Editorial: On Perception

This journal issue raises and renews questions about the perceptual strategies and effects of performance and their implications. The included studies are motivated by the potential of performance to affect artists’ and audiences’ perceptual range and to re-sensitize us to connections between environment, human (inter)action and creative thinking. This dimension of the work that performance does is difficult to register, understand and articulate. However, as the tools (theoretical, methodological and artistic) available to examine perception and performance develop, questions about this topic re-emerge with renewed focus.

Over the past three decades, influences first drawn from early twentieth century phenomenological philosophy (for example, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson), then from the more recently developed fields of cognitive philosophy (for example, Varela, Nöe) and performing arts psychology¹, have gradually altered performance scholarship and practices that explicitly aim to investigate, utilize or influence processes of perception. The theoretical foundations of practices developed during periods inflected by a hierarchical, Cartesian separation of mind and body have been revisited and revised. Earlier tendencies, either to privilege disembodied engagement through semiotic interpretation or to invert the Cartesian hierarchy by ascribing principal agency to the body, have been adapted through lenses that take minds to be embodied and bodies to be mindful.

Consequently, perception is no longer understood primarily as a lower-level stage preceding the presumedly key function of audience interpretation; nor is it narrowly seen as instinctual and subconscious body knowledge that risks being blocked by performers’ conscious reflection. The positive side of this shift can be defined by various theories. When approached from psychology, as one example, perception is closely linked with embodied action; it involves selectively processing and integrating sensory stimuli based on associated memory and it is shaped by each perceiver’s selective attentional focus. This focus is often influenced by cultural and embodied training, and it is also embedded in interpersonal or environmental constraints that trigger memory and cue responses (see Hansen and Bläsing 2017).

The authors in this journal issue respond to questions and topics raised in our editorial call for contributions by drawing on numerous and varied theories of perception and referencing a wide range of performance scholars’ application of such perceptual theory. Nonetheless, they all work with concepts of embodied perception that resonate with the development described above.

In our call for contributions, we noted that performing arts training and methods develop perceptual skills that enable performers to direct their attention in extended ways, to remain present and aware while simultaneously perceiving multiple information sources, and to make and act on decisions while performing. Approaches to creation and strategies of process often tax well-trained, automated skills by involving physical or cognitive obstacles, with an aim towards enhancing the performer’s ability to bring something new into the world. This work, in turn, also invites audiences to attend and perceive differently—to re-calibrate and re-cognize their sensing and to perceive more fully across sensory modalities. As previously mentioned, the potential effect of this invitation is to attune audience members’ minds and bodies to a wider range of possibilities than those perceptible within the pragmatically driven limits of everyday sensory perception. Not only aesthetically but also ideologically and ethically demanding, this perceptual recalibration and performativity (Vass-Rhee 2011) can be considered a foundational condition for imagination, for approaching diverse minds and bodies as potentials instead of pathological aberrations, and for the ability to register the many ways in which cultural practices and environments are both affected by and constrain human perception and action. These examples of perceptual effects and implications were drafted in broad strokes within our call, setting a framework for, and inviting, more specific enquiries.

The responses included in this issue derive from the fields of virtual reality (VR) design, landscape design, audio walks, theatre, dance, music, performance art, and literature. Topics highlighted include the ethics of proprioceptive manipulation, auditory and embodied attunement, (dis)embodied perception, psychedelic perception, sensory resistance, perceptual deterritorialization, discursive perceptual framing and the perceptual generation of communal Indigenous or Black identities. These topics are examined as effects of performance praxis and spectatorship, dramaturgical strategies or performative theories. Together, they explore, move through and reach beyond bodily and discursive constraints of perception to produce relational connections and enable imagination. In the following, we first discuss threads woven through and across the different contributions; we then attempt to relay the varied and incomplete fabric they produce.

DEVELOPING PERCEPTUAL ABILITIES THROUGH PERFORMANCE TRAINING

Although human perceptual systems have generalizable characteristics, the way these systems are used (that is, our attention to, and processing of, sensory stimuli) is not only determined by evolution but also learned. It follows that forms of training requiring learners to attend, process and respond in specialized ways affect the learners’ perceptual processes. Advanced training in the performing arts often shapes perception in unique ways that raise questions about the effect on performers’ perceptual abilities.

