When people watch a live contemporary dance performance, their brainwaves sync up, signalling shared focus and attention, according to a new study led by UCL researchers.
That synchrony dropped when the same performance was viewed alone on video, report the authors of the new iScience paper.
Dr Guido Orgs (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience), a neuroscientist and dancer who was the senior author of the paper, said: "We wanted to explore what makes live performance feel so different from watching a recording. Dance felt like the perfect medium to investigate that because it’s so often experienced in the moment, in a shared space."
The study is part of the NEUROLIVE project, a collaboration between scientists and artists at UCL, Goldsmiths University of London, the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and Siobhan Davies Studios. NEUROLIVE investigates "liveness" - the unique quality of being present in a performance.
To find out, Dr Orgs and collaborators brought the lab into the theatre. They outfitted 59 audience members with EEG headsets to track brainwaves across three live performances of Detective Work, a contemporary dance performance choreographed by Seke Chimutengwende in collaboration with dance artist Stephanie McMann. They then invited other participants to watch a recording of the same piece, in the cinema with others or alone in a lab, to compare how different settings affect brain synchrony.
In the live shows, audience members’ brains synced in the Delta band, a range of slow frequency brainwaves typically associated with mind-wandering and social processing. The synchrony was especially strong when performers made direct eye contact with the crowd.
First author Dr Laura Rai (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience) said: "Previous research has mostly linked attention to the faster Alpha band brainwaves. But in our study, it was the Delta band that best captured shared engagement, which is surprising."
Even without a live stage, watching the recorded performance together in a cinema still triggered brain synchrony. But when people watched alone in a lab, that synchrony weakened. The results suggest that sharing the moment with others, or "social liveness," may be as important as the performance itself.
Dr Orgs said: "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. They are created by performers and an audience who are in the same space at the same time."
The researchers also investigated whether moments of heightened engagement could be predicted. They asked choreographer Chimutengwende to identify scenes he expected would be most engaging. Audience synchrony peaked at nearly every moment he predicted.
Dr Orgs said: "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. Essentially, the artists know what they’re doing."
The team hopes to take the performance and study on a world tour one day, collecting more data and testing their findings in new settings. They also look forward to improved EEG technology. Current systems are bulky, movement-sensitive, and time-consuming to set up for large groups.
Co-author Matthias Sperling, artistic director and researcher at NEUROLIVE, said: "There’s so much knowledge contained in live performance. The artists are experts in liveness, and so are the audience. 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."
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Chris Lane
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