"In dance and music, the downbeat is the first beat. It is usually where we step, if we are stepping to the beat. The court dancers in 17th century Versailles rose instead, accompanying this movement with gesture and ornament. How can noticing and embodying what these people created help us understand better their complex world? Newell, in A Theory of Interdisciplinary Studies proposes that artists locate themselves within a system by expressing the meaning they find in it, in their work. In Research Integration: A Comparative Knowledge Base, Klein writes of interdisciplinary outcomes being intertwined with the “development and richness of a shared language culture”. Aesthetic inquiry into the languages of the arts requires attention to the qualities of things, such as the rise, the ornament, the gesture – parts of speech in Baroque dance and music - offering entry into the cultural worlds of these people, revealing astounding inter-connections if we are present to what is there, making our own meaning from the journey between and among these worlds. In this workshop, participants will explore how aesthetic inquiry into the “work” of art releases the imagination, creating pathways into woven systems of a culture. "