Pursuing such questions in relation to dance leads to relevant studies available from dance psychology. Scientists and interdisciplinary research teams within this field tend to test the cognitive and perceptual effects of dance in general or by considering genre differences along broad lines (for example, ballet, social dance or improvisation). The two ethnographic and mixed methods studies of dance and perception included in this issue instead apply a subject- and technique-specific view. As a result, they offer qualified suggestions for how individual dance praxes may train perception differently and remind us that the specific characteristics of dance praxes matter when studying their impact on perception. Examining the effects of training in the Fighting Monkey technique, Tomasz Ciesielski and Magdalena Szmytke found that this praxis increases the dancers’ level of ‘inclination towards the world’ and readiness for action-based perception in the present. Sarah Pini and Catherine Deans’ study of Contact Improvisation and the Butoh-derived Body Weather technique indicate that these dance forms foster heightened empathetic attunement of a dancer’s self to a dance partner and the environment, respectively.

By combining ethnographic methods with quantitative experiments, the authors of the first study discovered effects that both divert from and correspond with participants’ subjective experiences with Fighting Monkey. Although involving highly dynamic and fast responses to an object moving in space, the praxis was not found to increase response speed or improve visio-spatial perception abilities as expected, based on subjective accounts. However, a reported experience of becoming more ready to act was manifest in the participants’ significantly increased ability to mentally rotate their own body in relation to that of another. The authors thus conclude that the perceptual capacity trained through Fighting Monkey enhances embodied action-perception of environmental or interpersonal factors.

Using an enactive ethnographic phenomenological perspective informed by Wacquant and others, the second study’s empirical data derive from subjective accounts by practitioners of two differently antihierarchical dance forms. The first, Contact Improvisation, has a highly tactile and interkinaesthetic focus due to its incorporation of touch and shared points of balance between co-creating dance partners. The second, Body Weather, aims to expand the dancer’s perceptual orientation towards ecological co-existence with/in the environment. The authors draw on Stern’s concept of attunement, which addresses the ways that resonant infant–caregiver interaction scaffolds empathetic awareness of both intersubjectivity and the independent self, in order to interpret participant experiences. They argue that a comparable process of attunement in Contact Improvisation and Body Weather expands dancers’ attentive awareness of the world and the action possibilities it affords, while cultivating empathy at the same time. These effects, furthermore, tend to influence practitioners’ everyday lives beyond the context of practice.

When thinking across the two studies, it appears that the three praxes discussed share a tendency to constrain movement responses through relational and interactive points of connection. As Ciesielski and Szmytke mention, this tendency may render the perceptual training of such praxes different in kind to techniques that focus on the production of form through choreographic organization of dancers’ bodies. A question for future research that this possibility raises is whether the two kinds of perceptual training complement or counter each other. The answer would have implications for dance training, but it could also contribute to developing understandings of relational and enactive subjectivity more broadly.

RE – CALIBRATING ENVIRONMENTAL PERCEPTION

Performative dramaturgies designed to affect the perceiver’s experience of the environment by refocusing or altering their modes of perception are central to the fields of landscape design and sound performance. Eduardo Abrantes and Rennie Tang both share such strategies, which they have developed for teaching and creation purposes.

Like Pini and Deans, Abrantes discusses a praxis involving a conscious process of attunement to environmental stimuli that otherwise might remain implicit or unregistered. His aim, however, differs. Abrantes’ approach to audiowalk creation trains the capacity to listen reflexively, to notice sonic stimuli and consider their impact, including the politics of how such stimuli define inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. His dramaturgical aim is not to attune audiences empathically to the environment, but rather to develop audiowalk dramaturgies and techniques that strategically utilize processes involved in attunement towards another end. These processes include entrainment (the tendency to synchronize or fall into rhythm) and selective auditory focus, and they are used to enable audiences’ auditory experience of spatial politics.

Rennie Tang describes in situ training strategies used with students of landscape architecture to foster their embodied awareness of topography as they explore and apprehend the demanding terrain of Yosemite National Park. Tang’s exercises encourage the use of bodies, rather than writing instruments, as the primary measuring and note-taking instruments. The architects’ perception of the physical, temporal and navigational scale of landscapes is re-calibrated by physically tracing the park’s challenging land formations: niches and crevices, rough slopes, vast rocky plains. Tang’s techniques adapt landscape perception from a passive, observatory register into an active, relational one. The typical abstracted renderings produced when terrain is viewed at a disembodied distance is adapted by affording embodied, muscular and emotional memories of landscape spaces and textures at varied proxemic ranges. In so doing, this work aims to alter the trained habit of relying on visual perception as the primary source of information for architectural drawing and modelling. Like Abrantes’ dramaturgies, Tang’s practical exercises seem to alter the information available to the creator and—by extension—the artists’ ability to work their audiences’ embodied perception.

