This chapter presents the second study of the thesis which had as its main objective the closer examination of audience hand behaviour, as well as to test to test for any possible connection between audience movement and engagement. This study followed a similar methodological approach to Study I apart from introducing a new automatic method of hand movement tracking and using self-reported surveys as a supplementary material to test specific hypotheses.
The results of the study provide evidence that there is a relationship between audience body movement and engagement, which raises a number of interesting questions. The main finding is that according to 13 external "judges" deciding on the engagement levels of 24 audience clips, participants reported highest engagement levels in the clips where audiences move least. Moreover, it appears that the judges may have been responding more to hand movements than head and body movement as hands move significantly more than the rest of the body. This suggests that audience hand movement is the part of the body that is both frequently and potentially detectable to the dancers. This finding is consistent with the observations from Galton (1885) and Pasquier (2015) mentioned in Chapter 2, of engagement for audiences in lectures and theatres. The focus on the hands suggests that people become restless and this leads to more spontaneous self-touching gestures. This is compatible with the literature that claims that such gestures relate more to audience boredom or nervousness (Theodorou and Healey, 2017; Mahmoud et al., 2011). However, even though head movements are less obvious, it is possible that they may also be a significant component of audience response. This is something that cannot be resolved by using the current analysis, however the movement of the head has a strong connection with that of the torso while hands have more degrees of freedom to move independently from the rest of the body. Therefore, measuring the torso without the hands might be a good approximation of the movement of the head separately.
Another observation from Study I that is also supported here is that overall audi- ences move very little and have predominantly expressionless faces during the actual performance parts. This is in clear contrast to the animated facial expressions and body movements that are apparent during intervals. The decrease of body movement is something that was expected since audiences are physically very restricted during a performance as they are supposed to be sitting quietly on a chair observing and making sure they don’t annoy the performers or the rest of the audience. However, the fact that audiences have predominantly blank faces during the performance was not expected. This can be interpreted as a sign of concentration connected to people’s senses that they are not actively socially engaged during the performance. Overall, it is apparent that the facial expressions and hand gestures of the audience examined here are differ- ent from those involved in focused social interaction. In face-to-face interactions, social communication guides the non-verbal interaction (McNeill, 2008). During a conversation objects in the surrounding environment and spoken concepts lead the gestures and the facial expressions but it is apparent that in the case of an audience in a performance, social displays are greatly reduced. Therefore, hand to face gestures and facial expres- sions may be more representative of the cognitive-affective states that accompany the audience during the performance.
In addition, even though in Study I the results showed that the average velocity of the audience was decreasing during the performance while there was an increase in the number of audience hands on face, the results of this study did not show any clear pattern
of average hand velocity during each part of the performance while overall there was an increase in the number of hands on face. This might be due to the shorter length of these dance pieces (15 minutes) compared to the piece in Study I (37 minutes without a break) which does not allow enough time for the audience to reach a moment of boredom.
With regards to left and right hand behavior the results of this study show no sig- nificant differences between the use of the right and the left hand but show a significant difference in the average velocity of the hands with the left hand moving faster than the right. A possible interpretation of this might be that audiences use their left hand to perform more self touching gestures such as scratching while the right hand is used more for more static gestures such as holding their head. However, as mentioned in the previous study some caution is required in interpreting this result since there is no information on audiences handedness.
In terms of audience and dancers live communication, granger causality analysis did not show any systematic influence of audience movement from the movement on the stage. However, an unexpected finding that came our from this analysis was the influence that audience movement has on the movement of the dancers as well as the the relationship between audio power of the performance and audience movement. According to Dean and Bailes (2010) research on real time perception of music, listeners cannot influence acoustic parameters and these are appropriately taken to be exogenous variables while the perceptual parameters are endogenous. Is this supported also in dance? Is there a way for audiences to influence dancers movement? One interpretation of this might be that the choreography builds up specific expectations which may lead to this influence or that the timing of the choreography adjusts slightly depending on the audience. However the latter may be unlikely in cases similar to the one we have here where the soundrack was recorded and not live. This is something that needs further investigation that focuses more on the aesthetic elements of a dance performance. A more detailed discussion on this is given in Chapter 7 of this thesis.
Finally, it’s important to note here that the use of self-reported surveys in this context raises concern. As mentioned in section 4.3, the results of the survey that came out from the subjective responses of the performance parts show no significant differences in the preference levels among the four performance parts. This finding suggests that looking at the overall metrics of one performance compared to the other is not an efficient way to identify moments of high or low engagement in an audience. The reasons for this might be that moments of engagement or boredom might happen during very short moments of a performance and overall metrics would not be able to identify them. This shows that to be able to identify moments of engagement during a performance the focus needs to be on the momentary engagement of the audience rather than on the judgements of a dance piece as a whole. This is a challenging part that needs to be explored in future work by showing people shorter videos from different parts of a performance instead of complete performances. However, one of the important criticisms of quantitative approaches to
dance research is that dance unfolds in time, making the collection of data too simplistic if an entire dance piece can be reduced to a number.
Chapter 6
Audience responses part III:
Identifying moments of engagement
based on movement
6.1
Introduction
This chapter presents the final study of the research, which was focused on further clarifying and formalising the results of the previous studies. The hypotheses generated are thus similar to the previous two chapters but they are examined from a different angle and using a more controlled methodological approach. The first result that is examined more closely is that hands in particular have a significant role to play in understanding how the audience reacts to the performance. This is evident through their increase of movement during the performance and the unexpectedly contrasting behaviours between the left and right hands as observed in chapters 4 and 5. In this case, a more hi-tech method was used (wristbands with accelerometers) which also allowed for the collection of more detailed and more accurate measurements. Another result more closely explored is the one found in the second study, that there is an association of audience engagement with stillness. For this personalised engagements were captured using questionnaires and examined against movement data provided by the wristbands. Finally, the relationship between the movements of the audience and the dancers is re-examined, although the previous studies didn’t find it to be systematic. Thus, the hypothesis examined in this chapter are as follows:
Hypothesis 1 (H1): There are significant differences between the use of the right and left hand during the performance and are depended on handedness.
Hypothesis 2 (H2): Movement and engagement are inversely correlated.