How Do Dancers Learn To Dance?

Jean-Philippe Rivière (1, 2, 3) , Sarah Fdili Alaoui (1, 2, 3) , Baptiste Caramiaux (1, 2, 3, 4) , Wendy Mackay (1, 2, 3)

1 EX-SITU - Extreme Interaction
2 LRI - Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique
3 UP11 - Université Paris-Sud - Paris 11
4 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

We are interested in supporting motor skill acquisition in highly creative skilled practices such as dance. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 11 professional dancers to better understand how they learn new dance movements. We found that each dancer engages in a set of operations, including imitation, segmentation, marking, or applying movement variations. We also found a progression in learning dance movements composed of three steps consistently reported by dancers: analysis, integration and personalization. In this study, we aim to provide an empirical foundation to better understand the acquisition of dance movements from the perspective of the learner.

Mots clés: dance; Performing arts; music; motor learning; skill acquisition; first-person perspective

Domaines: Informatique [cs]; Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]

Jean-Philippe Rivière, Sarah Fdili Alaoui, Baptiste Caramiaux, Wendy Mackay. How Do Dancers Learn To Dance?: A first-person perspective of dance acquisition by expert contemporary dancers. MOCO 2018 - 5th International Conference on Movement and Computing, Jun 2018, Gênes, Italy. pp.1-8, ⟨10.1145/3212721.3212723⟩. ⟨hal-01849604v2⟩