Abrantes and Tang both anchor their contributions in exercises developed to train students. Although the exercises developed by Abrantes and Tang can be drawn upon as pedagogical tools, the unique offer they make in the context of this issue is to accessibly extract, articulate and demonstrate a series of otherwise complex strategies for the re-calibration of perceptual habits. As such, they remind us of the perceptual and attentional foundations of skilled behaviour and (inter)action, not only in these contexts but in many others, while showing how a perceptually performative approach to being in worlds facilitates their development.

(RE)DIRECTING ATTENTION

Noting that perceptual performativity is ripe for both use and abuse, Piotr Woycicki brings up the ethics of its manipulation. The examples of VR-performances and games through which his discussion unfolds raise affect as a value of experience and a memory trigger, but they do so implicitly while re-directing conscious attention to visual stimuli from the VR-environment. The affective arousal produced by the examined ZU-UK and Valve productions is not meant to re-calibrate perceptual sensitivity to politics (Abrantes), nor is it related to empathy and new forms of connectivity (Pini and Deans). The objective that Woycicki reveals is to generate and sustain emotionally heightened body states that implicitly draw embodied memory and experience into the visual VR-world, and thereby increase the performativity of this world. Woycicki discusses these strategies as interoceptive dramaturgies. VR-avatars provide surrogate selves that are parasitic of the typically implicit proprioceptive memory of the perceiver. Woycicki points out that cultural and discursive influences suppress conscious access to and reflexivity about interoceptive perception—making it far easier to manipulate the senses involved. The author reveals existing dramaturgical practices that utilize perceptual hierarchies for manipulation. In simplified terms, the success criterion for VR-games is to make the viewer forget that they are experiencing a virtual environment. This is done by minimizing discrepancies between bodily perceptual feedback and the virtual avatar’s movement that otherwise produce vertigo. This criterion targets implicit modes of perception and reduces rather than enhances the agency of the perceiver in ways that Woycicki invites us to understand, appreciate and critique.

Dramaturgies of perception that adapt perceptual practices by directing conscious attention can perhaps be considered more ethical. The performative potential in such works lies in their promise to expand the audience’s spectrum of perceptual awareness beyond what is needed for everyday purposes. However, because awareness is a precondition for agency, the act of directing attention may also shift the perceiver’s domain of agency. The approaches studied and developed by Natalia Esling and Olga Krasa-Ryabets, respectively, indicate that such transitions are complex processes that involve negotiating the defining constraints of roles, relations and environments.

Natalia Esling examined the effect on audience perception of haptic touch in intimate one-on-one theatre works. Through a Practice-as-Research experiment, she tested several assumptions about the dramaturgical effect of touch in interactive performance—including a notion that touch performance extends to the audience the kind of relational connection and empathy discussed by Pini and Deans. Esling found that when scenes involving touch between a performer and audience member are short these theoretical assumptions are not realized. Instead, touching participants’ bodily attention is increased to a level where their physical mobility, participation with the performer and ability to attend to the story decreased. Short durations of haptic stimuli seem to block the audience member’s other sensory registers and reduce their agency. In longer scenes with more prolonged touch, however, participants worked through this initial phase and gradually began to experience increased relational agency and attention to story. This participation supported the performer, and instances of attachment behaviour began to emerge. As briefer instances of touch are more common in participatory theatre, Esling’s results are relevant for the development of haptic dramaturgies. Like Ciesielski and Szmytke, Esling uses experimental research methods that enable the discovery of behavioural patterns and effects, which are not directly informed by discourses of praxis and thus gain capacity to both confirm and question theories embedded in such discourses.

