ABSTRACT
Human beings seem to have little or no problem with perceiving and understanding the expression of gestures of musical performers and dancers on a scene. Even when we are not able to see all details of the performers’ movements and/or bodies, for example due to poor lighting, occlusion, or distance, we usually quickly sense the expressive character of these movements, i.e. whether the movements are slow, fast, calm, agitated, and from those gestures, we can often easily infer whether the person moving is happy, sad, tired, or elated. In looking at gestures, we also perceive parts of the body that may be momentarily occluded because of an unfavourable viewing angle, i.e. we will in most cases correctly assume that a person continues to move the whole body even though we actually only see some parts of the body moving.
