The performer's stage experience. Embodiment, being-in-there, experiential translation and the role of the audience in dance performances

Starting from the analysis of those artistic performances which are non-verbal, and fully corporeal, par excellence, i.e. dance ones, I address the performer's scenic experience, with a particular focus on its embodied, phenomenal and interactional features. The paper derives from the ethnographic research that I have been carrying out on the world of dance. Data primarily include fieldnotes, videorecordings and in-depth interviews. After a brief panoramic on the process of progressive, collective, and emergent construction of the performance from "nothing" to the form that it shall take on the stage (e.g. Atkinson, 2006; Becker et al., 2006), I discuss the role of embodiment in both learning and enacting a performance, and show how that is fundamental for reaching the "status of experience", the modality of being-in-the-world (Merleau-Ponty, 1945), in which the performer shall need to be on stage. What is usually called "scenic presence", and I call being-in-there, in fact, is nothing but the ability to enter - and remain inside - the universe internal to the performance, being thus able to experience "flux" (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975). It is about, therefore, a voluntary experiential translation. This is something that performers also try to rehearse in the staging process' final phases, yet the audience plays a fundamental role in theatre. If the audience's quantity and quality affect the performer's scenic experience, in fact, its simple presence, on the other hand, interactionally works as a legitimizing factor for both the performance as a social ritual and the performer's acting and transformational experience.