Time Through the Magnifying Glass of Slowness

Abstract

Abstract In recent years, slowness has become a major choreographic trend in Western dance. What are the experiences of time lived by spectators and dancers in slow dances? This chapter focuses on the perception and production of extreme slowness in the work of the French choreographer Myriam Gourfink. Combining the subjective reports of the spectators and cognitive tasks of temporal perception, it appears that slowness induces temporal experiences other than the mere feeling that time passes slowly. On the dancers’ side, the extreme slowness corresponds retrospectively with a very strong contraction of the objective duration of the choreography, and while dancing, the slowness of the movement seems inversely proportional to the internal speeds experienced by the dancers. Reports from spectators and dancers support the idea that time perception is intimately linked to the sense of self and that interoceptive focus plays a major role in changes in time perception.