IADMS New York 2002   [back to the Category]

A New Approach to a Comparison of Ballet Skills: fMRI of Classical Ballet's Foot Movements   [read the french version]

Author :   Kaori Muramatsu, MA & Al.

A New Approach to a Comparison of Ballet Skills:
fMRI of Classical Ballet's Foot Movements


Kaori Muramatsu, MA; Minoru Fukuzaki, PhD
Department of Information and Networking
Tokai University Junior College
Tokyo, Japan

Seiji Nasu, MD; Masahiro Yamamoto, MD, PhD
Yokohama Stroke and Brain Center
Yokohama, Japan


In our recent study, we found that a dancer’s perception of her movement agrees with the movement itself when the spindle effect is preserved in Pirouettes.

For dancers, body perception is crucial to produce motion, so to understand a dancer’s perception of her body, we measured a dancer’s brain function during ballet movements with the aid of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). fMRI is now being used to see the changes in cerebral blood flow and in blood oxygenation induced by brain activation.

Using fMRI we observed differences between beginning dancers and skilled dancers performing similar movements. This can prove useful not only for improving the movement skills of dancers of all levels of proficiency, but also for helping trainers to enforce educational guidelines during training.

Using fMRI to examine a dancer performing a simple ballet movement (foot pointing and flexing in a lying position), it was found that, in general, skilled dancers had less activated area in both primary and supplemental motor regions than those of beginning dancers. In observing beginning dancers, the visual region of the brain tends to be activated to execute the unfamiliar task.
In conclusion, it is hoped that our research will help dancers understand their brain functions in order to improve their performances both physically and mentally, and that our findings will also contribute to the advancement of training methods. In this study, we confirm fMRI will be one of the main experimental methods to clarify a dancer’s performance skill in the future quantitative analysis.