Contemporary Dance Research Articles

비언어적 무용극 창작을 위한 연출적 특성 - 매튜 본의 <호두까기 인형!>을 중심으로

This study focuses on the importance and value of directing within the contexts of the dance theatre as a total art by exploring the directing style and method of Matthew Bourne through examining his < Nutcracker! >. The specific directing features from the analysis are the following. First, he wrote a realistic scenario to achieve a dramatization by using subtext from reinterpreting the original novel and ballet. Second, he attempted to maximize the dramatic expression of non-verbal performance by using logical plot and creative scenes. Third, to convey some continuities from the original, he transformed the original characters into completely different modernized personals having unexpected humor. Fourth, he used original Tchaikovsky''s music as a motif that becomes the center of his dissolution and re-creation. Fifth, he used various style movements such as folk ballet, gymnastics, pair skating, headbanging, Spanish dance, fashion model movements, and the 60s’ social dance along with contemporary dance movement vocabularies. Sixth, he pursued popularity by employing homages and parodies throughout the work by adapting stylistic elements inspired by other performing arts fields such as theater, movies, and musicals. Seventh, he and his stage-art designer, Anthony Ward, create several visual metaphors symbolizing the duality and illusion that crosses reality and fantasy.

현대무용전공 대학생의 셀프리더십이 대학생활적응에 미치는 영향 : 학교지원의 매개효과

The survey was conducted on 184 contemporary dance majors nationwide to examine the self-leadership effects of university life adaptation and verify the intermediate effects of college support. The results showed that self-leadership behavior-oriented strategies had a static effect on academic adaptation in college life, and that behavior-oriented and constructive thinking strategies had a static effect on social adaptation. Finally, it was found that professor support acts as an arbitrator in behavior- oriented strategies, academic adaptation, social adaptation, individual emotional adaptation, constructive thinking, and social adaptation. "Application and development of a self-directed education system," "improvement of self-directed awareness through follow-up research," and "school-level support for adapting to university life" were presented, focusing on the results and discussions.

Movement quantity and quality: How do they relate to pain and disability in dancers?

This field-based study aimed to determine the association between pre-professional student dancers' movement quantity and quality with (i) pain severity and (ii) pain related disability. Pre-professional female ballet and contemporary dance students (n = 52) participated in 4 time points of data collection over a 12-week university semester. At each time point dancers provided self-reported pain outcomes (Numerical Rating Scale as a measure of pain severity and Patient Specific Functional Scale as a measure of pain related disability) and wore a wearable sensor system. This system combined wearable sensors with previously developed machine learning models capable of capturing movement quantity and quality outcomes. A series of linear mixed models were applied to determine if there was an association between dancers' movement quantity and quality over the 4 time points with pain severity and pain related disability. Almost all dancers (n = 50) experienced pain, and half of the dancers experienced disabling pain (n = 26). Significant associations were evident for pain related disability and movement quantity and quality variables. Specifically, greater pain related disability was associated with more light activity, fewer leg lifts to the front, a shorter average duration of leg lifts to the front and fewer total leg lifts. Greater pain related disability was also associated with higher thigh elevation angles to the side. There was no evidence for associations between movement quantity and quality variables and pain severity. Despite a high prevalence of musculoskeletal pain, dancers' levels of pain severity and disability were generally low. Between-person level associations were identified between dancers' movement quantity and quality, and pain related disability. These findings may reflect dancers' adaptations to pain related disability, while they continue to dance. This proof-of-concept research provides a compelling model for future work exploring dancers' pain using field-based, serial data collection.

Ownership and transmission in contemporary dance and beyond: A short introduction to the special issue

AbstractThe aim of this special issue is the investigation and contextualization of specific arts practices for what they can show us about the transmission and ownership of knowledge. Our authors make explicit the modes of sharing that are part of the creative process in contemporary dance and in Irish traditional music and examine the principles of transmission and social mores that allow ideas to move between practitioners. This introduction sets out some context for the issue and our approach, which is to work alongside practitioners to understand and reveal the social principles and expectations of ownership that are part of the process of producing these art forms.

The costume designer as co-author of contemporary dance performance: Erika Turunen’s signature style

With the aim of contributing to the scholarship on costume designers’ agential collaboration within contemporary dance, this article centres on the creative authorship of the designer. Using the notions of ‘signature style’ and ‘authorship’ as the key research lenses, it investigates the work of Finnish costume designer Erika Turunen within contemporary dance, specifically her collaboration with choreographer Tero Saarinen. Drawing from in-person interviews with the designer and materials related to her costumes, this article addresses the issues of re-invention versus repetition, and process and outcome as two interlinked steps in the creation of Turunen’s signature style.

