This book offers an approach which unites choreographic and spectatorial perspectives, and argues for dance itselfits materials, its structuresas a medium of emotional communication. Contemporary dance often seems to contend with issues of understanding, regularly being read in languages which alienate it. Even if emotion seems a significant part of peoples engagement with dance, its workings are often surrounded by an air of mysticism. Engaging with these issues, this study investigates the experience of emotion in Euro-American contemporary dance theatre. It questions its dependence on the artists personal emotions, and the assumption that it is mediated by representational meaning. Instead, this book proposes that the emotional import of dance emerges from an interplay between perceptual properties and symbolic elements in an embodied affective cognitive experience. This experience includes the background of the spectator as well as the context of work, choreographer, performer(s) and other creative agents.