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.

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We utilise qualitative audience research and functional brain imaging (fMRI) to examine the aesthetic experience of watching dance both with and without music. This transdisciplinary approach was motivated by the recognition that the aesthetic experience of dance revealed through conscious interpretation could have neural correlates in brain activity. When audiences were engaged in watching dance accompanied by music, the fMRI data revealed evidence of greater intersubject correlation in a left anterior region of the superior temporal gyrus known to be involved in complex audio processing. Moreover, the qualitative data revealed how spectators derived pleasure from finding convergences between two complex stimuli (dance and music). Without music, greater intersubject correlation was found bilaterally in a posterior region of the superior temporal gyrus, showing that bodily sounds such as breath provide a more salient auditory signal than music in primary auditory regions.Watching dance without music also resulted in increased intersubject correlation amongst spectators in the parietal and occipitotemporal cortices, suggesting a greater influence of the body than when interpreting the dance stimuli with music. Similarly, the audience research found evidence of corporeally focused experience, but suggests that while embodied responses were common across spectators, they were accompanied by different evaluative judgements. In this paper we discuss a study that was carried out as part of the Watching Dance: KeywordsKinesthetic Empathy project (www.watchingdance.org). The Watching Dance project. This was a transdisciplinary exploration of the extent to which spectators' experiences of dance were based upon kinesthetic empathy. The present paper focuses on spectators' aesthetic experience of sound and movement, investigated through a combination of qualitative audience research and functional brain imaging (fMRI).As a multi-modal form, dance invites research into how different sensory modalities interact with each other. Although the relationship between dance and music is central to Western theatre dance practice (see for example Jordan, 2000;2008), and has begun to be addressed by neurocognitive approaches , it has not hitherto been studied in combination with qualitative research on dance audiences in theatre settings. Our approach parallels the recent proposals of how aesthetic aspects of dance can (Christensen & CalvoMerino, 2013) and should (Jola & Christensen, 2015) be a subject for empirical research into the audience experience. Further, our research emphasis aligns with the current surge of interest in multisensory aspects of performance (Banes & Lepecki, 2007;Bläsing, 2015; Chapple & Kattenbelt, 2006;Di Benedetto, 2010;McKinney, 2012;Vass-Rhee 2010;Viaud-Delmon et al. 2012). Within this context of developing research into the multi-modal aspects of dance, our aim was to research audiences' responses to dance movement when accompanied by different combinations of movement and sound.The specific que...

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