Embodied cultural property: Contemporary and traditional dance practices

AbstractThis article discusses the implications of recording and digitizing a variety of cultural and contemporary dance performance practices, core to a European project known as WhoLoDancE, which focused on issues of reuse, ownership, property, and responsibility. The recordings and subsequent processing of dance material into digital data raised questions about the responsibilities to the dancers who have contributed their material to the project, particularly when it is transformed into data visualizations that can be accessed and reused by others. The article not only focuses on how value accrues in these kinds of resources and sometimes in unexpected ways but also draws attention to how dance remains bound to the communities in which it is performed and tends to resist its abstraction from the body to be commodified as a form of cultural property. This then points to how dance, as intangible cultural heritage, is self-regulating in terms of principles of ownership and attribution.

Riffing off intellectual property in contemporary dance

AbstractDance disappears the moment it becomes visible, the complexity of its ontology matching that of its production and of its intellectual property status. Its creative process is both collaborative and hierarchical, involving the transmission of knowledge from one body to another, remembering steps, recognizing moves, mimicking, and improvising gestures as well as coordinating the roles of dancers, choreographers, and studios. Matthias Sperling’s Riff (2007) directly addresses many of these issues, which inform the specific content of the piece as well as its conceptualization, development, and the copyright licenses that underpin it. Sperling’s performance is clearly conceived as a rite of passage, a dance through which a dancer becomes a choreographer, going from “riffing off” other choreographers’ work to developing dance movements and phrases that, while tied to those of his predecessors, he can claim as his own. As such, Riff makes explicit and rearticulates the rearrangement of professional relations and roles, the difference between reperforming and innovating, between learning from bodies or from media, as well as how the property status of the work intersects with community norms and expectations of attribution.

Principles of ownership and the transmission of knowledge in contemporary dance and Irish traditional music: Social norms and legal contexts

AbstractDrawing on the contributions to this special issue, this article offers a synthetic description of the principles of ownership, sharing, and reward that guide and stimulate the creative practices of contemporary dance. Irish traditional music is also considered. The article aims to contextualize creative practices within a series of concerns around the protection and perpetuation of valuable cultural and artistic practices. This contextualization establishes the relevance and interest of the contemporary dance for other domains and attends to the contemporary conditions of cultural production, including those of intellectual property law, commercialization, and community/commons formation. I show how this work offers an illuminating model of social process in which value created in common is linked – through reputation, attribution, recognition, and innovation – to people, without private property becoming the dominant mode of ownership.

Ownership, ontology, and the contemporary dance commons

AbstractThis article considers the “commons” in relationship to contemporary dance in the United Kingdom. I highlight the norms and expectations that shape the sharing of dance in this context by outlining four implicit rules that govern circulation and ownership. I go on to highlight how dance’s circulation outside of legal structures is in part due to its ontology through the examination of choreographer and visual artist Florence Peake’s work RITE (2018) and its relationship to choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1913).

Making something together: A conversation about creating and sharing dance knowledge

AbstractIn this transcript of an extended interview, Dame Siobhan Davies discusses her biography and oeuvre in the context of an enquiry into aspects of learning, transmission, and claims to ownership over the material that makes modern dance. The creative practice of contemporary dance makers offers an opportunity to describe the “coming into being” of both knowledge and persons in a unique domain, but one also connected to other areas of the arts and collaborative practice. Davies describes an approach to making dance that explicitly rejects two key notions: that the body merely performs what the mind creates and, thus, that the choreographer and the dancer are in a hierarchical relationship of control mirroring the control of mind over matter. She then describes how her creative processes with others have been increasingly shaped to allow non-proprietorial and non-hierarchical outcomes that are substantive to the art works themselves.

Nature of Personality Patterns and Coping Strategies among Female Indian Classical Dancers (Bharatanatyam Dancers) and Contemporary Dancers

Nature of Personality Patterns and Coping Strategies among Female Indian Classical Dancers (Bharatanatyam Dancers) and Contemporary Dancers

The transformative dance of the crisis to resignify social educational work: auto-ethnographical reflections on a cooperative enquiry in Northern Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic

This contribution proposes an autoethnographic reflection on a cooperative enquiry involving social workers, volunteers and family members of people with intellectual disabilities in Northern Italy. The author, a social worker and doctoral student, recognises the complexity of her own positioning and reflects on the educational work that takes place in the social sphere, on the risks connected to a technocratic logic and on critical, and transformative possibilities offered by the crisis. The author proposes a systemic reflexivity that challenges the dominant discourses, connects the micro, meso and macro levels and promotes different ways of knowing. The dynamism of the body, linked to the author's experience in the field of contemporary dance, becomes a symbolic way to decolonise the posture of social workers and open it up to the transformative potential of a sensitive, conscious and incorporated social educational work.

