ABSTRACT
Why do we dance, and why are we moved by dance? Competing accounts suggest that our motivation to dance springs from reasons that are either deeply personal (such as for purposes of exercise, entertainment, or artistic expression), or inherently social, which play a key role in facilitating relationships with others in a social world. A more recent account, however, suggests that the mechanisms of dance are more complex, and as dance scholar and philosopher Kimerer LaMothe suggests, humans “are creatures who evolved to dance as the enabling condition of [our] own bodily becoming.” In this chapter, we consider what psychological and neuroscientific studies can tell us about how we perceive dance, and why we might enjoy watching others dance. Our aim is not to dissect the phenomenological experience of watching dance into something so granular as to erase the deeply human pleasure of dancing or watching others dance, but instead to survey what the behavioural and brain sciences can reveal about this ubiquitous and fundamental means of expression. We begin by presenting a brief overview of research examining the links between action perception and action production, and then explore how this work informs research into the empirical aesthetics, and next, the empirical neuroaesthetics, of watching dance. Finally, we conclude with considerations into how emerging technologies might further elucidate or augment how we perceive, produce, and enjoy dance.
