beyond policy lab 3
The Body That Remembers A Live Lab for Dancers on AI Governance and Embodied Wisdom
The group comprised 5 dancers, grounded in various traditions and dance forms. The group began with a response to prompt where they shared their names, their dance forms, and one thing their bodies were taught about discipline and care.
Aparna Nagesh practices a mix of multiple forms of dance having experienced learning various styles across a number of years. She called it Contemporary Dance Theatre at one point but now feels that her art form has gone beyond that definitive term. Her origins were in jazz and ballet, and while she has had several teachers and experiences, she looks to two somatic teachers whose teachings have influenced the way she looks at the body: Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and Navtej Johar. Her exploration of dance helped her understand discipline to be a form of listening to cellular memory and having conversations with the body, and the recognition of dance as both a physical and mental practice that brings a sense of ease to the body.
Rasika Sundaram primarily practices Bharatnatyam, though she has also learned Jazz briefly in the past. She is also currently engaged in Sangeet choreography that incorporates a range of different styles including Bollywood. Her first teacher was Smt. Parvati Ravighantasala who taught her the Pandanallur style of Bharatnatyam, followed by Smt. Subhashini Chandrashekar, who taught her the Thanjavur style of Bharatnatyam. Rasika is currently exposed to the Radha Kalpa method taught by Rukmini Vijaykumar. In her growing years, she had strict teachers who taught her, but growing up, discipline has come to look like self-teaching and liberation that comes from that. She was not taught care from a young age, but through her engagement with the Radha Kalpa method and Sangeet Choreography, she has come to see care as a practice of looking after oneself and finding reciprocal alignment with dance.
Vasanthi S Pillai practices Bharatanatyam, having trained under Smt. Lalitha Ganapathi, who taught her the Vazhavoor style of Bharatnatyam. Vasanthi was taught that discipline is about showing up despite. One may not be at their 100% every time, but to show up and to be present is discipline at work. Care, for Vasanthi, arrived after a long journey of navigating consciousness around the body and taking up space, and looked like just being in tune with focusing on the form and what it brings to her. She also finds this idea of care bearing ripple effects on other aspects of her life.
Sreepreya Srinivasan practices Bharatnatyam, and learned from Dr R Vijay Madhavan, who also practices the Vazhavoor style of Bharathnatyam, having been a disciple of Chitra Vishweshwaran. Sreepreya found a lot of nuance in the way the dance was taught, especially by a man in a field dominated by women. She reflected on discipline and care and shared that she thinks of them like an umbrella. Discipline is not about perfection, but consistency, and growth happens with discipline, but happens slowly. It taught her that learning is not immediate, but a long process that can be both tedious and fun. She herself completed her aranghetram 13 years after she began learning Bharatanatyam, and it was a rewarding journey no less. Her guru would often say that the performance is never on a good day – so one’s discipline included preparing for things like boils on the leg, or cramps, or lighting issues on stage. Her guru showed care in a different way and remained attentive to his students’ experiences and what they navigated in their lives.
Shoa Hussein learned Belly Dance, from Ruchika, from Art of Belly Dance. Her engagement with the art form followed her engagement with breathwork therapy, and felt in many ways, like an extension of therapy, too. Shoa’s exploration showed her that one cannot and likely will not get the moves down pat right away. Practice, patience, and paying attention to moving the body takes time. To her, it was also an interesting exploration of how the body moves and what it has to share as it experiences movement.
Naming and framing the problem
The group began with some scene setting that looked at the military origins of AI and how those origins inform the mindsets and worldviews that build AI into existence. With the recognition of profit-generating capacities, capitalism took over and baked AI into everyday life, manifesting in the many ways in which we encounter it in the world around us. They made space for the fact that there are promises and perils, and equally, potentials to augment both, with AI.
In looking at the perils of AI, the group reflected on the way AI is built, using data that may not necessarily have been drawn without consent, and causing greater surveillance and privacy violations. They spoke about emerging levels of dependency on AI tools to the point that humans are looking at these tools for answers that human experience and expertise can better provide, with care for nuance. They also reflected on how AI is used in ways that don’t respect dance as an art form with a history, context, tradition, and a social impact. AI-generated dance videos might at best be able to imitate choreography, styles, and particular ways of presentation, but they lack the soul, wisdom, tradition, and long-held and embodied cellular memory that makes the very act of performing a human experience. While some may argue that AI offers convenience and speed, the purported “efficiency” and “expediency” offer a final product that is bereft of honest emotion and internal processing that it takes to produce a work of art. The group also reflected on the notions of “convenience,” while interrogating the cost at which this convenience arrives, and whether this convenience is necessary or worth this high a cost at all.
The critical ideas the group arrived at were that the AI question is a power question, that certain things cannot and should not be replicated or flattened by AI, and that certain knowledge is sacred in the face of several forces in the world.
Reflecting Deeper on Dance
Following from the three critical ideas identified, the group first reflected on what their dance forms knew about power and never needed to articulate because the body already knew it. One participant said that power is balance in its truest essence (physical, mental and emotional). The body already holds this balance, and the exploration of the form is the actual journey of discovering this balance. To another participant, strength and power was never taught but was demanded from the body because the art form required it. This experience was eye-opening in itself because it showed them how the body holds tremendous power and capacity to perform even if the mind thinks it incapable. A third participant named the truth that power is not always loud, and that dance carries a power that simply does not need to announce itself – a slight glance can command attention, bringing the shoulder back can present strength. True power, they noted, lies in control, intention, and the ability to portray without force. A fourth participant reflected on the power of intuition where even in forgetting a choreographic element, the mind and body are able to come together to transition to the next step smoothly while allowing the fluidity of the dance form to thrive. The fifth participant noted the importance of listening to the body, an intuitive relationality with the body that is built over time through dance.
The group then tuned into their dance form, to identify aspects in their tradition that cannot be replicated, and to reflect on what that tells us about what should never be handed to a machine. For one participant, dance is the embodiment of the body’s inner space, where embodiment indicates the truth of a physical form. To them, the body’s cellular memory and this embodied process cannot be replicated by a machine. A second participant brought up the emotional connection with the artform and how one expresses oneself, which are both as important as the movement itself. Given that these are unique experiences, distinct for each individual, a machine can simply not replicate the lived feeling behind an emotion, the subtle humanity that gives meaning to the performance. Another participant shared that the inner healing, love, and freedom that comes from dance, and the act of imparting the knowledge of dance cannot be replicated because the art form requires a measure of relationality. For another participant, self-worth and love and respect for the body without the imposition of perfection as a standard cannot be replicated. The final share from another participant was that the aspect of surrender that one is taught over time – be that to an emotion or to letting the body lead – both of which are like a steady stream of consciousness, cannot be replicated or handed out to a machine.
Creating a repository of wisdom
The group was invited to identify concept, practice, principle, or embodied understanding from their tradition that relates to governance. During this segment, the group named the following as catalysts for their thinking:
Sensory vulnerability and embodied expression in movement
The practice of namaskar before and after dancing, where the namaskar is directed toward the God, the teacher, the audience, and then the earth, and seeks blessings to honour the transfer of knowledge from the guru, to thank the audience for their presence, and to ask for forgiveness from mother Earth for stamping on her while dancing respectively.
Consent, to present the body and articulate through it, myriads of emotions, feelings, and stories.
Nritta and Nritya: Nritta, pure movement, only gains power when combined with Nritya, expression and storytelling. Dance is not about moving as fast as possible but moving in harmony with the rhythm.
Sam (or sum), in kathak, which is the first beat of any rhythmic cycle, where the cycle starts and ends in Sam. It is a rhythmic anchor that book ends the dance composition.
Jugalbandi, or a duet, which captures the art of reflexivity and a musical dialogue of call-and-response between a singer/musician and a dancer
The guru-shishya parampara as a model of accountable knowledge transfer — where the teacher is answerable not just to the student but to the entire lineage behind them and ahead of them
Yato hasta-stato driṣṭiḥ, Yato driṣṭi-stato manaḥ, Yato mana-stato bhāvaḥ, Yato bhāva-stato rasaḥ,” a verse from the Natya Shastra that means “Where the hands go, there the eyes should follow. Wherever the eyes go, there the mind follows. Where the mind is focused, there an expression of inner feeling arises. Where there is true feeling and expression, an emotional experience is evoked and enjoyed by the audience.”
Taal / talam / rhythm, which is the rhythmic cycle that structures a performance by dictating the pacing, footwork, and musical synchronisation.
Chakkar in kathak, which is a high-speed spin where a dancer rotates rapidly on their central axis. Spiritually, it acts as a dynamic mediation that represents the dissolution of ego.
Mudra, or intricate hand, finger, and wrist gestures used to create a rich language that communicates emotions, full stories, and actions without speaking.
Building a container for governance
Drawing from the wisdom identified, the group proceeded to reflect on how they can inform and shape the governance of AI. The group reflected on the knowledge that can only be held in living bodies and relationships and how we can govern AI in ways to protect rather than replace it, the obligations that emerge from receiving knowledge and what it might mean to hold AI developers to an equivalent accountability, and what can be drawn from the boundaries in various dance forms to inform AI governance.
