Kinesthesia, Empathy, and Related Pleasures: An Inquiry into Audience Experiences of Watching Dance

Dance is frequently described as being “about” movement. “Dance,” writes Ann Daly, “although it has a visual component, is fundamentally a kinesthetic art” (Daly 1992, 243). Audience experiences of dance can therefore be conceptualized in terms of responses to movement, most prominently in terms of what has been described as “kinesthetic empathy.” What does it mean, however, to watch, respond to, or appreciate movement? And how does the historical and theoretical concept of kinesthetic empathy relate to contemporary audiences’ articulations of the experience of watching dance?

This article sets out to answer these questions by exploring different kinds of kinesthetic and empathetic responses and pleasures (and indeed displeasures) articulated by spectators of live dance across different styles and contexts. Pleasure is of particular importance to audience studies because it relates to motivations. Why do people seek out dance performances to watch? What are they looking for in the experience? In this context, we are interested in kinesthetic empathy as a mode of engaging with dance that can give pleasure to spectators and can be a strong motivating factor in why people choose to watch dance. However, we feel that any attempt to define audience responses in terms of preformed concepts of kinesthetic empathy enacts a kind of teleology that also potentially closes down and prejudges possible responses to dance. We are critical of the potential universalism present in conceptualizations of kinesthetic empathy and are interested in how ideas of kinesthetic empathy are relevant to viewers who have different experiences of dance and different motivations.

We are also aware of the current interest in the “mirror neuron” system as a methodology for understanding responses to dance, particularly in terms of the wider context of this research within a cross-disciplinary research project.¹ However, this paper does not respond to discussion of the mirror neuron system. Nor is it primarily a discussion of kinesthetic empathy in dance history or theory. Instead, it is firmly located within the ethnographic traditions of audience research and driven by extensive primary research material. Qualitative audience research deals with conscious, reflective responses post-performance. Our audience research material has made it possible to identify a range of kinesthetic pleasures that spectators articulate in response to watching live dance. The very breadth of pleasures recorded and presented here is a key point of the paper, which aims to stress that we need to think of kinesthetic responses in the plural rather than the singular. These often involve empathetic experiences but also include kinesthetic responses that are linked with broader aspects of emotion, admiration, escapism, and sensuality, some of which, we will suggest, can be conceptualized with reference to “sympathy” and “contagion.”

As a result, this paper is structured through discussion of a series of possibilities, mapping the range of pleasures, motivations, and expectations through which spectators engage with the kinesthetic aspects of dance. Martin Barker’s discussion of audiences is useful here: “Being an audience for anything is never a simple or singular process. It is a process that begins in advance of the actual encounter, as people gather knowledge and build expectations. [ . . . ] In other words, audiences bring their social and personal histories with them” (Barker 2006, 124; emphasis in the original). We shall refer to pleasures or interpretative “strategies” to designate the instinctive and largely automatic and engrained processes that motivate spectators in their engagement with dance. The plural of “strategies” indicates our interest in describing the multiple and nonhierarchical nature of spectator responses.

Watching Dance—Methodologies

The research presented in this paper is located within a larger project, “Watching Dance: Kinesthetic Empathy” (<http://www.watchingdance.org>), that uses audience research and neuroscience to explore how dance spectators respond to and empathize with dance. This is a three-year, multidisciplinary project, involving collaboration across four institutions (Manchester, Glasgow, and York St. John universities and Imperial College London), that is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the United Kingdom. The materials we discuss here draw on the audience research data gathered by this project through a range of...