🇬🇧 Experiencing Dance performance, With all Senses 🇬🇧 (ENGLISH)

 Experiencing Dance performance,  With all Senses

DANCE IS PRIMARILY A VISUAL AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE?

In an article published this year, in frontiers Psychol ,16 April 2021, Bläsing and Zimmermann discuss the general perspective of dance as a visual art form by common arts and science perspectives. The article brings in particular up how dance performance can be made accessible for a non-sighted Audience.

SIGNAL OF CHANGE

Cultural institutions and artists still share the view of dance as primarily a visual aesthetics experience. All thought, there is a growing interest in creating dance performances available for individuals with visual impairment / blindness (Bläsing-  Zimmermann 2021). 

Could this interest and perspective lead to a new way for artists and cultural institutions to work with dance performance?  

EXPERIENCE DANCE WITH ALL SENSES - DANCE A MULTIMODAL ACTIVITY

Different modalities in which dance can be accessed, from the visual (section Watching dance, and enjoying it) over the audible to the tangible (section Action perception coupling beyond vision). Audible access to dance will be regarded in detail, with three different aspects: natural sounds produced by the dancers (section Dance made audible by means of choreography), technically produced sound resulting from movement sonification (section Dance made audible by means of technology), and audio description (section Putting dance into words: challenges for audio description), followed by tangible access via touch tours (section Dance performance made tangible). In typical “real world” scenarios, none of these modalities (except, to some extent, the visual) would be used exclusively to provide access to dance performance, supporting the notion that dance is a multimodal activity, for the producer as well as for the perceiver.  (Bläsing-  Zimmermann 2021).

REFLECTION & POTENTIAL:

I think that broadening and giving more focus on other aesthetics than just the visual, when creating dance performances material, could enrich the aesthetics experience for every one that's taking part enjoying a performance, not just only for a non-sighted Audience. 

SOURCES:

B Bläsing & E Zimmermann, Front. Psychol. ( 16 April 2021) Dance Is More Than Meets the Eye—How Can Dance Performance Be Made Accessible for a Non-sighted Audience? https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.643848/full