Other-Adjustment and Beyond

The study examines how participants of a “mirror exercise” in a community dance workshop sustain movement synchrony. They make other-adjustments by slowing down, stopping, or returning to an earlier movement phase to allow the partner to catch up. We also examine how gaze, facial expressions and talk increasingly come to play in dealing with hitches in the task, sometimes up to abandoning the task. The analyses illustrate how participants coordinate synchronious movement, the distribution of modalities in this coordination, and how it intertwines with their shifting roles as workshop participants.