Identifying regions of good agreement among responders in engagement with a piece of live dance

This study investigated the issue of subjectivity in dance cognition by examining the amount of agreement in continuous “engagement” responses made by 12 observers to a semi-improvised dance work. Continuous judgements of engagement were collected using the portable Audience Response Facility, which sampled ratings from participants twice a second. Sample-by-sample standard deviation (SD) scores were used as a measure of observer agreement. SD varied from 19% to 34% of the total engagement scale range. Seven regions of good agreement were identified and analysed. Sections where expectations were not interrupted were more likely to produce good agreement. A further analysis examined the effect of window size (bin width of one sample, up to 11 samples) and alternate measures of observer agreement (50% interpercentile, 90% interpercentile, and median absolute deviation, in addition to SD) on results. Window size made the least difference to the analysis of observer agreement. The results counter the views that dance response is too subjective to be worthy of experimental investigation, or that it lacks subjective, intertextual components.