CHAPTER 10 PERFORMANCE MODE UNDER THE MICROSCOPE: A COGNITIVE SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF EYE GAZE AND OTHER BODY MOVEMENTS IN A CONTEMPORARY DANCE IMPROVISATION CARLA FERNANDES, VITO EVOLA AND JOANNA SKUBISZ Introduction This paper 1 intends to provide insight into how a group of improvisation performers interact socially when they are in “performance mode”. To this end, five expert performers and five non-performers, joined by Portuguese contemporary choreographer João Fiadeiro, were filmed separately during a contemporary dance exercise, the “Real-Time Composition Game (Composição em Tempo Real, or CTR)” (Fiadeiro 2007). Fiadeiro, one of the founders of the Nova Dança Portuguesa in the 1980s, created the so- called “CTR Game” in 1995 as an improvisation exercise in order to provide choreographers and performers with a methodological tool for composing artistic works. Applying the method, the artists take turns performing in a delimited space in the studio, following a process of creating relations with previous 1 This chapter has been adapted from a previous publication (Evola, Skubisz, and Fernandes 2016) with the exception of section 4, which has not been published elsewhere before. Section 2, all tables and figures, and quantitative analysis were contributed by the third author. Section 3, as well as the study design, is the work of the second author. The first author is responsible for the remainder of the chapter. Fernandes, C., Evola, V., & Skubisz, J. (2019). Performance mode under the microscope: a cognitive semiotic analysis of eye gaze and other body movements in a contemporary dance improvisation. In Galhano-Rodrigues, I., Zagar Galvão, E., and Cruz-Santos, A. (Eds.). Recent Perspectives on Gesture and Multimodality. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 121-135.