Measuring responses to dance : is there a 'grammar' of dance

This paper reports a series of experiments that investigated how dance artists learn to see and understand dance. We measured, in real time, the responses of a number of dance artists and students, to a range of different dance stimuli to gain an understanding of how observers respond to structural elements of dance as they unfold over time. We were particularly interested in how dance students learn to 'see' and understand a dance work. We assumed that the ways in which dance students learn to understand dance underpins how they learn to make dance. Therefore, observing dance students' responses to dance will provide a basis on which to begin to theorise about how dance students as observers of dance cognise or think about dance. That is, how do they construct dance as a meaningful system of movement and in some instances signs and/or symbols? Specifically, we were interested in whether we could elicit evidence that dance students were responding to the dance on the basis of any kind of shared dance 'grammar'.