Olga Krasa-Ryabets actively engages audiences in interactions meant to separate spaces, objects and stories from the contextual systems of meaning by which they otherwise would be defined. She includes small actions (for example, handling of objects) that are disassociated from the narrative of the event and uses theatrical or intermedial means to separate everyday spaces from their normal function. In this issue, Krasa-Ryabets reports on an extension of her experimental ‘microracting’ project carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic, which made direct contact between participants and facilitator impossible. Guided through their own homes in the dark while accompanied only by Krasa-Ryabets’ voice on Zoom, participants experienced a distortion of their own familiar spaces. As sounds and sensations were amplified or inexplicably shifted locations, participants’ orientation was momentarily lost. This is in part achieved by eliciting misapprehension of sensory information. Krasa-Ryabets’ estrangement of participants’ kn(own) domestic environments is motivated by Soviet scholar Yurchak’s notion of deterritorialization—that is, the generation of spaces that systems of meaning cannot describe, but that also are not in opposition to such systems. The space thus held momentarily through discrepant processes of recognition and meaning-making is defined by Krasa-Ryabets as an imaginary world on the edge of the perceptible.

Interestingly, in both Esling’s and Krasa-Ryabets’ work the perceptual spectrum that may be expanded does not directly reflect the sensory modality emphasized. Touch performance and the handling of objects do not seem to expand the audience’s attention to haptic stimuli; rather, touch increases body awareness and, over time, relational agency, and the disassociated handling of objects may confuse the normative experience of sensory stimuli and lead to different perceptual integrations and possibilities of (inter)action. These expansions are arrived at through the breach of spectators’ intimate spheres or through the estrangement of everyday spaces that otherwise might provide stable meaning and untested boundaries. In other words, the agency gained comes at a price that, in a pandemic context, is complicated by the increased risk of touch and dependence on home spaces. Once these domains are surrendered, however, new forms of interactive agency with (co-)creative potential seem to emerge.

CRITIQUING, SUBVERTING OR RESISTING OPPRESSIVE FRAMES OF PERCEPTION

When training, re-calibrating and (re-)directing attention through performance, it is important to consider the frames that constrain perception and their politics. In many cases, constraints are productive for those they serve. However, they do not serve everyone equally, and they can also be used to select, restrict and oppress. Approached from a psychological perspective, our surroundings attract attention and cue perceptual behaviour through memory in ways that render human action-perception efficient and meaningful within that context. Constraints can be addressed and conceptualized as social discourses, the hermeneutics of cultural contexts or (as mentioned above) as the cues of distributed cognition. Although reflecting very different theoretical foundations, these notions each enable the identification of frames that otherwise might remain implicit. Such frames can be difficult to consider empirically, and be more accessible through analytical enquiry. Philip Watkinson, Paul Geary and Celia Vara each analyse performance practices that push beyond identification and seem to draw on the agency that awareness provides to engage the politics of frames experientially.

From an audience perspective, Philip Watkinson argues that the music and performance company Purity Ring subverts normative patriarchal objectivity and visual observation of the body, not by reacting to or critiquing this objectifying position, but by inviting their audiences to explore optical touch as an affective mode of seeing. Watkinson invites us into the visceral sonic and visual imagery created by the electro-pop duo through their synth-driven music tracks, lyrics and cover artwork. In his reflections, Watkinson notes the frequency with which sight and the eyes figure— albeit in viscerally unsettling ways—in their lyrics, describing how these references poetically evoke bodily interiors, organic flows and haptic textures within Purity Ring’s lush, transcendent sound and vocals. Drawing a parallel to Medusa’s ocular rending of the division between itself and the world, he notes a similar dynamic in Purity Ring’s visual and sonic imaging, through which the subjectivity of the performing and evoked bodies floods palpably into the world and our senses.

Paul Geary, by contrast, takes us both literally and figuratively inside through an engagement with Rideout’s Past Time, a performance that was staged in a British prison and that explores the history of feeding the incarcerated. Focusing on the food samples prepared and served to the audience by the prisoners themselves, Geary notes how language inflects perception of foods and of eating—and thereby also physical and mental health. At the same time, the context of the encounter (the prison’s chapel) drew attention closely to the performativity of food presentation and consumption. As Geary points out, our presumedly personal attitudes towards the sensing and eating of food are in fact pre- conditioned by ‘cultures of sense’ that define how, whether and how much we enjoy what we are eating. Rideout’s performance interrupts this largely unconscious perceptual register by directing attention either towards or against the grain of the habitual. Geary’s close reflection of the eating of three prison dishes—not all of them pleasant or as expected—exposes the ethos and politics of feeding prisoners and the ways in which these have historically been and remain tied to flavour, texture and terminology.

