Dance is often called a “universal language” with the ability to express shared emotions and stories across cultures.
A collaboration between scientists and artists has found that, when people watch live dance, they also share focus and attention, with their brainwaves syncing up.
“We wanted to explore what makes live performance feel so different from watching a recording,” says Guido Orgs, a neuroscientist and dancer at University College London (UCL).
“Dance felt like the perfect medium to investigate that because it’s so often experienced in the moment, in a shared space.”
The research, published in iScience, was conducted as part of the NEUROLIVE project – an interdisciplinary research collaboration that aims to understand what makes live performances so special.
Participant getting brain activity monitor placed before NEUROLIVE project dance performance. Credit: Hugo Glendinning.
A group of 59 audience members were fitted with EEG headsets so the researchers could track their brainwaves.
The audience members watched 3 live performances of Detective Work – a contemporary dance duet choreographed by Seke Chimutengwende in collaboration with Steph McMann.
Dance performance from the NEUROLIVE project. Credit: Hugo Glendinning.
The researchers invited a second group to watch a recording of the same performance in a cinema – some together and some alone – in a lab to compare the different settings.
The results show that the live audience members’ brains synced up in the delta band. Delta brainwaves are the slowest brain waves in humans, most active during deep sleep.
“Previous research has mostly linked attention to the faster alpha band brainwaves,” says Laura Rai, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCL and first author of the study. “But in our study, it was the delta band that best captured shared engagement, which is surprising.”
The synchrony was especially strong when performers made direct eye contact with the crowd.
“There’s so much knowledge contained in live performance,” says artistic director and researcher at NEUROLIVE, Matthias Sperling. “The artists are experts in liveness, and so are the audience.”
Throughout the study, the researchers asked choreographer Chimutengwende to identify moments he expected to be the most engaging.
The EGG data showed that audience synchrony peaked at nearly every moment Chimutengwende predicted.
Participants in front of stage for NEUROLIVE project dance performance. Credit: Hugo Glendinning.
“People often emphasise how personal and subjective art is, and that’s absolutely true regarding interpretation. But when it comes to attention, we found that how people engage with live performance can be surprisingly predictable and measurable,” adds Guido Orgs. “Essentially, the artists know what they’re doing.”
Those watching together in a cinema were also found to have brain synchrony, but when participants watched the performance alone in a lab it weakened.
The researchers suggest being together may be just as important as the performance itself.
“The fact that we find synchrony in the delta band links the experience of live dance to the idea that performing arts are social art forms,” says Orgs. “They are created by performers and an audience who are in the same space at the same time.”
The team now hopes to take the study on a world tour, collecting more data on the performance in different settings.
“This research offers a new way to tell stories about what’s happening in that rich, complex environment, using science to open a different window into those shared experiences,” says Sperling, a co-author of the study.