With few exceptions, dance, and traditional dance in particular, has received little attention regarding the development of technological tools that can support teaching. The WebDANCE project was a pilot study with a European scope that aimed to experiment with the development of a web-based learning environment for traditional dances. The final…

Photography should be regarded as an art rather than as passive documentation. Those interested in photographing dance can best think of it as an opportunity not just to record what the dancer is doing, but also to explore the dancer's personality and to stimulate the invention of movement. This exploratory approach will not only benefit the…

This paper acknowledges the importance of a dancer's centre but likewise highlights the problematic nature of the communication of this concept from dance teacher to student. After a brief introduction of orthodox approaches in finding centre, this paper suggests a method of locating centre through the ancient somatic technique.

Dance embraces the entire globe. Universities offer world dance classes to expose students to various styles and educators travel to different countries to experience how dance is viewed, performed, and taught in different cultures. In this article nine dance educators share their experiences of teaching and observing dance abroad. These accounts…

Why would boys want to dance? Why would anyone want to dance? The argument prosecuted in this paper is that dance educators have tended to see dance as a self-evidently good thing with self-evident benefits for children who learn to dance. In other words, dance educators tend to concern themselves with why students should dance rather than why…

Studio owners continually face the challenge of finding qualified instructors. While aspiring performers spend time developing dance technique, little time is devoted to enhancing teaching skills. In this article, the author, a studio owner, describes the problem she had with her dancers' lack of teaching knowledge and details how she discovered…

In response to concerns about the place and nature of dance history in British higher education curricula, a database was compiled of representative but significant examples of modules which focused directly on the teaching and learning of history, or had history as a key component. An analysis is presented of these modules in terms of the place…

In this paper, a new dance training system based on the motion capture and virtual reality (VR) technologies is proposed. Our system is inspired by the traditional way to learn new movements-imitating the teacher's movements and listening to the teacher's feedback. A prototype of our proposed system is implemented, in which a student can imitate…

Researching student participation in distance postgraduate programmes of studies in dance constitutes a concern of any educational organisation. This sort of participation can be considered as a type of "behaviour" of the students which has to be researched and defined. The aim of this study is to research the factors which constitute…

Letting the dance work itself educate the student and conducting related experiential classes is an important foundation on which to build readings, discussions, written assignments, and projects. Dance educators can design the educational investigations to be fueled directly from the art and support the investigation with contextual information.…

Dance education has not played a significant role in Hong Kong schools. Teacher education may be at a crossroads in determining its future directions in relation to dance as art rather than physical activity. Taking Marcel Mauss's characterizations of the techniques of the body as the ways in which, from society to society, people learn how to use…

Although the technological methods in which dance artists create, develop, document and present their work have grown significantly over the past two decades, technology education in undergraduate dance curricula in the US often remains peripheral. Some dance programs in higher education, especially those with graduate programs, now include a…

Schools that bring in teaching artists often look beyond their school walls--to other sources of funding and for collaborative partnerships--to work with teaching artists from the community. For the teaching artist with an expansive vision and a willingness to try new approaches, opportunities may be opening up beyond the typical…

The subjective experience of flow in professional dancers was analyzed using interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA). Flow is believed to be a psychological state in which the mind and body "just click", creating optimal performance. Unfortunately, sport and performance research have severely neglected reviewing the flow experience in…

Since 1977-78, The USA National Dance Association (NDA) has selected one individual each year to receive an award as NDA Scholar and/or Artist and make a presentation at the association's annual meeting. The following essay was originally presented as the 1994 NDA Scholar's Lecture; a manuscript version has been published by that organization. The…