IADMS Miami 2000   [back to the Category]

Skill Acquisition and Mastery in Performance of a Complex Dance Movement   [read the french version]

Author :   Shaw Bronner, P.T., M.H.S., O.C.S., et al.

Authors: Shaw Bronner, P.T., M.H.S., O.C.S., Bruce Brownstein, P.T., M.B.A., Lise Worthen, M.S., B.F.A., Sarah Ames, B.S.; Soar Research, Long Island University, Brooklyn, NY, USA

Objective: What constitutes “skilled” movement? What distinguishes the mastery of the expert from the student? The dance population has been selected for study because expert dancers exhibit highly consistent spatial and temporal coordination patterns while performing domain-specific movements. The objective of this research is to understand the effect of skill acquisition on the organization of a complex dance movement (arabesque). The arabesque is a commonly performed dance movement that involves the coordination of postural control with upper and lower extremity multi-joint movement. The arabesque requires extreme changes in trunk orientation, temporal coordination of the endpoints of the gesture limbs, as well as balance control.

Methods: Preliminary analysis of a 3-D kinematic study of the arabesque in 30 subjects is presented. Subjects represented three distinct levels of training: expert (professionals with a minimum of 10 years of dance training), advanced, and beginner-intermediate, based on their ballet placement by faculty at an international dance school. Subjects were excluded if there was any history of lower extremity injury during the previous six months that caused them to stop dancing.

Results: All subjects displayed similar movement shape and general organization as demonstrated by angular and resultant displacements of the gesture limb and temporal trunk-limb sequencing. Frontal plane postural control and precision of phase transitions varied greatly from expert to student dancers.

Conclusions: Skilled performance of the arabesque appears to involve mastery of both postural control and segmental velocities. Students frequently focus their attention on control of the gesture limb. However, successful mastery of trunk control appears to be a key area that differentiates expert from student dancers. The study of kinematics provides insight into underlying control of movement dynamics and is a useful tool in analyzing the effectiveness of our training techniques.

This research is supported in part by the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation and NIH MBRS Grant # SO6 GM54650-04.

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).