Worldmaking: Situating the performance-maker-as-scientist

From early 20th century psychologies of the arts, through the emergence of experimental aesthetics and up to today’s “neuroesthetics,” the past century of scientific investigations of art has unrolled across sweeping changes in psychological and cognitive theory. Over the last two decades, empirical inquiry has also expanded from almost exclusive focus on pictorial art and music to consideration of all art forms, including performance. Due to this analytic heritage, though, analyses focus largely on the art product, to the exclusion of the conditions in which it is presented. This is particularly egregious with regard to performance art forms, as neglecting their situatedness harbors the same analytic risks as does extrapolating real-world results from empirical research conducted under reduced circumstances. Performers do not move, speak, or interact in a vacuum, but rather within made worlds in which not only action but also the visible and sonic environment are composed to engender affective valences through the production of perceptual accords and conflicts, emphasis and obscuration of action and detail, and cross-modal augmentation of sensory impact.

An ecological, “expanded scenographic” view (McKinney & Palmer 2017) of performance study redraws the boundaries of occupational categories like director and choreographer along broader lines. In this paper, I correct William Forsythe’s creative domain from choreographer to composer, in the fundamental sense of one who puts elements together. Like virtually all dancemakers, Forsythe is not merely a stepsmith but also determines the total visual and auditory environment within which his choreography will be presented. Not only does consideration of composed dance as situated within equally composed worlds require a refocusing of the analytic lenses of dance/performance studies, this view also crucially inflects the potential of analyses that consider artists as scientists working under uniquely constrained conditions toward distinctly domain-specific outcomes (Zeki 1999, Lehrer 2007).