Conceptualizing the stylistic body movements in contemporary Ghanaian dances as performance art form

This paper attempts to conceptualize the stylistic body movements in contemporary Ghanaian dances through the aesthetic lenses of performance art. The expressiveness of performance art forms is frequently praised for the emotions we have toward them. These feelings are derived from the symbolic connotations and functionalities of the arts in life. Through an exploratory design of qualitative inquiry, the researchers focus on a contextual dialogue on the aesthetic visual presentations of selected contemporary Ghanaian dances as performance art forms. The critical content analysis of music videos was espoused to examine the stylistic body movements and gestures coded in some contemporary Ghanaian dances such as Azonto, Twerking, Kupe, Pilolo and Shoo as part of an empirical artistic study. Instruments for data collection were observation, document analysis and photography for the contextual visual content analyses grounded in semiotic and aesthetic theoretical discourse. This study again relied heavily on secondary data from recorded communication including music videos, books, transcripts, websites, newspaper articles, journal articles and the like to make objective inferences. The findings indicate that dance is the communication that occurs via the conduit of the dancer's body that ruptures individuals' independent existence and generates a sense of finitude. Whereas some of the dances make aggressively erotic visual statements, others are mere expressive gestural and body movements to simply entertain a targeted audience. The result further shows that, the contemporary Ghanaian dance performances transcend beyond mere entertainment but rather are an embodiment of body language emerging from the indigenous dance symbolisms. Teaching learners to perceive visual aesthetic qualities and symbolic interpretations in dance performances will deepen the appreciation of Ghanaian dance performances not just as entertainment but as another medium for expression to transmit their inherent messages. It is suggested that, these dance forms should be formalized as indigenous knowledge in a quest to blend tradition with modernity in our creative endeavours. This knowledge should be propagated through creative arts education in Ghanaian schools. Other performance art components displayed in contemporary Ghanaian dances including body painting, facial expressions, costumology and fashion accessories present another lacuna for further research by future researchers. Key words: aesthetics, dance, therapy, performance art, body, movement

Living up to a bohemian work ethic. Balancing autonomy and risk in the symbolic economy of the performing arts

Empirical studies generally report that aspiring a career in the performing arts is risky business. Within the contemporary European context of neoliberal capitalism, the particular workforce is inclined to occupy a precarious socio-economic position. We aim to contribute to this body of research by discussing how risk and precarity in the artworld are macro- and meso-governed by existing structures and micro-managed by agents. Our data stem from empirical research conducted among members of the contemporary dance population in Brussels and Berlin. We focus for the most part on qualitative findings from longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork to discuss how the informants live up to a bohemian work ethic that is framed by a more general symbolic economy. In this paper, we argue that within the longstanding sociological agency-structure debate, the outlined bohemian work ethic ties in with the concept of an autonomous heteronomy. Furthermore, despite the relatively different socio-economic macro structures in both locales, we come to conclude that the very similar symbolic economy seems to have a much greater impact on artistic and economic risk taking than the specific social security policy and welfare approaches.

Auto-Ethnography of Engagement Through Dance

This paper proposes a reflection on collaboration through dance. Drawing on ten years of fieldwork within the Swiss contemporary dance scene, the author, an anthropologist, dance scholar, and dancer, discusses her ethnographic practice, method, and writing inspired by collaborative anthropology. The first part of the paper advocates for dance as a practice-based research method, and for auto-ethnography to convey anthropological knowledge in a more accessible way. Research-creation is claimed to particularly suit sensorial topics, tending toward symmetrical relationships between anthropologists and fieldwork interlocutors. Drawing on an applied anthropological project using djembe dances for better social cohesion, the second part of the paper shows one possible engagement with society through dance practice. Generating intimacy and misconceptions, the project Kunda emphasizes how dance can become a laboratory to learn and negotiate intercultural differences.

Coloured Swan: Moya Michael's Prowess in the Face of Fetishization in European Dance

AbstractIn my ethnographic fieldwork in the contemporary dance scene in Brussels, I followed closely which struggles Moya Michael had to overcome as a South African maker in the European contemporary dance sector trying to sell her work. As a female artist of color, she cannot escape the fetishistic gaze emphasizing her exoticized body, a body imagined as exotic vis-à-vis institutional whiteness. This article examines how the work environment in the continental European contemporary dance sector forms a breeding ground for the fetishization of Afrodiasporic artists. After unpacking the general issues related to identity in the European contemporary dance sector, this article continues to discuss the dance solo Khoiswan, which Michael created in 2018 as the first part of an ongoing series called Coloured Swans. In this choreographic work, Michael centers and explores her multilayered identity on her own terms.