When the freedom to performatively invert or critique oppressive frames is withdrawn, sensory practices that live underneath or outside the frame can provide paths of resistance. Moving quietly under the repressive systems of the late Franco regime in the 1970s, Catalan performance artist and filmmaker Fina Miralles created intimate, transgressive performance artefacts in which she engaged in somatic communication with her physical world, gleaning and expressing knowledge through introspective tactile and visual relations with things in it: whispered promises to a mulberry tree; tactile assemblages of shells, leaves, and stones (and the spaces and air around them); the transportation of snails from the countryside to a gallery and of beach sand to an orchard; or the capture, with her camera, of natural elements touching. Celia Vara's embodied and archival research of Miralles’s oeuvre draws on Noland’s elaboration of the notion of kinaesthesia to explore the self-liberative potentials of embodied knowledge acquired by knowing things through the hands, eyes and body. Vara reveals these interventions as under-the-radar acts of emancipatory feminist resistance in an unsettled and dangerous time.

GENERATING BLACK AND INDIGENOUS SUBJECTIVITY THROUGH COMMUNAL ATTUNEMENT

Susanne Thurow and Ágatha Silvia Nogueira e Oliveira remind us that peoples whose embodied practice, cultural knowledge and ties to land have been subject to rupture and erasure may aim for restorative perceptual reconnection as acts of subjectivity and reconciliation. The performance practices Thurow and Oliveira analyse use multi-sensory approaches to foster communal attunement with the land or with ancestral practices.

As a settler in Australia, Thurow pursues an understanding of her emerging, communal relationship with Indigenous land by examining her subjective, sensory audience experience of the Indigenous performance I am Eora (2012) by Wesley Enoch. Acknowledging her cultural positioning and bias, Thurow filters her lens through exchanges with Enoch and published Indigenous knowledge. Thurow presents a performance analysis that reaches for these sources of insight while holding space for Indigenous voices on the subjects of Indigenous cosmology, subjectivity and sovereignty. She identifies multisensory generation of affect as a dramaturgical strategy used in I am Eora to invite Indigenous and Western audiences to consider their communal relationships with the land and togetherness with one another. Supported by experiential descriptions, she shares how the work uses dynamic kinaesthetic, visual and sonic stimuli to raise communal affect, display interconnections and reflect tenets of Indigenous cosmology. Engaging with narrative, Thurow also proposes that the work repurposes Aristotelian dramaturgy by, for example, denying the colonial dramaturgical convention its resolution to a Western notion of social order, and instead reconstituting Indigenous relationships with the land.

Drawing on both experiential and theoretical perspectives, Ágatha Silvia Nogueira e Oliveira analyses the multimodal and inter-agentive dynamics of dancer, choreographer and pedagogue Edileusa Santos’s methodology Dance of Black Expression in the Brazilian context. Oliveira delineates a shift of perception across drummers and dancers in which a blended sense of embodiment emerges in the form of what she terms the dancer–drummer–drum body. This three-way relationship of improvised co-creation recognizes the agency of African-heritage drums and their vibratile ‘voices’, while productively complicating notions of the ‘black dancing body’ (Gottschild) in line with paradigms of extended cognition. An associated idea of the body/drum and drum/body, in turn, hails the moving space between dancers, drummers and drums as the resonant medium that makes a transformation of perception possible. With this transformation, bodies are decentred and subjecthoods are anchored in relational dynamics with the drums.

Although differing in both perspectives and identity, Oliveira and Thurow both extract teachings from relational perceptual experiences that move past the interdependence of multiple autonomous entities, aiming instead to (re)establish communal foundations. Each acknowledges that such communal foundations of subjectivity, and the perceptual activity that supports them, implicate environments, the beings (including objects) within them and their histories.

TRANSCENDING BOUNDARIES OF EMBODIED PERCEPTION AND THE SELF

One of the possibilities that Oliveira articulates when reaching for communal identity is that embodied human perception is adaptable and might extend beyond its known constraints. Dancing and drumming bodies may merge with drums and the motions they evoke to form blended identities, and thereby new ways of perceiving. Watkinson explores the possibility of adapting our experience of the body altogether via an imaginative sensory journey through its internal carnal landscape. Although these perspectives reach towards relational or adapted ways of being and sensing, embodiment still pulses through them and serves as a grounding reference point.

Nebojša Tabački and Deni Li carry this even further to engage with the question of how perceptual performativity may transcend constraints of the embodied mind and, in doing so, also exceed the discursive limitations of experience and imagination. Arguably, the question advances radical propositions that require ‘ungrounding’ tools.

