Quantitative Performance Improvement Studies in Dance

In the past few days, I have been pondering about how to get my students to perform better.  My training as a Scientist and Engineer drives me to seek an efficient and scientific way to train my students in Classical Ballet.  Qualitatively I have good ideas as to where my dancers need more improvement but I do not feel comfortable not knowing cause and effect relationships at a quantitative level.  Specifically, I seek numerical evidence to determine which aspects of movement and anatomy affect the execution of certain steps in the vocabulary of Classical Ballet.  So far I have not found any good material covering this approach to performance improvement analysis. 

The general approach I plan to take is to get data on  input variables such as the angle of turnout, depth of plie and correlate this with the number of piroutte turns or the height of a grand jete.  The method will involve looking at film images and analyzing the body positioning based on stick models.  Quantitative data from this will then be analyzed using correlation analysis and other experimental analysis methods.  I'd like to know if anyone has ventured into this type of performance improvement research in Dance.  Feel free to comment.

How unison improvisation can improve co-worker relations...

 

One of the most common exercises in improvisation is the Unison.  It trains dancers how to feel each other and move as a group.  Unison exercises develop a heightened awareness in dancers for the movements of their co-performers.


In it's basic form, a unison exercise starts off with a leader in front who moves in a slow fashion.  As soon as the leader faces the sides or turns about, the most forward person in that direction becomes the leader.  The leadership changes as the leader changes  the position he/she faces.  The great thing about unison is that you can also add the elements of variation and succession which we use in mirroring.  If a dancer has learned how to do mirroring, unison should not be that difficult.

While this improvisation exercise benefits dancers a lot, non-dancers have a lot to gain as well.  For one, the awareness to non-verbal cues allows participants to be sensitive to the movement of the group as a whole.  By constant exposure, this awareness can grow to a point that a person can carry that same sensitivity into the work setting and other non-dance environments.  Considering that most communication is non-verbal, an organization with its members  adept in unison and other improvisational exercises would certainly be a highly effective team.  For this to work, it would be great is the whole organization regularly gets into a unison exercise to be able to explore and experiment on interdependency relationships between team members.


Unison exercises train teams to function organically without any verbal communication.  I also teaches how to adjust with leadership changes. In a nutshell a unison activity is a good simulation for developing co-worker interaction.  Perhaps, these exercises are  a great preventive to common place personality clashes in the work place.