Disorientation as Critical Practice: Confronting Anti-Black Perceptual Regimes and Activating the Otherwise in mayfield brooks's Improvising While Black Pedagogy

AbstractThis article examines how mayfield brooks uses spatial, discursive, and vestibular disorientations to intervene within anti-Black regimes of perception in their Improvising While Black (IWB) workshops, which draw from their ongoing life/art project by the same name. Drawing from insights gathered through my participation in IWB workshops as well as through conversations with brooks and other workshop participants, I examine what brooks's guided disorientations do, that is, what they produce kinetically, perceptually, and relationally among participants. I show how brooks's disorientations expand on Sachi Sekimoto and Christopher Brown's conceptualization of racialized regimes of perception by revealing a set of choreographic tropes that undergird those regimes. These include perceiving from a vertical posture, leading movement from the head, navigating based on visual cues while inhibiting responsivity to other senses, turning away from cultural and ancestral context, and relating to self and others as individuals. Drawing on examinations of disorientation within contemporary dance practice and critical race theory, I argue that brooks guides participants into disorienting improvisations that draw attention to, refuse participation within, and generate otherwise possibilities to this choreography.

Taxonomía of a Spicy Espécimen

Taxonomía of a Spicy Espécimen

Developing the Positional Characteristics of a Dance-Specific Star Excursion Balance Test (dsSEBT).

Current dynamic balance tests do not sufficiently test all aspects of balance required for dancers in everyday training and performances. The aim of this study was to examine alterations to the Star Excursion Balance Test (SEBT) to ensure a more dance-specific protocol. Twenty-four healthy ballet and contemporary dancers (age: 22.21 ± 6.47 years) participated in completing five different variations of the SEBT. This research implemented upper-body restrictions commonly used in dance settings and tested the effects of two different foot positions, parallel and turned out, as well as two alternate balance surfaces, a foam balance pad and a firm yoga block. Reach distances (percent of limb length), center of pressure (COP, cm²), error scores, and time to completion were measured. Overall, the dance-specific upper body restrictions did not affect the dancer's ability to reach maximally and achieve a successful trial as there were no significant differences between the original SEBT and the dance-specific SEBT parallel condition (p = 1.00). The foam and block conditions were found to be significantly more difficult due to lower reach distance values, higher COP values, and higher error score values when compared to the original, parallel, and turnout positions (p < 0.05). Lastly, it was discovered that 62.61% of all errors made were in the crossed side and crossed front spokes, suggesting these are the most difficult reach directions to accomplish. The variations used in the study will aid in developing a reliable dance-specific dynamic balance test.

Quantifying Internal Load in Pre-Professional Contemporary Dancers: The Association Between Objective Heart-Rate Derived Outcome Measures and Subjective Dancers' and Teachers' Perceptions.

Monitoring heart rate is one of the most common methods used to quantify internal training load (ITL) in athletes. The aim of this study was to determine whether subjective measurements can be used as a simple, non-invasive, and inexpensive method for assessing ITL in pre-professional contemporary dancers. <br/>Method: A total of 16 first-year contemporary dance students participated in this study. Students wore heart rate monitors during 56 training sessions. After each session, students completed the rate of perceived exertion (RPE) scale and teachers completed the rate of observed exertion (ROE) scale. For each session, we calculated the session-RPEs (sRPE), session-ROEs (sROE), and heart-rate-derived ITLs [i. e., Banister TRaining IMPulse method (TRIMP) and Edwards TRIMP]. Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated to determine the association between sRPE, sROE, Banister TRIMP, and Edwards TRIMP. <br/>Results: Between-individual correlation between Banister TRIMP and subjective dancers' (sRPE) and teachers' perceptions (sROE) were moderate (r = .49, p < 0.01) to large (r = .57, p < 0.01). Between-individual correlations between Edwards TRIMP and the subjective perceptions (sRPE and sROE) were very large (r = .74, p < 0.01; and r = .79, p < 0.01). There was a statistically significant large (r = 0.52, p < 0.01) to almost perfect (r = 0.93, p < 0.01) within-individual correlation between the sRPE and the two measured TRIMP methods. There was a statistically significant small (r = .29, p < 0.01) to almost perfect (r = .92, p < 0.01) within-individual correlation between the sROE and the two measured TRIMP methods. <br/>Conclusion: The results of this study suggest that the sRPE is a simple, non-invasive, inexpensive, and valid method for quantifying ITL in pre-professional dancers.