Multiple Uses of Mental Imagery by Professional Modern Dancers

Abstract

The present qualitative study has revealed a range of mental imagery strategies which professional modern dancers used for different purposes during their training, during the creation and rehearsal of a choreography, as well as prior to, during, and after a performance. The dancers' use of imagery tended to be multi-modal, multi-dimensional, seeking to integrate mind, body, and spirit not only in their dance activities but also in their lifestyle. Many of these personalized images had common characteristics and similar effects, which made possible their organization into eight imagery categories: inspiration, atmospheric, specific movement, metaphysical, emptying out, filling up, projection, and imagery rehearsal. Suggestions are made for the inclusion of similar types of images into the dance classroom and into other movement contexts.

An interpretative phenomenological analysis of how professional dance teachers implement psychological skills training in practice

“…This is similar to previous research in dance (Hanrahan and Vergeer 2000;Nordin and Cumming 2005;Overby, Hall and Haslam 1998). The teachers also used emotionally focused images and often suggested different images to the students who then could find something that worked for them, which is consistent with the experiences and preferences of dancers in other research (Bolles and Chatfield 2009;Nordin and Cumming 2006).…”

“…Something that differs from imagery in sport and exercise is the use of metaphorical, characterbased and emotional images among dancers (Hanrahan and Vergeer 2000;Nordin and Cumming 2005;Overby, Hall and Haslam 1998). Parallels can be drawn to figure skating and gymnastics where imagery can similarly be used to optimize the artistic aspects of performance such as expression (Murphy, Nordin and Cumming 2008).…”

Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science

“…Operationally defining positional index advances beyond the mere fact of context effects and investigates the organization peculiar to the context itself, as in the tri-partite temporal context experiments (Jones and McAuley 2005) discussed above. Similar support for these rich context effects of positional index occur in a variety of experiments, for example, in aesthetic judgment (Russell 2000), judgment involving quantifiers (Newstead and Coventry 2000), body and imagery (Hanrahan and Vergeer 2001), emotion contextualization (Kunzendorf et al 2000), mortality salience (Arndt et al 2002), decision making (Sharps and Martin 2002), lexical processing (Kambe et al 2001;Rawson and Kintsch 2002), proprioception (Simons et al 2002), counterfactual thinking and emotions (Mandel 2003), mood maintenance (Watkins et al 2003), viewer frames of reference (Mou et al 2004;Waszak et al 2005), visual working memory (Olson and Marshuetz 2005), and object-background semantic consistency (Davenport and Potter 2004). "The gambler's fallacy is the tendency to see a given outcome as less likely if it has just repeatedly occurred, in this case, leading to the choice of tails following three heads.…”

Effects of Practice, Visual Loss, Limb Amputation, and Disuse on Motor Imagery Vividness

“…Professional dancers are known to use mental imagery in different ways in their training. 32,33 We also studied a group of adults with prior visual experience who had become functionally blind, at least 2 years prior to this study, to determine how their movement representation was affected by the loss of visual inputs. In addition, we examined the effects of a lower limb amputation on motor imagery vividness and whether walking with prosthesis helped to maintain movement representation in the missing limb.…”