Analysis of Movement Entropy during Community Dance Programs for People with Parkinson’s Disease and Older Adults: A Cohort Study

Dance therapy can improve motor skills, balance, posture, and gait in people diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and healthy older adults (OA). It is not clear how specific movement patterns during dance promote these benefits. The purpose of this cohort study was to identify differences and complexity in dance movement patterns among different dance styles for PD and OA participants in community dance programs using approximate entropy (ApEn) analysis. The hypothesis was that PD participants will show greater ApEn during dance than OA participants and that the unique dance style of tango with more pronounced foot technique and sharp direction changes will show greater ApEn than smoother dance types such as foxtrot and waltz characterized by gradual changes in direction and gliding movement with rise and fall. Individuals participated in one-hour community dance classes. Movement data were captured using porTable 3D motion capture sensors attached to the arms, torso and legs. Classes were also video recorded to assist in analyzing the dance steps. Movement patterns were captured and ApEn was calculated to quantify the complexity of movements. Participants with PD had greater ApEn in right knee flexion during dance movements than left knee flexion (p = 0.02), greater ApEn of right than left hip flexion (p = 0.05), and greater left hip rotation than right (p = 0.03). There was no significant difference in ApEn of body movements (p > 0.4) or mean body movements (p > 0.3) at any body-segment in OA. ApEn analysis is valuable for quantifying the degree of control and predictability of dance movements and could be used as another tool to assess the movement control of dancers and aid in the development of dance therapies.

Problems of Modern Folk and Stage Choreography: Artistic Language and Motivations

The article is devoted to revealing the peculiarities of the artistic language of folk-stage choreography at the beginning of the XXI century. and to determine the specifics of the use of motifs of folk dance movements in the process of modern stage interpretation of Ukrainian dance. The article considers the processes of creating signs that make traditional Ukrainian dances unique, as well as identifies the features of their use and transformation in the context of the development of modern stage folk dance. The study found that the leading, determining role in the system of heterogeneous means of artistic language of stage folk dance belongs to the authentic dance culture. This is explained by several aspects: first, the archetypal nature of the stage dance itself, which finds expression not so much in the return to the syncretism of the archaic, but in the appeal to the inexhaustible potential of artistic and aesthetic possibilities contained in any archetype; secondly, the fact that folk-stage choreography is extremely receptive to creative pursuits and bold artistic experiments. That is why even in the most difficult, crisis moments in the history of Ukrainian culture, in the moments of its transformation and transition to a new level, stage folk dance plays a special role, because against the background of complex transformations returns Ukrainian culture national spirit, and on the other the language of folk-stage dance determines the search for new forms and meanings. It is noted that authentic Ukrainian dance, whose motives come from folk beliefs, legends, myths, rituals and ceremonies, is designed to promote the national identity of the modern generation, which is an urgent problem of socio-cultural space of the early XXI century.

Psychological Perceptual Analysis Based on Dance Therapy Using Artificial Intelligence Techniques

Dance is an embodied activity when applied therapeutically, and it can have numerous specific and unspecific health assistances. Dance Movement Therapy (DMT) is a psychotherapeutic process used for the individual’s emotional, cognitive, and physical integration. To automatically synthesize dance movements according to the music, it needs to solve some computational challenges. This paper proposes the Artificial Intelligence assisted Dance Movement Therapy (AIDMT) to predict an individual’s psychological condition. The complete aim of this paper is to analyze the effects of recreational/general dance and dance movement therapy (DMT) on well-being, anxiety, and depression by a convolution neural network (CNN). The research results support the potential usefulness of DMT as a multi-faceted intervention for enhancing different facets of functioning in adolescence with diminishing cognitive abilities. The absence of advantageous effects for our long-term DMT and exercise intervention effects discover the requirement to preserve persistent activity levels with sufficient duration and intensity. Conclusion — The experimental result suggests that AIDMT achieves the highest classification accuracy of 98.03%.

The Unification of the Arts

The Unification of the Arts presents the first integrated cognitive account of the arts that attempts to unite all of the arts into a single framework, covering visual art, theatre, literature, dance, and music, with supporting discussions about creativity and aesthetics that span all of the arts. The book’s comparative approach identifies both what is unique to each artform and what artforms share with one another. An understanding of shared mechanisms sheds light on how the arts are able to combine with one another to form syntheses, such as choreographing dance movements to music, or setting lyrics to music to create a song. While most psychological analyses of the arts focus on perceptual mechanisms alone—most commonly aesthetic responses—the book offers a holistic sensorimotor account of the arts that examines the full gamut of processes from creation to perception for each artform. This allows for a broad discussion of the evolution of the arts, including the origins of rhythm, the co-evolution of music and language, the evolution of drawing, and cultural evolution of the arts. Finally, the book aims to unify a number of topics that have not been adequately related to one another in previous discussions, including theatre and literature, music and language, creativity and aesthetics, dancing and acting, and visual art and music. The Unification of the Arts provides a bold new approach to the integration of the arts, one that covers cognition, evolution, and neuroscience.

