RETRACTED: Contemporary dance and the problem of evaluation: A consensual approach in the Chinese case

Abstract

• Contemporary dance is a dance style, using the body for conceptual ideas expression. • Modern contemporary dancers have heightened figural and verbal creative abilities. • The dancer's creative experience positively affects the creativity evaluation. • Contemporary dance is understood more profoundly by the dance experienced people. Creativity is an essential element of modern dance and is often cited as a key goal of dance training. From the experts' side, creativity is often seen as part of a score for choreography or approach to improvisation. The audience evaluates the creative component of a contemporary dance subconsciously, by perceiving a dance - for a mass audience, contemporary dance is often abstract and does not have clear criteria and thus its meaning is not considered properly. There is no single approach to the means by which it is possible to understand and subsequently evaluate the creative abilities shown in dance, which prompts researchers to search and improve approaches to assessing creativity in contemporary dance. The study attempts to test a simple method of consensus assessment of contemporary dance, which allows a viewer to subconsciously assess the manifestation of creativity in contemporary dance. Due to the pandemic, the author had to form groups of participants in the experiment through Chinese social networks: WeChat, Weibo, Qzone, Youku. The sample is represented by: choreographers - 12 people ( n = 4 men and n = 8 women); dancers - 46 participants ( n = 32 women, n = 14 men); spectators - 123 people ( n = 83 women and n = 40 men). The main analysis was carried out using the capabilities of the LAVAAN package; to determine the influence of the main studied categories (experience and knowledge), the correlation was checked using Cohen's kappa (value 0.82, high level of reliability). Analysis of variance was used to determine the difference in average ratings of videos with dance performances. The results show that a real-life dance experience is critical. The fact that raters have had some dance lessons or that they regularly watch dance videos does not affect the final score in assessing the creative component of the shown contemporary dance. Raters with dance choreography experience rated creativity higher. The practical significance and prospects for further research lies in the possibility of using the developed methodology to study the problem of creativity not only in modern dance, but also in other varieties. The prospects are also that it is possible to study the peculiarities of the formation of creativity in modern dance, not only in China but also in other countries.