Movement, Gesture, and Meaning: A Sensiromotor Model for Audience Engagement with Dance

Philosophers of art draw a distinction between two broad sets of concerns: questions about aesthetic responses to artworks and questions about interpretation, including questions about the formal strategies artists use to express emotions and ideas. Recent research in philosophy and neuroscience addresses the nature of aesthetic responses to dance, suggesting that they are embodied, grounded in the human mirror system and action observation network, and involve either some form of tacit motor simulation (Calvo-Merino et al 2008) or proprioceptive sensibility (Montero, 2006). Recent literature does not address interpretative responses to dance. However, a model for the way that dance is used to express emotions and ideas can be derived from the literature on aesthetic response. Langer (1953) and Beardsley (1982) argued that dance is a gestural language in which ordinary movements are used as “virtual gestures ” to express the intentions of choreographers and dancers (e.g., the ideas and emotions constitutive of the content of a dance). Recent discussions suggest that areas of the premotor and parietal cortices associated with the action observation network play a significant role in our capacity to recognize and understand the intentions (Gallese & Goldman, 1998; Hamilton & Grafton, 2006) and emotiona