With Nebojša Tabački, we return to the VR- installation rule book—more specifically, the strategy of minimizing discrepancies between VR and embodied sensory stimuli in order to prevent vertigo and suspend disbelief that Woycicki also discusses. Rather than, like Woycicki, exploring the ethics of mapping virtual avartars onto human embodied memory and experience, Tabački seeks a virtual explosion of the mind that may render porous the viewer’s grounding in embodied perception. While acknowledging the bodily constraints of perception, particularly through perceptual anchors in embodied memory, he also argues that the human sensory systems and memory have capacity to adapt. When humans and technology are approached as equal partners with shared agency, Tabački argues, a potential arises for the VR experience of space to extend past the constraints of embodied memory and perception and expand into limitless imaginary possibilities. To qualify and theorize this possibility, Tabački analyses the scenography of VR music videos and animations by Analog Studios/Björk and VRTOV, while drawing on Barad’s theory of new materialism. This theoretical repositioning of both VR strategies and norms of embodied perception could potentially inspire new paths for practice.

Deni Li’s article extends the interrogation of perceiving body-minds via a focus on the queer-feminist writings and lived experiences of Chicana cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldúa. Li reads Anzaldúa’s writings and experiences with hallucinogenics as performative in that they harbour what Li terms a ‘psychedelic perception’ at work. Given that perception is something we do rather than something that happens to us (Noë), Li asks how experiences of non-normative perception or expanded states of consciousness—which are often difficult to articulate—can be translated into writing, and what forms of knowledge production and altered thinking such writing might engender in its readers. Li’s focus on spiritual and psychic realms of experience reminds us of their presence and influence. The latter is charted by Li through scrutiny of Anzaldúa’s spiritual activism, which is articulated in two ideas, conceptualized by Anzaldúa as facultad and nepantla, that resonate with her experience as a woman between/in multiple worlds. Described respectively as ‘non-discursive depth perception’ and a liminal ‘bridge between the material and immaterial’, these ideas involve processes of unlearning reality, suspending one’s sense of self (for example, history, beliefs, behaviour), and releasing the capacity to imagine one’s existence in a new reality.

Although Tabački’s and Li’s means are different in kind, the implications of their aims bring the two authors into dialogue as both explicate the ability to perceive a different reality, unconstrained by normative embodied and discursive knowledge.

RELAYING REFLECTIONS ON PERCEPTION

Although the authors of this issue embrace post-Cartesian notions of embodied perception, the state of the scholarship presented here does not reflect what Kuhn would have identified as the height of a paradigm—that is, when scholars implicitly or explicitly are proving correct the central idea of a paradigm by applying it as a foundational concept to their research. Rather, the authors collectively push far beyond such a state by instrumentalizing embodied perception, manipulating it, critiquing its implications and challenging its boundaries from the perspective of a wide array of performance forms. This is done by creatively and theoretically examining how performance trains embodied action- perception differently, or how it affects agency via masking or emphasizing proprioceptive and haptic senses. The authors also explore the potential power of performance to subvert or resist oppressive frames of perception through visceral sensory experiences, to render perception communal through multisensory experiences of blending or togetherness and to transcend perceptual constraints in states of consciousness (virtual or altered) where the body’s boundaries merely become one source of information among many. These creative and theoretical approaches to perception in performance bend and blend the discursive, contextual, embodied and psychological ‘rules’ and norms of perception in order to either release or reconnect human relationships and decentre our sense of self. The possibilities that can be imagined through these contributions are exhilarating.

Notes

1 Performing arts psychology is a term covering dance psychology, music psychology and cognitive theatre studies. While all these fields are interdisciplinary, the first two lean towards scientific methodology while the latter leans towards interpretive application of scientific findings within the humanities. See Di Benedetto (2010), Vass-Rhee (2011) and Hansen (2011) for early studies of sensory provocation, perceptual performativity and perceptual dramaturgy. Art and the Senses (Bacci and Melcher 2011) offers multi-disciplinary perspectives. Later scientific essay collections and journals with contents on perception include: Bläsing, Puttke- Voss and Schack’s The Neurocognition of Dance from 2019 (1st edn, 2010); the Frontiers in Psychology topic ‘Performance in Theatre and Everyday Life’ from 2021; and the journal Psychology of Music (1973– present).