Blog 17- Second Response (Iris)

I thought this prompt posed an interesting question to the reading- specifically the Reason and Reynolds article, in that they talk about dance and the perception of dance as an entirely subjective manner. As a former dancer and an avid spectator of dance, I've seen a lot of performances of different styles of dance over the years, but didn't really have the tools to talk about the performances I saw or my reactions to them.  This article, while not giving me any new tools to construct my responses with, definitely allows that such responses are varied and valid.

When we talk about the sublime, we talk about a big, transcendental experience that occurs in the spectator. After reading the interviews in the article, it seems that some of the spectators might have felt this way. An equal amount might have also classified their experience as stuplime, and were stymied or bored by a performance that they either didn't or couldn't connect to. But neither the ballet nor the traditional Indian dance was seen as objectively "better" than the other, and I'm assuming that both were of professional quality. The experience of watching and enjoying the performance existed entirely in the world of the spectator, and a lot of factors influenced their level of enjoyment or engagement. 

To be fair, there are some elements of self-fulfilling prophecy in here- of course if someone thinks of themselves as a ballet-goer, they're going to enjoy going to a ballet- but proficiency in a dance form did seem to be important to the enjoyment of the dance form. On a purely sensory level, you need to understand what you're seeing in order to appreciate it. Of those spectators who were not versed in one form of dance or the other, the only ones who seemed to be able to transcend this were also dancers themselves- several interviews talked about feeling the movements of the dance in their own bodies, sympathetically dancing with the performers. In order to connect to a performance on a kinesthetic level, it seems that you need to establish proficiency either as a spectator, through repeated viewings of a certain type of work, or as a performer, who can translate your experiences from one medium of dance to another.  I'm not sure how this understanding of subjectivity will help us in our discussion of the sublime and the stuplime, but I think it's helpful to keep in mind that when we talk about audience engagement, we are talking about a vast and varied amount of experiences and competencies.