Engaged and confused: Aesthetic appreciation of live and screened contemporary dance

Aesthetic cognitivism assumes a positive relationship between aesthetic experience and knowledge acquisition. Here, we study this relationship in the context of contemporary dance. 207 audience members watched either a live performance or a screening of a contemporary dance duet, where some participants wore mobile EEGs. All participants reported on their aesthetic experience after the show. Qualitatively, a thematic analysis of open questions revealed that the audience recalled the performance in both descriptive and imaginative ways, highlighting ambiguity and meaning making as recurrent ways of engagement. Quantitatively, a principal component analysis revealed two distinct dimensions of aesthetic experience: engagement and confusion. Simple group comparisons suggested that engagement was higher in the live than in the screened performance and among spectators not wearing EEGs, but these effects disappeared when dance experience was accounted for. Confusion did not depend on live or screened performance context, wearing EEGs, nor on prior dance experience. Participants wearing EEGs reported overall lower excitement, and higher happiness before the show, and a drop of happiness after the show. Our findings suggest that dance experience is more important for audience engagement than the specific context in which dance is experienced, and that ambiguity is not necessarily an aversive component of engagement. Confusion can be experienced as an intended feature of an artwork, and in the process also becomes a form of engagement, more so if viewers have sufficient experience with the art form. Our findings therefore challenge a conceptualisation of aesthetic experience as a simple by product of insight.