Drawing from the wisdom of the Natyashastra, through the verse “Yato hasta-stato driṣṭiḥ, Yato driṣṭi-stato manaḥ, Yato mana-stato bhāvaḥ, Yato bhāva-stato rasaḥ,” (meaning: “Where the hands go, there the eyes should follow. Wherever the eyes go, there the mind follows. Where the mind is focused, there an expression of inner feeling arises. Where there is true feeling and expression, an emotional experience is evoked and enjoyed by the audience”), there was a reflection on being attentive to AI alignment or the process of training AI tools to align with and act meaningfully in accordance with human values, rights, and ethics. The verse describes a cascade from hand to eye, eye to mind, mind to feeling, feeling to rasa. It is a theory of how coherence propagates. Each layer must genuinely follow the one before it to sustain the whole. In the AI context, alignment failures are often failures of this cascade. A system's "hands" (its outputs, actions in the world) may be technically correct while its "eyes" (its attention, what it is actually optimizing for) are pointed somewhere subtly different. Its "mind" (deep structure of its objectives) — may be misaligned with what was intended, even when outputs look fine on the surface. And the bhāva, the inner state or value representation, may be entirely absent or simulated, producing outputs that pattern-match to goodness without being grounded in anything that deserves that name. In the process, they also alluded to caution around the AI black box, because while we are always watching the outputs, the correspondence between the layers, the genuine following of one by another, is extraordinarily difficult to audit. This verse from the Natya Shastra also reminds us that the rasa, as the terminal criterion, is most important. The goal is not merely that the hands move correctly, nor even that the mind is in the right place. The goal is that something real is evoked in the audience, in the community, in the world that receives the performance. This reframes alignment as not purely an internal property of a system but a relational one. A system is aligned not just when its internals are correctly ordered, but when that ordering produces genuine experience and benefit in those who receive it. This alignment, the group reminded us, needs practice and sustained effort.
The group talked about the importance of context and attention to depth without flattening complexity, through inner listening and awareness of the senses that can intuitively guide and create movement. They noted that an individual exploration into one’s own inner space and pedagogical process may be the same, but the emergent output will differ because of the myriads of lived experiences and interpretations of life that inform and shape it. By reflecting on how these movements lend themselves to new, fresh, and unseen vocabulary that cannot and should not be replicated, the group drew attention to a key call for the AI lifecycle not to flatten the complex diversity that underpins the human experience by reducing each individual to a data point.
Relatedly, the group also talked about the responsibility of receiving and transmitting knowledge. The experience of one’s inner space and how they choose to share it arises from a deep vulnerability, which imbues the performer and viewing audiences different kinds of power and responsibility. Just as a performer holds the power of the personal in presenting knowledge, the audience holds the power of response and reaction in receiving that knowledge. The performer holds the responsibility of authentic knowledge and the audience holds the responsibility for receiving that knowledge – which holds profound wisdom for how those that design an AI tool have a responsibility for transmitting knowledge, and those that use the tool have a responsibility for receiving and using that knowledge.
Extending this responsibility further, the powerful concept of responsible engagement through reflexivity was shared by one of the participants, who noted that as greater dependency on AI emerges, there is a need to present stronger guardrails to counter technosolutionism. The participant shared that an AI tool could turn the onus of reflexivity onto the user, through a question instead of a disclaimer. When an AI tool is asked a question that is best answered through a human being, instead of offering a standard disclaimer for verification, the tool could ask the user to think once again about whether the AI tool is the best resource for knowledge on that question.
Another key theme the group reflected on is consent, where in presenting a performance, the performer holds power and consents to present themselves, their story, and their artform. They start from a position of bodily autonomy, consent, and celebration of the self and the community, and these artforms have stood the test of time because they have been embedded in joy, celebration, community, and sharing of stories. For the AI lifecycle, this offers a powerful value as guidance: the consent of those whose data are taken and those whose lives the tool will affect when used is critical before the tool is built or deployed.
The group also reflected on the foundation of all forms of dance, namely rhythm, where the speed of a piece of choreography, or a full dance performance, is held together within a container shaped by the underlying rhythm or beat. Dance is not about moving as fast as possible, but moving in harmony with the rhythm. This beat determines the speed, pace, and flow of the entire performance. Within these spaces, speed is very much a character, and is never melded into the performance for the sake of it. Rather than move fast and break things, dance teaches one to recognize the importance of calibrating speed and not accelerating things for the sake of acceleration. This is a powerful lesson for the AI lifecycle, which has been racing ahead to innovate with little to no attention to the undesirable consequences of such speed. A closely connected theme was balance, where the recommendation was to remember that AI capability alone is not enough, but that it must be guided by human values and purpose. AI requires balance between innovation and care, efficiency and ethics, and progress and preservation.
Recognizing the importance of vast datasets and knowledge as foundational to building and training an AI tool, the group also reflected on the question of whether that much knowledge or information is essential at all, given that when vast amounts of data are presented, nuance is more likely to be lost. While it may make sense to train a machine on vast amounts of data to predict the economic progress of a nation, for the creative arts, an AI tool trained on that vast a pool of data may result in flattening the creative component and the elimination of nuance and wisdom. In the process, we become inattentive to the legacies of the knowledge we were trained in. This learning marked a call for data minimization and mindful data collection.