What is exceptional about live dance performance in comparison to digital? How does seeing a real 3D live time dance affect people in a physically, corporally, assembled audience? And how is that is different or better than the experience an individual has when viewing an online performance? Why should people gather together physically in groups to see a performance when they can see a show on their phones, tablets or computers? These are the questions we have to know the answers to if we want to be hired for a school assembly or theater performance, or to justify funding for dance.
It is easy to see what the downsides are of dance performances in theaters. To get people to leave the comfort of their sofas and safety of their homes is inconvenient and difficult. Publicity costs a lot. In the days of feared epidemics like the bird flu, public gatherings are places where there are lots of germs. In a theater someone else's cellphone conversation or crying baby interrupts the flow of experience in a way that doesn't happen when you are at home streaming a movie on Netflix...
Now, have I talked you out of the idea of going to see Dance Brazil? Alvin Ailey? Or a Cirque du Soleil show? Didn't think so. So.... why? Why do we love and need live performances in the digital age?
I have been reading Oliver Sack's newest book, Hallucinations, and something that relates to the above questions jumped out at me. He discusses the neurological phenomenon that produces "phantom limb" sensations, that mental magic that allows people to experience robotic arms as part of their own being – or mentally harness the power of an avatar. (p. 270-290)
My question: is this effect neurologically similar to what happens to people who play video games, and more importantly for us as stage choreographers, inside the person in the audience watching a live dance performance? Many times as an audience member I have the physical sensation of my own muscles tensing and releasing as the dancer I watch contracts and reaches. My eyes well up with tears and my own heart constricts or swells as I "experience" the sorrow or joy in the movements of the dancer in front of me. This transference – the sensation of me knowing motion, emotion, and meaning of the dancer's as my own must surely be the same or related - neurologically speaking- to that which the great neuroscientist Oliver Sacks describes. Does the performer on stage become a part not only of my own body image, but of my body's felt action and state of mind as well?
I discuss in my own book, Dancing for Young Audiences, the poet Coleridge's idea that we respond to artificially constructed reality of art through a "willing suspension of disbelief. " But is that really why art and dance affect us so much as we watch? Could it be something more intrinsic? Something neurologically structured within us? Is it that we respond to what is on stage less by an act of will, but more through an unconscious, evolutionarily primed response within our own body image to what we see other people doing?
This instinct to feel what we see, in response to another's emotion, is what Aristotle said is the important purpose of attending a theater performance. The "cleansing" of the self. His words translate as "catharsis." It certainly cannot be a coincidence that the Greek theater at Epidaurus was part of a great hospital complex for healing physical, mental and spiritual illnesses. The Greeks believed in healing holistically. And ultimately science now reveals to us that mind and body exist together, not separately. There is no such thing as a disembodied mind.
Art can heal. Hospitals have music and art therapy. Dance can bring the mind and body into focus and unity, since rhythm unites and physical expression works as an outlet for psychological pain. If anything, it seems to me that society needs what live art and live dance gives so compellingly to those who participate as performers and as audience; an expression of who we are both personally and collectively, what we would like to become, and what we desire to reject safely experienced in a theatrical form and channeled for others to witness and to understand. No need for a gun.
