“23 Feelings in Dance” project I wanted to know how dance makers, choreographers, would go about portraying sets of emotions in dance and I wanted to know if audiences watching dance could recognize potentially complex sets of emotions. In the spring of 2010 I put out a call to choreographers to create a three-minute piece of dance based on a set of emotions drawn from a list of 190 feelings-based words. Some of the words in the list were obvious, feelings-based words like love, afraid and proud, that are easy to recognize in people’s movements, but the majority of the words in the list were subtler, like benevolent, estranged and mixed-up, that might be harder to portray physically and recognize in the way people move. Choreographers responded brilliantly to the brief and I was sent hundreds of dance films. I received entries in jazz dance, tap, ballet, and lots of contemporary dance pieces that portrayed complex sets of emotions. The choreographers often sent me a written explanation of their work but I always watched the pieces first before I read any of these written explanations. I was preparing a show for the 2010 Edinburgh Festival Fringe called “Dance Doctor, Dance! The Psychology of Dance Show” where I would discuss the science of dance, so I decided to use the 23 individual performances of my show to see whether audiences could recognize the emotions and feelings expressed in the pieces created by the choreographers. From the hundreds of entries I received, I selected 23 pieces based on the complexity of the emotions expressed. Therefore, I didn’t select any pieces where the choreographer was trying to express just a single, iconic emotion, like happy or sad and I avoided pieces where the form of dance expression used a vocabulary of known movement gestures to communicate an idea (like in some forms of classical dance). What I was left with was a collection of works that were mainly derived from contemporary dance practice. I then invited each of the choreographers to come to Edinburgh and perform their three-minute piece on one of the nights of my 23-night run. I called this collection of work 23 Feelings in Dance. My aim in 23 Feelings in Dance was to leave the constraints of a scientific laboratory behind and see if audiences could recognize a choreographer’s intention to portray emotion and feelings through dance. Each night I spoke about the science of emotion recognition and then I introduced one of the 23 Feelings in Dance pieces. I didn’t tell the audience what to expect. Once the piece was over I asked the audience directly what emotion or feelings they thought were being represented in the piece. The audience would shout things out and we would discuss what they saw and then I would bring the choreographer onto the stage to discuss the way in which they started to work with dancers to represent certain emotions or feelings. What struck me, night after night, was that the audiences were spot on in their understanding of the pieces even when abstract forms of dance were used and when very complex patterns of emotion were represented. Sometimes the audience found it difficult to articulate what they’d seen, but they still accurately described the essence of the choreographer’s intention. Let me give you an example. One of the pieces was a solo, choreographed by a woman and danced by a man. This is relevant. The piece was about what it felt like, for a woman, to lose an unborn child during pregnancy. When, after the piece, I asked the audience to tell me what they thought the piece was about there was silence. I looked around for a minute until someone said that they didn’t know, but that they thought it was something to do with loss. As they said this they made a downward pushing motion with their hands, moving their hands from their chest down to their lap. This movement had not been used in the dance piece. They made this downward pushing motion a couple of times as they said, “something to do with loss”. Another member of the audience said they thought it was based on “decay, or dying inside”, but that they couldn’t place this within a meaningful context. This was interesting to me because it showed how it is possible to communicate feelings and ideas through movement that people understand implicitly, without necessarily understanding the context of the piece explicitly. In this piece, the male dancer was expressing what it felt like for a woman to lose a pregnancy and yet despite the logical inconsistency of this piece being danced by a man it was still possible for the audience to understand its emotional essence.