Dance is one of the ways in which a society communicates with itself and with other societies. Australian dance presents images of national identity, some direct and consciously local, others indirect, metaphoric, abstracted.
In a collaboration involving industry partners, dance academics and cogni-tive psychologists, we gauged the effect of pre-performance information sessions on response to live contemporary dance (Glass 2005, 2006). The outcomes of this project have implications for the artform and dance industry in Australia.
Our experimental investigation of audience response involved the system-atic manipulation of three variables or factors: choreographic intention (rep-resentational versus abstract), audience member expertise (experts (ten years’
training) versus novices) and pre-performance information (generic informa-tion session, specifi c informainforma-tion session, no informainforma-tion session – control group). Four-hundred and seventy-two audience members formed the sample for the experiment with sessions conducted over a period of six months. Two new Australian works were used as stimulus material with data collected from audiences attending one of seven live performances in city and regional centres in the Australian Capital Territory (Canberra), New South Wales (Sydney), Tasmania (Launceston) and Victoria (Melbourne and Geelong).
Approximately half of each audience arrived early to receive either a generic or
88 shirley mckechnie and catherine stevens
specifi c information session concerning the work they were about to see. The sessions were presented by dance writers and artists McKechnie, Grove and Healey, and included examples of movement performed by dancers live or on video. The remainder of each audience arrived just before the performance, forming a control group for the information variable (i.e. the control group received no information other than the title of the work and brief programme notes). The two dance works were Red Rain choreographed by Anna Smith and Fine Line Terrain choreographed by Sue Healey.
An example of action research, the implementation of different kinds of information sessions necessitated some means for evaluation of session e ffec-tiveness. This gave rise to the development of the Audience Response Tool (ART) – a new psychometric instrument for gathering psychological reactions to live or recorded performance (Glass 2005, 2006). The ART consists of three broad sections: a qualitative section that explores cognitive, emotional and affective reactions; a quantitative section that includes a series of rating scales that assess cognitive, emotional, visceral and affective responses; and a demographic and background information section (e.g. age, gender, dance or music experience, etc.).
Exhaustive qualitative and quantitative analyses of open-ended responses demonstrated that approximately 90 per cent of participants formed an inter-pretation of the dance work that they saw (Glass 2006). For the observer, contemporary dance can be viewed as non-representational or representational and various cognitive strategies may be called upon to extract representa-tional content including (1) thematic analysis, (2) metaphor, (3) imagery, (4) narrative-searching and (5) personal memory. Some of the cues used to form an interpretation included visual elements, aural elements, movement and the use of space; Table 4.1 shows that the relative contribution of these elements in the two works differed (Glass 2005, 2006). Information sessions did not impact on the tendency to engage with the piece but specifi c information sessions did impact on the content of interpreted responses.
Almost 90 per cent of participants reported that they felt an emotional response, and almost 95 per cent of participants reported that they enjoyed at least one aspect of the dance-work. The results indicated that contemporary
Table 4.1 Cues used to form an interpretation (Glass 2006)
Cue Red Rain
(%)
Fine Line Terrain (%)
Visual elements 40.5 35.9
Aural elements 31.4 35.9
Movement 31.4 < 10
Use of space < 10 63.1
knowledge unspoken 89
dance is a multi-layered event with numerous avenues for emotional and affec-tive communication. Some of the reasons for the experience of emotion and enjoyment, as stated by participants, included visual and aural cues, dancer characteristics, movement, choreography, novelty, spatial/dynamic elements, emotional recognition, intellectual stimulation, the piece generally and emo-tional stimulation (see Table 4.2). Audience members also noted higher-order relations between cues as being important for their enjoyment. For example, relations between dancer movement and music were mentioned; movement and music appear to embody motion expressed through structural variables such as dynamics and time (Glass 2006). Some of the processes that we had observed during practice-led research in creating a dance work (Stevens et al.
2003) are active as audience members watch contemporary dance – processes such as association, analogical transfer, synthesis and functional inference.
Creative thinking was evident not only in the context of observers watching Smith’s Red Rain (the dance work that we had studied from the perspective of creative choreographic cognition) but also in the context of a more abstract piece, Healey’s Fine Line Terrain.
Information sessions did not impact on the tendency to respond emotionally or the tendency to enjoy the piece. Differing levels of dance expertise and expe-rience among audience members did not appear to affect verbal responses gath-ered using the ART. Implications of the study include the value of a period of refl ection after a performance suggested by the enthusiasm with which people entered into completing the questionnaire, the need for new methods that record involuntary responses (e.g. eye movements: Stevens et al. 2007) and continuous rather than retrospective reactions, and the role of pre- performance sessions offering a variety of ways to approach a live performance.
Table 4.2 Reasons for enjoyment (Glass 2006)
Cue Red Rain
90 shirley mckechnie and catherine stevens Other forms of pre-performance information
Recent fi ndings in cognitive neuroscience point to other forms of pre-performance sessions that might enhance response to contemporary dance.
Psychologists have long speculated that perception and action are intimately linked – that observing an action involves the same repertoire of motor rep-resentations that are used to produce the action (Castiello 2003). One impli-cation of this view is that the capacity to understand another’s behaviour and to attribute intention or beliefs to others is rooted in a neural execution/
observation mechanism (Grèzes and Decety 2001). Using fMRI, Calvo-Merino et al. (2005) demonstrated neural mirroring and an effect of specialist expertise when dancers observed dance movement that they had learned to do (either classical ballet or capoeira) compared with movement that they had not learned to do (either classical ballet or capoeira). The results show an effect of acquired motor skills on brain activity during action observa-tion – brain activity was affected by whether observers could do the action or not. Experts had greater activation when observing the specifi c movement style that they could perform; the same areas of activation in non-expert control subjects were insensitive to stimulus type (Calvo-Merino et al. 2005:
1245).
An implication for practice from this basic research is that an alternative to verbal pre-performance information might consist of action observation.
Laboratory investigations of eye movement patterns of expert and novice observers of dance indicate that even after just one viewing of a short dance fi lm, novice observers have acquired expectations about the dance and begin to anticipate trajectories and phrases (Stevens et al. 2007). For the active and more adventurous audience member, especially those with some dance experi-ence, efforts to enact and embody some phrases of an unfamiliar dance work should heighten recognition of that movement in subsequent viewings of the dance. Enhanced response to the work will likely fl ow from increased percep-tual fl uency (Szpunar et al. 2004; Zajonc 1968). For example, a dance piece, like a musical one, can be constructed systematically so that there are novel movements or themes with repetition used to develop perceptual fl uency as the piece proceeds, thereby constructing effective semiotic fi elds which would be expected to be viewer-specifi c as well as piece-specifi c.