Movement synchrony among dance performers predicts brain synchrony among dance spectators

Performing dance is an intrinsically social art form where at least one person moves while another person watches. Dancing in groups promotes social bonding, but how does group dance affect the people watching? In this study, we show that movement synchrony among dancers of a live performers predicts brain synchrony among dance viewers. Dancers and dance novices watched a video of a “Group Study” a choreography by Matthias Sperling in an fMRI scanner and continuously evaluated the performance after. Firstly, we computed cross-recurrence of continuous enjoyment ratings and inter-subject correlations (ISCs) in fMRI separately for both groups, and with the choreographer of the dance work. At both behavioural and neural levels, dancers responded more similarly to each other than novices. ISCs among dancers extend beyond brain areas involved in audio-visual integration and sensory areas of human movement perception into motor areas, suggesting kinaesthetic empathy in the expert group. Secondly, we show that dancers’ brain activations and continuous ratings are more similar to the choreographer’s ratings in keeping with sharing an aesthetic and artistic perspective when viewing the work. Thirdly, we show that movement synchrony among performers is the best predictor of brain synchrony among both dance and novice spectators. This is consistent with the idea that changes in emergent movement synchrony are a key aesthetic feature of performing dance. Finally, ISCs across perceptual and motor brain areas were primarily driven by movement acceleration and synchrony, whereas ISCs in orbital and pre-frontal brain areas were overall weaker and better explained by the continuous enjoyment ratings of each group. Our findings provide strong evidence that the aesthetic appreciation of dance involves experience sharing between the dance spectators and the choreographer, Moreover, experience sharing increases with shared knowledge of and practice in the artform that is being experienced.