Abstract
According to Hume, experience in observing art is one of the prerequisites for being an ideal art critic. But although Hume extols the value of observing art for the art critic, he says little about the value, for the art critic, of executing art. That is, he does not discuss whether ideal aesthetic judges should have practiced creating the form of art they are judging. In this paper, I address this issue. Contrary to some contemporary philosophers who claim that experience in creating art is irrelevant to one’s ability to judge that art form, as well as to some dance critics who see dance training as possibly even detrimental to one’s aesthetic judgment, I suggest that having practiced dancing makes one a better observer of certain aesthetic qualities of dance. Dance training, I argue, can facilitate a kinesthetic experience upon watching dance without which some aesthetic aspects of a dance performance—such as grace, power, and precision, as perceived kinesthetically—may go unnoticed.
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Notes
Compare this to the experience of reading an article for enjoyment and reading that same article after you have written on the topic yourself. After practice, your reading becomes much more focused.
Although it seems unlikely, one explanation of these results could be that ballet dancers and capoiera performers have innate neural differences that account for their different neural reactions. If so, their specific training is irrelevant to the observed different patterns of neural activity. However, the researchers guarded against this explanation of their results. Capoiera was chosen specifically because it is kinematically very similar to ballet. For example, they both involve turns, high kicks, and big jumps with the legs scissoring past each other. And a professional choreographer was recruited to choose the video clips that were the best kinematically matched. Most likely, our brains are not innately fine-tuned so that observing capoiera but not ballet produces a motor response in some of us while in others observing ballet but not capoiera produces a motor response.
I am hesitant to say that it shows this (rather than it seems to show this) since male dancers still observe more male-specific movements and female dancers still observe more female-specific movements. This is in part because rehearsals and classes are sometimes held separately. For example, there will be a rehearsal for the men’s variation, and only the men who are doing this role will be there; and then there is men’s class and women’s pointe class. Moreover, even when in training together, women watch women more and men watch men more.
A further reason for why females outperformed males may be that, in the ballet world, females generally have trained more (starting at a younger age and putting in more hours) than males.
Moreover, it could be that for a trained ballet dancer, the motor–perceptual experience of watching ballet accounts, in part, for why ballet dancers generally prefer watching good ballet much more watching good performances of other physical activities, such as capoiera. See Cole and Montero (2007) for a discussion of the pleasure of bodily movement.
For a discussion of expressive qualities in art, see Graham (2005).
It may also be that part of the aesthetic value of ensemble work depends on having a motor–perceptual experience of the movement of the ensemble as a whole. In watching the string of dancers, hand in hand, tie themselves into a knot in Balanchine’s Concerto Barroco, for example, one appreciates not only the mathematical beauty and cleverness of the choreography but also the feeling of being tied into a knot oneself, of being, that is, the entire tangle. However, since dancers have never practiced being tied into individual knots themselves (or at least not literally), the role of dance training in facilitating this, if at all, is unclear.
One further questions is, granted that dance training does improve one’s ability to aesthetically judge dance, does the rate of improvement in one’s ability to aesthetically judge dance decrease with more practice?
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Acknowledgments
I thank Rachel Zuckert for her helpful comments on numerous aspects of this work as well as the Phenomenology and Cognitive Science anonymous referees for their extensive useful comments.
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Montero, B. Practice makes perfect: the effect of dance training on the aesthetic judge. Phenom Cogn Sci 11, 59–68 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9236-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9236-9