Dance Is More Than Meets the Eye-How Can Dance Performance Be Made Accessible for a Non-sighted Audience?

Bettina Bläsing,Esther Zimmermann

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.643848

Abstract

Dance is regarded as visual art form by common arts and science perspectives. Definitions of dance as means of communication agree that its message is conveyed by the dancer/choreographer via the human body for the observer, leaving no doubt that dance is performed to be watched. Brain activation elicited by the visual perception of dance has also become a topic of interest in cognitive neuroscience, with regards to action observation in the context of learning, expertise and aesthetics. The view that the aesthetic experience of dance is primarily a visual one is still shared by many artists and cultural institutions, yet there is growing interest in making dance performances accessible for individuals with visual impairment / blindness. Means of supporting the non-visual experience of dance include verbal (audio description), auditive (choreographed body sounds, movement sonification), and haptic (touch tour) techniques, applied for different purposes by artists and researchers, with three main objectives: to strengthen the cultural participation of a non-sighted audience in the cultural and aesthetic experience of dance; to expand the scope of dance as an artistic research laboratory toward novel ways of perceiving what dance can convey; and to inspire new lines of (neuro-cognitive) research beyond watching dance. Reviewing literature from different disciplines and drawing on the personal experience of an inclusive performance of Simon Mayer's “Sons of Sissy,” we argue that a non-exclusively visual approach can be enriching and promising for all three perspectives and conclude by proposing hypotheses for multidisciplinary lines of research.

Highlights

Dance has been defined and characterized in many different ways and from the perspectives of different disciplines
Aesthetic evaluation of the perceived movement depends on the observer’s expertise (Kirsch et al, 2015; Orgs et al, 2018), the variability and predictability of the movement kinematics and dynamics (Orlandi et al, 2020b) as well as the temporal coordination between dancers (Vicary et al, 2017). These perspectives support a common notion in science as well as the arts, leading to the conclusion that the aesthetic experience of dance is mainly a visual one: dance is brought on stage in order to be watched, and even though this visual experience of moving bodies can elicit a variety of multimodal perceptions (Boucher, 2004), it is always visual in the first place
We have focused on approaches and techniques that are used to make the experience of dance performance accessible to a non-sighted audience

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Dance has been defined and characterized in many different ways and from the perspectives of different disciplines. Kirsch et al (2016) propose that expanding the focus of neuroaesthetics research to include dance and human body movement in general could lead to a more holistic understanding of aesthetics At this point it could be added that, given the prominent role of brain areas supporting multimodal integration and supramodal representations (Ricciardi and Pietrini, 2011), not exclusively focusing on visual perception could be another promising step into this direction. Ricciardi and Pietrini (2011) point out that spatial discrimination and navigation skills in individuals with visual impairment are comparable to those in sighted, and that this applies to cognitive domains that rely indirectly on spatial representations, like number processing Taken together, these findings provide evidence that human motor action can be explored in other ways than through vision. The extent to which earlier visual experience is useful or necessary for the interpretation of such images is under debate, even audience members with congenital blindness can extract useful information via tactile picture perception, especially if additional information or explanation is provided (Heller, 2002)

A CASE REPORT

DISCUSSION

CONCLUSIONS

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT