Walking in film as muscle memory training and movement bias development?

Walking in film as muscle memory training and movement bias development? A workshop at the Women Walking: Histories, Movement and Mobilities Festival focused on the representations of women walking in cinema and its muscular effect on film audiences. The observation of movement on screen enhances the imitative abilities of the audience with respect to the motor activity Bulgakowa (2008). The aim of this research project, of which this proposal is a part, is to investigate how movement mimicry by cinema audiences might inform their movement preferences and biases off screen. And whether these mechanisms in turn might play a role in social cognition, in informing ideas about women’s actions and identities off screen. This contribution took form of an online participatory embodied walking workshop in which a series of short filmic vignettes by the author, focused on gait, are watched and inform action movement experiments with the workshop participants. The experiments were based on common coding, a model of cognition which proposes a connection between an organism’s movement, observation of movement and imagination of movement. This connection means that either one of these representations trigger the two others. Prinz (1992). The workshop will both served the purpose of embodied experience of the research by its participants and will further inform the method, hypothesis and direction of this research