Project description
Dacing with a partner, coordinating movements, and paying attention to each other may cause us to develop a feeling of closeness and connection, even if we did not know our partner prior to interacting with them in dance. Similarly, when observing a pair of dancers we often experience aesthetic pleasure and feel almost as if we participated in their relationship.
These two experiences could be dubbed, respectively, first-person and third-person perspective on dance interaction. What is the connection between those perspectives? To what extent can we recognise the connection between people from the outside? Is the subjective connection between two dance partners visible in their objectively observable movement coordination? In order to find answers to those questions, we analyse the footage of eight paired dance improvisations, registered during a dance festival. Apart from the footage, we take into account extensive interviews conducted with the dancers, pertaining to their experiences during the improvisation. In order to obtain the full picture, we use computer algorithms dedicated to detecting movement, as well as network methods which help to reveal the structure in the interviews. Moreover, we make use of outside expertise regarding the level of closeness between dance partners. Thanks to this, we can find out to what extent the feeling of connectedness is shared between different people and how it manifests in movement.
PIs: Klara Łucznik, Julian Zubek
The research is founded by the Excellence Initiative Project, University of Warsaw
