How Do Dancers Learn To Dance?

Abstract

We are interested in supporting motor skill acquisition in highly creative skilled practices such as dance. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 11 professional dancers to better understand how they learn new dance movements. We found that each dancer engages in a set of operations, including imitation, segmentation, marking, or applying movement variations. We also found a progression in learning dance movements composed of three steps consistently reported by dancers: analysis, integration and personalization. In this study, we aim to provide an empirical foundation to better understand the acquisition of dance movements from the perspective of the learner.

Current Use, Non-Use, and Future Use of Ballet Learning Technologies

“…There has also been recent work extracting design guidelines by exploring the learning acquisition of a contemporary dance phrase [64] [63]. Learning contemporary dance movements contrasts from learning ballet technique due to the fixed nature of ballet vocabulary and static positioning of the spine.…”

Capturing Movement Decomposition to Support Learning and Teaching in Contemporary Dance

“…The workshop asks dancers learn a solo dance sequence from a video recording while simultaneously document the way they practice the movements. We structured the documentation process according to the result of [36], where expert contemporary dancers engaged in the following learning techniques:…”

“…This contextual factor builds upon individual embodied knowledge to create complex learning strategies. In our previous works [36], we examined how dancers elicit these techniques and express their experiences. However, this work did not highlight operational mechanisms that could influence the design of technologies for supporting movement learning and movement transmission from teacher to dancers.…”