Engagement and the ?gem? moment: how do dance students view and respond to dance in real time?

Vincs, Kim MFA, PhD, Deakin University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; Schubert, Emery BA (Hons), PhD University of New South Wales, Sydney, Victoria, Australia; and Stevens, Catherine, BA (Hons), PhD, MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney, Sydney, Victoria, Australia

Dance students learn to perform and to choreograph by watching and evaluating each other?s work, as well as through their own experiments.  This paper reports on a means of improving dancers? choreographic training, and hence their ability to understand and perform complex or nuanced choreography, through measuring and analysing their real-time responses to dance. 

Using the Audience Response Facility, a group of dance students were asked to rate their levels of ?engagement? with a dance that was performed for them.  The students recorded their responses continuously throughout the dance, using a stylus on a hand-held computer along an 11-point scale. The Audience Response Facility recorded the students? real-time responses to the dances against a common time-code, sampling the responses twice per second.  A total of 20 students and 5 expert observers over three test days recorded their responses to the same piece of choreography.

Surprisingly, given the multi-factorial nature of dance analysis, there was a high level of agreement between individual?s responses to the dance.  One of the characteristics identified on the time plotted shape of these responses is the ?gem moment? that is associated with a positive spike of engagement in response to the dance.  After analysing the corresponding, antecedent dance activity, we hypothesise that these spikes are implicated in the development of expertise in ?reading? dance.  The implications of this interpretation for teaching dance choreography and performance are discussed.