An Eye for the Impossible

The embodied simulation account of aesthetics, proposed by Freedberg and Gallese, assigns a pivotal role to an observer’s body in aesthetic appreciation of an artwork. While originally focused on visual artworks (such as paintings and sculpture), this theory clearly also holds great relevance to the performing arts, in particular dance. In this chapter, the author describes how she was inspired by this theory, as well as earlier work using dance as stimuli and dancers as participants to explore the relationship between embodiment, perception, and brain activity from a non-artistic perspective, to examine how observers’ physical abilities (or lack thereof) shape dance preferences. The author describes her team’s work demonstrating that dance-naïve participants are most drawn to highly complex, impressive dance movements impossible for observers to embody or perform themselves and how engagement of brain regions implicated in translating perception into action appear to be involved in this process.