Overt audience responses to contemporary dance: is hand and body movement a signal of engagement?

Theodorou, P. Healey and F. Smeraldi: Abstract and Spoken Paper, International Symposium on Performance Science (ISPS), Reykjavík, Iceland, 2017

Abstract

Background

Conventional seated audiences have relatively restricted opportunities for response. Perhaps the most salient is applause. However, they also use their hands and bodies to make other, visible, movements: to fix hair, adjust glasses, scratch ears, support their chin, or shift their body on the chair. The question we address here is whether these apparently incidental movements may provide systematic clues about their level of engagement with a performance. Our programmatic hypothesis is that audiences’ ongoing responses are part of a bi-directional system of audience-performer communication that distinguishes live from recorded performance. What could performers be detecting in these situations that informs their dynamic sense of how well a performance is going?

Aims

The main aim of this research is to uncover these overt audience responses and test whether they provide a signal of audience engagement and thereby from part of a feedback cycle between the performers and their audience.

Method

We investigate this in the context of contemporary dance by capturing the responses of an audience to four performances by the London Contemporary Dance School. Video recordings of performers and audience were analyzed using computer vision and data analysis techniques extracting hand and body movement data. Each audience member wore a reflective wristband that allowed for automatic hand movement tracking, in this case by applying a blob detection algorithm to the video recordings. Audience movements were compared with the results of a survey of 21 participants who ranked the four dance pieces according to their quality.

Results

The results of this study indicate that overall audiences move very little during the performance. However, hand seem to play a significant role since they follow different movement patterns compared to the rest of the body; indeed, they are able to move more freely and might be detectable by the performers. In particular, we examine whether changes in hand and body movements are associated with audience preference for the four performances, as captured by the surveys. Looking at the mean speed of hands and body for each performance separately, the results show that they both move less during the most preferred dance pieces while their movement is more at the least preferred ones.

Conclusions

The results provide some initial clues to the importance of overt audience reactions, and especially visible hand movements. While the interaction between audience and performers is especially explicit in genres such as stand-up comedy, our study shows that it is still important, although more subtle, in genres like contemporary dance. The results of this study point to interesting open research questions regarding the interpretation of hand and body signals during a dance performance and their relation to audience engagement.

Keywords

audience; engagement; motion tracking; movement; contemporary dance

Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as part of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Media and Arts Technology.

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