Dance, Expertise, and Sensorimotor Aesthetics

The article reviewed in this chapter discusses how questions initially originated in cognitive neuroscience can be answered with collaborations with nonscientific disciplines, such as performing arts. The author describes the first study that showed dancer’s brain activity when observing dance movements. By investigating how the expert brain works, they demonstrated the important role of sensorimotor processing for movement perception, emotion perception, and aesthetic judgment. This work opened a channel of communication between neuroscientists and performing artists, enabling conversations that have generated novel questions of interest to both disciplines. The chapter discusses three fundamental insights: the importance of prior experience for perception, the importance of motor representations for perception, and the existence of a system for embodied aesthetics. Finally, the author provides some consideration on neuroscientists’ capacity to dissect the aesthetic experience and how this knowledge can be absorbed by the performing artist during the artistic and choreographic process.

Training Effects on Affective Perception of Body Movements

What leads us to enjoy watching others’ bodies in motion? In this chapter, the authors discuss their motivation to explore how our bodily experiences, especially in the form of dance training, shape our perceptions and preferences for watching others move, especially in dance contexts. They highlight findings from several studies that they conducted to investigate how general dance experience (or lack thereof) influences our enjoyment of watching dance and how acquiring experience specifically related to the dance piece being observed shapes the pleasure we derive from watching that piece specifically. Overall, our work finds that the richer experience an observer has with learning particular dance movements, the more enjoyment that observer derived from watching those movements. This research underscores the utility of dance as a stimulus and training intervention for addressing key questions relevant to human neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, particularly in the domain of neuroaesthetics.

An Eye for the Impossible

The embodied simulation account of aesthetics, proposed by Freedberg and Gallese, assigns a pivotal role to an observer’s body in aesthetic appreciation of an artwork. While originally focused on visual artworks (such as paintings and sculpture), this theory clearly also holds great relevance to the performing arts, in particular dance. In this chapter, the author describes how she was inspired by this theory, as well as earlier work using dance as stimuli and dancers as participants to explore the relationship between embodiment, perception, and brain activity from a non-artistic perspective, to examine how observers’ physical abilities (or lack thereof) shape dance preferences. The author describes her team’s work demonstrating that dance-naïve participants are most drawn to highly complex, impressive dance movements impossible for observers to embody or perform themselves and how engagement of brain regions implicated in translating perception into action appear to be involved in this process.

Do free dance movements communicate how we feel? Investigating emotion recognition in dance

Current research into music and free dance movement explores differences in corporeal articulation of basic emotions. Accordingly, Van Dyck et al. (2014, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0089773) report congruent emotion recognition in free dance movements recorded after happiness or sadness inductions in lay dancers. The current study replicates this previous study with an advanced methodological approach measuring ratings of happiness and sadness recognition separately within both happy and sad conditions. We then tested the differences between the recognition of happiness and sadness in free dance movements. Therefore, a dance movement pre-study was conducted in two different conditions where either happiness or sadness were induced within four lay dancers using guided imagery and music listening. Subsequent to this, dancers were video recorded while moving freely to a neutral piece of music. Those silenced video recordings were then presented to participants (N = 37) in an online experiment, who were instructed to rate the emotion they recognised. Based on the Effort-Shape Theory by Rudolf Laban, observers also rated kinematic features of velocity/acceleration, directness, impulsiveness and expansion. Participants rated higher levels of happiness for the happy-induction condition compared to sadness. However, participants rated higher levels of sadness in the sad condition compared to happiness for just one of the four dancers. This finding indicates that it is easier to recognise happiness in free dance movements than sadness. The results of the kinematic features supported previous research which rated higher intensities for the happy condition than the sad condition.

The Effect of Music Therapy in Counseling

In general, dance and movement is a performance that is shown in the staging event. Dance is an activitythat uses body movements where muscles throughout the body rub against each other to be able to make abeautiful body movement, and also the need for the right rhythm and beats to make movements in dancedance to be beautiful, but what if motion and dance are used in the world of counseling , through musicalaccompaniment in accordance with dance movements that can make the counselee become more relaxed,both mentally, physically, and mentally. The purpose of writing this paper is to provide newknowledge to the general public about music in counseling sessions.