of the diverse affordances of their environment. Different ‘virtual fields’ [28] have emerged for online and studio conditions that brought up dissimilar capacities and tendencies in their movement. In the interaction process, the problem of reading others’ intentions and digital interruptions of coordination dynamics took part. As a result, studio participants and online participants’ sense-making process differed.

I also find it crucial to highlight that even though the affordances of Zoom challenged participants’ perceptual experience in the long hours of movement classes, that did not hinder enhancing their bodily awareness or their creativity. In this article, my main point was trying to explore issues that participants faced in hybrid settings. Therefore, my focus was mainly on problematic areas of bringing together online and studio participation compared to face-to-face movement training. This mainly displayed the video-conferencing system as a limitation. Yet, in fact, the use of these digital mediation tools made dancers reflect on how they usually move in the studio and sharpen their self-movement awareness. The positive impact of online mediated dance experience has also been pointed out in several other articles published after the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Li, after a learning curve, the participants overcame the challenges of being online and demonstrated a significant amount of creativity [31]. Goletti and Milovanovic [32] indicated that the main positive development of online dance training during COVID-19 was an expanded focus on somatic methodologies (p.28) and students’ increased responsibility and agency in learning (p.26). Loussouarn [24] also pointed out Zoom’s attributes of seeing self-images as creative opportunities for dancers. On the other hand, dancers’ experience during my fieldwork, which they described as a clash, addresses that trying to replicate or even expecting to have a similar experience to the face-to-face experience in an online environment is problematic. The physical and online realm requires different adaptations in the learning and teaching process. This is mainly because both conditions offer different affordances. Instead, we need to look at what these video conferencing systems can offer to explore new ways of moving, interacting, and creating.

6 Conclusion

During intensive hybrid movement training, reduced collaborative work, lack of tactile interaction, and increased verbalisation caused by limited affordances of the telematic system (Zoom) and other technical infrastructure intervened and shaped studio and remote participants' experiences differently. Moreover, participants` dissimilar spatial contexts in remote places generated diverse perceptual fields. As a result, participants’ physical and digital presence created challenges, which some participants described as clashes. In the article, I looked at participants' and teachers’ experiences from the enactive perspective, and I tried to unfold how and why studio and online participants’ experiences differed.

During the training, online participants’ perceptual experiences were challenged most. Even though their sensory organs and motor abilities were working perfectly fine, online participants still felt disrupted because they could not access the rich multi-sensorial cues created by dancers in the studio. They were exposed only to the audio-visual representation of that vivid information generated out there. Thus, the affordances of Zoom and other technical equipment shaped participants’ perceptual experience. Moreover, online participants had to rely on the person behind the camera and the quality of technical infrastructure. Therefore, their perceptual grip of the world and their autonomy were disturbed. In this sense, the affordances of Zoom were limited to capturing complex multi-modal characteristics of movement experience, making it a ‘cold medium’ [13] because it demanded so much contribution from participants. Online participants needed to use their ‘re-presentational consciousness’[17] more than studio participants to apprehend the things which are not present for them in person in their surroundings. Verbalisation emerged as a main strategy to compensate for limited access to bodily sensorial stimuli. Teachers had to be more descriptive to transfer the information, and online participants had to articulate their experience verbally to keep their engagement with the studio.

Hybrid format training also diversified the direction of online and studio participants’ attention. While dancers in the studio were able to pay attention to the felt qualities of exercises, online participants’ feedback revealed that so often, they were distracted by the quality of audio–video streaming. Consequently, creating ‘mutual intention’ emerged as an issue. Participants had difficulty sensing the intention of their partners’ movement during the online partner work due to limited access to each other’s movement dynamics. Overall, dissimilarities in attention, intention, and asymmetries of sensorial cues impacted the co-creation of shared meaning among participants in a hybrid format.

Although the online and studio participants' experiences may differ at the perceptual level and may lead to diverse sense-making processes with different outcomes, audio–video streaming systems, like Zoom, hold immense potential for exploring new ways of moving, interacting, creating, learning, and teaching. However, trying or expecting to replicate face-to-face physical experiences in an online environment may create disappointment and frustration. Face-to-face and online mediated conditions offer different affordances; therefore, learning and teaching in the physical and online realms require different adaptations. Thus, we need to explore the unique possibilities that video conferencing systems can offer in embodied learning and creation.

This article is written based on the thesis (2020) conducted within Choreomundus: International Master in Dance Knowledge, Practice and Heritage. Choreomundus is an Erasmus Mundus master programme offered by a consortium of four universities: Université Clermont Auvergne (UCA), Clermont-Ferrand, France, as the coordinating institution; the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim (NTNU); the University of Szeged, Hungary; and the University of Roehampton, United Kingdom. https://choreomundus.org/