Abstract
Art experiences, in particular, dance and performing arts, have evolved as social tools facilitating non-verbal communication, group coordination and social bonding. While the behavioural, physiological and neural underpinnings of aesthetic experience have been widely investigated, the impact of the live, social, real-world experiences, in particular dance, has yet to be studied. The aim of the thesis is to explore the importance of physical and social liveness in live performing arts, with a new contemporary dance performance titled Detective Work. I first review past empirical research on social art experiences, and existing theories on multi- brain frameworks and inter-brain synchrony (IBS). I further provide an outlook for the empirical research to be conducted in the thesis. Chapter 2 focuses on the effect of physical liveness by comparing two groups of spectators attending the same dance piece, from: a) the live dance performance, and b) a cinema screening of the professionally edited film. Chapter 2 presents the results from the thematic analysis; on the modes, themes, and memories related to engaging with the dance piece, and from the exploratory factor analysis; revealing the important dimensions of the audience’s experience with the dance piece, and how it may be explained by physical liveness and dance expertise. Chapters 3 and 4 explore the effect of social dynamics shared between the audience members on IBS from the electroencephalogram (EEG) data, in the live (Chapter 3) and cinema (Chapter 4) conditions. Chapter 4 further shares the behavioural findings from another group that watched the unedited recording of the same dance piece in a dance studio. Chapter 5 compares the IBS and averaged EEG power between the live and cinema audience members, as well as from another set of data collected in a laboratory, where participants watched the unedited recording alone. The last chapter discusses the findings across previous chapters, on how the social aesthetic experience of Detective Work may be related to shared and overall neural activity, physical and social liveness, and dance expertise, and whether the findings may be applied to understanding other real-world aesthetic experiences or other social scenarios. This thesis highlights the challenges of conducting research in ecologically valid settings, while providing a lens into understanding the complexity of social aesthetic experience.