This article explores how choreographed movement, through its collective orientation, builds political agency. How might shared gestures reform the public space and lay ground for new social structures to grow, structures that are restorative and reparative against the extraction that is commanding the way of life? This how is addressed by looking at the social choreographies common moves in 2023 and Make Arts Policy! in 2014, both realised in the sociocultural environment of Helsinki, Finland. These social choreographies engage in facilitating an active presence that emerges in shared movement. The article explores the political aspect of choreography as a rehearsal ground for new types of social structures and relations to emerge. This aestheticopolitical possibility is considered through the notions of common and affective infrastructures, namely through Lauren Berlant’s theorising. The case studies together with the theoretical perspectives offer a lens to look at the local gestures that have in their own ways ruptured the status quo, even momentarily. The ripples of these instances resonate and keep their movement alive. Altering and claiming the public space in unexpected ways enable new types of social structures to emerge. This article discusses the notions of agency and social change: movement and speculation, as well as the senses and emotions that tie into the aesthetic experience that emerges in social choreography.
To examine the effect of synchronous dance movements on social bonding and perceived closeness between generations, 168 young (20–45 years) and older (65–90 years) participants were randomly assigned to six dyad conditions. These included dancing synchronously or asynchronously with an in-age-group or out-age-group unfamiliar partner for 11 min. The participants then completed social bonding and group closeness questionnaires. To assess variation across individuals’ and dyads’ measurements, a generalized estimating equation modeling analysis was conducted. In line with the hypotheses, synchronized dancing increased social bonding, and young adults showed an enhanced perception of closeness between generations. The hypothesis that synchronous dancing with out-age-group members would foster greater perceived closeness compared to in-age-group members was not confirmed. Surprisingly, the results indicated that asynchronous movements with the in-age-group led to a higher degree of closeness between generations than asynchronous movements with the out-age-group. Avenues for future studies on the mechanisms by which intergenerational dance fosters intergenerational bonding and closeness are discussed.
The article is devoted to the problem of studying the psychological health of adults. A review of the main works revealing approaches to understanding psychological health as a phenomenon is carried out, a number of scientific papers illustrating the characteristic features of psychological health of persons in different fields and types of activity (students, teachers, medical and social workers, representatives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs system, etc.) are analyzed. The current shortage of knowledge in science regarding psychological health of people who regularly practice dancing. The article also presents the results of a study that describes the peculiarities of the psychological health of people (average age 48 years) who regularly attend dance classes (folk, ballroom, dance vibroplasty).
Education (General), Theory and practice of education
Iliana Stefanova Ruzhanova-Gospodinova, Silvi Vladova, Tomasz Szara
et al.
The present study aimed to describe the skull and mandibles of the brown bear (<i>U. arctos</i>) from the Dancing Bear Belitsa Park using advanced 3D morpho-geometric techniques. The objective was to explore how sexual dimorphism and size influence cranial structures using advanced 3D geometric morphometric methods. Three-dimensional models of the skulls and mandibles of 12 brown bears were used. Differences in skull morphology between male and female brown bears were observed in this study. The male brown bear skull, larger than the female, exhibited a more pronounced extension of the upper part of the nuchal region towards the posterior. Additionally, the posterior part of the frontal region appeared notably thinner in male brown bears compared to females. Analysis of the mandible revealed that the masseteric fossa was more developed in males than females. These shape differences between males and females were found to be influenced by body size. Statistical analyses indicated a significant allometric effect of body size on skull PC1 values, suggesting that giant bears tend to have more elongated skulls. This implies a relationship in which larger individuals exhibit greater cranial elongation. In contrast, mandible PC1 values showed no size-related variation, indicating that mandibular shape is less influenced by overall body size. However, PC2 values in the mandible increased significantly with larger specimens, indicating a larger masseteric fossa in larger bears. This morphological adaptation potentially enhances feeding efficiency and bite strength in larger individuals, reflecting functional adaptations in brown-bear mandibular morphology. These findings contribute to our understanding of sexual dimorphism and size-related morphological adaptations in brown bears, providing insights into their adaptation biology and ecological roles within their habitats.
Self-confidence for early childhood is still minimal, especially when it comes to interact with the surrounding environment. The lack of self-confidence indication appears in Siminal Siminul Dance learning at LKP Merpati Blora, which the children feeling shy and afraid to perform in public following by the lack of courage to express their opinions. The purpose of the study was to analyze the Instilling of self-confidence character in Siminal Siminul Dance learning at LKP Merpati Blora. The method used in the research was a qualitative method with a phenomenological approach. Data collection techniques using observation, interviews and documentation. Data validity techniques used triangulation of sources, methods and theories while data analysis uses data reduction, data presentation and conclusion drawing. The results showed success in instilling self-confidence through 4 indicators at LKP Merpati Blora in learning Siminal Siminul Dance, namely, believing in one's own abilities resulted the students experiencing changes from 6 students to 20 students. Independent in making decisions aimed at success with changes from 9 students to 20 students. Positive thinking resulted in changes from 6 students to 20 students and the courage to express opinions from 6 students to 16 students. The results of this study are expected to be literature to add insight for the readers regarding the benefits of dance learning to increase children's self-confidence.
