Robin Conrad

This research reframes aesthetics, considering it a motivator for action, exploring its generative possibilities. Expanding on aesthetic experience, denoted as a particular type of qualitative experience or exceptional state in which attention is directed, eliciting feelings, fascination, and affective arousal, this empirical study explores the process by which dancers of the improvisational and interactive social dance of Argentine Tango feel the dance as it is being danced. Participants in this dance form describe aesthetic experience as a complex initiator in the creative process of making art, termed here as aesthetic decision-making. Aesthetic decision-making provides a way to understand the complexity or multiplicity of possibilities within creative composition. Argentine Tango dancers with their cultural sensitivity to the dance, individual aesthetic predilections, and tactile-kinesthetic sensations are embedded in and impacted by affordances and affectivity. Through aesthetic decision-making, the ecology in which the dancers operate reflects not only what is available but also what is possible. Once identified as possible, the options for creative processing become intermixed with what is available. Thus, operating in a helical fashion, aesthetic decision-making becomes the action of expanding worlds, of making art.