IADMS Miami 2000   [back to the Category]

Rear Foot Alignment and Injury in the Female Flamenco Dancer   [read the french version]

Author :   M. Virginia Wilmerding, Ph.D. et al.

Authors: M. Virginia Wilmerding, Ph.D., M. Elizabeth Pedersen, M.A., Jennifer L. Monfiletto-Wilkins, P.T., Stuart B. Pett, M.D., University of New Mexico, Department of Theatre and Dance, Albuquerque, NM, USA

Flamenco dance requires patterns of footwork that create aggressive, percussive and repetitive sounds on the floor. As such, it would be expected that the foot and ankle might be sensitive to injury, particularly in the pre-professional student of the art form. Previous research by the authors has, in fact, documented that foot pain is the predominant malady identified by this population. The purpose of this study was to measure the rear foot alignment in sub-talar neutral and the tibio-calcaneal angle in dancers who self-report ankle injuries and those who do not.

Twenty-eight females provided a convenience sample from intermediate and advanced classes held at an annual International Flamenco Festival. Informed consent was obtained and identification of injury status was gained via interview. Rear foot varus measurements in non-weight bearing were recorded, and tibiocalcaneal angles of the participants’ feet were measured standing in bare feet and in a heeled Flamenco shoe. T tests were conducted to assess the difference of these measurements between the injured and the non-injured groups.

Results indicated a significant difference between the group with self-reported ankle injuries as compared to the non-injured group in rear foot varus alignment (6.01 degrees and 4.39 degrees respectively, p = 0.024), tibio-calcaneal angle in bare feet (6.46 degrees and 4.07 degrees respectively, p = 0.006) and shoes (3.36 degrees and 1.96 respectively, p = 0.021). Further analysis, however, indicated no significant difference in the symmetry of right and left foot in either group.

This study showed that there was only a moderate degree of difference between the measured angles of ankle alignment in the right and left feet of female Flamenco dancers who did not report being injured. This degree of difference was preserved in the set of participants that self-reported injury, which implies that the difference between the two groups was not due to the injury itself. If the injury caused the positional faults, then the uninjured foot would show less variance. This was not demonstrated. The possibility exists, therefore, that positional variances of the feet that can be measured may pre-dispose a dancer to self-reported injury.

This is the abstract of a paper presented at the Tenth Annual Meeting of the International Association for Dance Medicine and Science, held 27-29 October 2000 in Miami, Florida, USA. All rights are reserved by the individual author(s).