Ian Heckman

I think we have come to a point in the current state of technology where we, as appreciators, makers, and producers of live performances, must ask ourselves an important question. We must ask ourselves whether, in a world where we can easily access videotapes of performances, there is something important that we obtain through our engagement with live performances that we cannot get in our engagement with even the best quality videos. The performing arts, as artforms which perform with real bodies on a stage, seem to be on the verge of an existential crisis. Given the sheer cost of live productions of artworks, it might seem more and more tempting, from both an audience’s and a performing arts organization’s standpoint, to simply create videos of artworks and make them publicly available through the Internet. However, despite the cost efficiency of recordings, many of those who attend live performances have an intuition that there is something we get from a live performance that we cannot obtain from a mere video of that performance. This paper explores and justifies the claim that we do lose something when we videotape a live performance, and what we lose is a sense of the performers’ presence through becoming kinesthetically distanced from the performers’ inner world and their agency.

Recent debates in the philosophy of dance have focused on the relationship between motor response and dance appreciation. Some philosophers argue that motor responses to dances are an important part of dance appreciation. Proponents of such a claim are often backed with support from cognitive science. But it has not remained uncontroversial. Despite its controversy, the concept of motor response remains under-analyzed. As a result, assumptions about the idea and purpose of motor response get borrowed from cognitive science. I argue that one such assumption, that motor response is supposed to be veridical, runs us into several problems. It runs us into something of a paradox, where it is claimed that motor responses happen as part of our general perception of movement. However, few people experience such responses. Furthermore, it seems that the motor responses that are appropriate for a dance might not be the ones the dancer is feeling. As a result, we should prefer an account of motor response that emphasizes its flexibility and its ability to change and adapt to the movement we see.