Performance across species: from multimodal spider courtship to African drumming and dance

Spiders perform some of the most elaborate songs and dances in the animal kingdom, integrating movement, ornamentation, and vibratory song into coordinated displays. Historically, studies of their complexity were typically reduced to isolated, unchanging traits—ornaments, vibratory components, or solitary movements—rather than understood as the coordinated execution of behavior through time. How signals are sequenced, timed, and varied - how they are performed - is a central dimension of animal communication has remained conceptually underdeveloped. My research on multimodal courtship signaling in Schizocosa wolf spiders has repeatedly revealed that mating success depends not simply on what signals are produced, but on how they are executed: their timing, coordination, and dynamic structure. These findings point to a missing analytical framework. To address this, I propose to engage a body of scholarship that has long treated performance as its central object of study: specific African percussive drumming-dance traditions with rich scholarly frameworks. In these traditions, rhythm, movement, and coordination are understood as inseparable components of an integrated temporal system. By placing this work in dialogue with animal signaling, this project seeks to develop a shared conceptual language of performance that can bridge spider (and other non-human animal) and human communication systems.