Slowed dance spectating and changes in time perception: A dialogue between aesthetics and cognitive science on zeitlupe in contemporary art

Résumé En

The co-presence of bodies inherent to live performance coupled with the movement qualities of the dancers underlies the audience’s kinesthetic empathy (Foster, 2011). We were interested to quantify a change in “body-mind” state of the spectators brought about by a live rendition of Gourfink’s unique choreography that uses a contemplative practice to produce an extremely slow and hypnotic dance. Phenomenological studies of her work report a number of body-mind effects including a change in temporal perception (Gioffredi, 2008). We wanted to quantify changes in temporal perception, test for their specificity and assess their relation to changes in physiological rhythms (Joufflineau & Bachrach 2016). We combined physiological monitoring and subjective reports with two measures of temporal cognition before and after a 40-min live performance (12 subjects): a Spontaneous Tempo Production (STP) task (McAuley et al., 2006) and a task assessing the temporal window inducing the Apparent Motion effect (AM) (Marusich & Gilden, 2014). The same temporal tasks (14 subjects) were tested with a control choreography with a distinctly different quality of movement. Post-performance, we observed a significant slowing down of STP (t=15.01, p