A study on the metacommunicative competence of the dance space

Dance consists of a dancer’s sensory experience as well as her/his inner experience. On the other hands, it also offers aesthetic beauty and pleasure to the audience. Dance possesses cognitive aspects including observation, imitation and performance, and emotional aspects including stimulation, feeling, attention and expression through the continuous training and practice which interact each other. Dance has not only visual elements but it is also kinesthetic arts which feels and understands through the entire of the body. In a dance performance, the dancer evokes the feeling of inner experience and the process of self-reflect, and the audience observes the dancer’s intended performative state. If so, it could be argued that how the communication emerges and processes through the non-verbal dance movement. With this interrogation, this study explores the relationship between a dancer and an audience in a dance performance through the contemporary interests of embodied dance to understand how the audience perceives the dancer’s movement based on phenomenology and cognitive science. The nature of artistic creativity may be metaphoric thinking which offers cognitive and emotional elements of communication between choreographer, dancer and audience. Therefore, this study aims at exploration of the metaphoric space which may be able to extend the potential of the dancer and audience relationship through the metacommunicational perspective discussion. This study examines firstly, to discuss the process of perceiving dance for the audience, it assumes that body, mind and brain are all connected and analyses the cognitive system through cognitive neuroscience. Secondly, to discusses the emotional reaction and awareness between the dancer and audience, it explores the audience’s kinesthetic empathy with the dancer’s body movement. Lastly, it could be argued that when the audience perceives the dancer, her/his cognition is also activated. Therefore, intersubjectivity is discussed to explore the greater and potential relationship between the dancer and the audience through metaphoric space