Objective: This study aimed to compare the regulation of brain activity by different kinds of long-term exercises (Tai Chi, treadmill training, and dancing) in healthy older adults and those with PD.Methods: From January 2000 to October 2021, the electronic databases PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus were searched. All articles were screened throughout the inclusion and exclusion criteria, which was followed by PICOS criteria. Finally, all articles were systematically reviewed with analyses.Results: 29 studies were identified for this review, 24 of which were finally included in a group of healthy older adults, and five of which in a group of people with PD. All studies showed that significant changes were showed on people with PD and healthy older adults’ brain activity after three terms of the exercises we chose. An inverse change trend on the functional connectivity in people with PD was observed after treadmill training, whereas increased brain activity, cognitive function, memory, and emotion were noticed in healthy older adults.Conclusion: Our findings suggest that different patterns of brain activity were also observed between healthy older adults and people with PD after treadmill training. However, more robust evidence and comprehensive studies are needed to determine if there is a difference between healthy older adults and people with PD.
This special issue has been motivated by the transformation the world has experienced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Major upheavals and change have occurred in light of this pandemic and there is now a forced reconsideration demanded of what dance is and how dance practitioners, educators, and researchers might continue their work in sustainable, relevant and accessible ways. With such change comes the possibility for dance to be transformed, reconsidered, and reimagined in ways that have implications for meanings, enaction, contexts, communities, practice, education, policy, and application.
En los últimos años se ha puesto de manifiesto el interés en la investigación sobre el papel del flamenco en los medios de comunicación, no sólo por la importancia de éstos para la promoción y difusión del flamenco, sino por su cualidad de método de conservación y fuente de estudio para el desarrollo de diversas áreas de conocimiento. La accesibilidad de estos contenidos, sobre todo tras la digitalización de los fondos hemerográficos y audiovisuales, y a la reciente aparición de algunos de estos medios (más allá de la incorporación de Internet, hay que tener en cuenta que la televisión aún no ha cumplido cien años desde su llegada a los hogares), ha favorecido que los investigadores obvien la necesidad de realizar un ejercicio de organización y análisis de esta información. Sin embargo, empieza a ser fundamental tener una noción de qué documentos conservamos o de cuál es el significado de los mismos en su contexto histórico, político y/o social.
The COVID-19 crisis, and its ensuing periods of confinement, has generated high levels of social stress on a global scale. In Spain, citizens were isolated in their homes and were not able to interact physically with family members, friends or co-workers. Different resources were employed to face this new stressful and unexpected situation (fitness, reading, painting, meditation, mindfulness, dancing, listening to music, playing instruments, cooking, etc.). Humor was one of the most frequent and widely used strategies in an attempt to keep perspective, deal with the seriousness of the situation and make the day-to-day more bearable. Humor is cultural: it varies from one country to the next and is part of the idiosyncrasies of a culture. It is deemed a particularly important feature of the Spanish personality. During the COVID-19 crisis, the main means or channels of communication were social networks. Throughout the confinement period, there was an excessive flow of humorous memes concerning Coronavirus and related shared experiences during the National State of Emergency decreed by the Spanish Government. The memes draw on irony, ingenuity and creativity to make a difficult and stressful experience more bearable. In this paper, a qualitative methodology based on ethnography research is used and ethnographic fieldwork is carried out on the memes disseminated through WhatsApp during the lockdown period experienced in Spain (14 March to 21 June 2020). The memes are considered to be an example of Netlore, digital contemporary folklore, and a theoretical framework on memes and humor is presented that discusses its different functions in order to channel grief, fear and suffering or to play down specific situations. A corpus of 644 memes that have flooded social networks are categorized and analyzed to witness how the Spanish have managed to bring out their humorous and creative side in difficult times even as they have criticized political decisions, let out their frustrations, described their new “normal” lives, interacted with others and anticipated the future.
The reign of Louis XIV marks an important milestone in the development of dance and art. Convinced that visual arts and music would significantly contribute to a monarch’s authority, image, and glory, the “Sun King” coordinated artistic activities through establishing a significant number of royal academies. Through the Académie Royale de Danse the art of dancing was given a proper language and notation system for the first time in history. On the other hand, the Académie Royale de Musique was tied to the birth of a national operatic style. Opera was the perfect tool for an idealistic and majestic projection of a nation’s monarch.
Rezumat. EPOCA DE AUR A DANSULUI BAROC. Domnia lui Ludovic al XIV-lea marchează o etapă importantă în dezvoltarea dansului și a artei. Convins că artele vizuale și muzica vor contribui semnificativ la autoritatea, imaginea și gloria unui monarh, "Regele Soare" a coordonat activitățile artistice prin înființarea unui număr semnificativ de academii regale. Prin intermediul Academiei Regale de Dans, arta dansului a primit, pentru prima dată în istorie, un limbaj și un sistem de notație adecvate. Pe de altă parte, Academia Regală de Muzică a fost legată de nașterea unui stil liric național. Opera era instrumentul perfect pentru o proiecție idealistă și maiestuoasă a monarhului unei națiuni.
Cuvinte cheie: dans baroc, Ludovic al XIV-lea, sisteme de notație a dansului, balet de cour, academii regale, Jean-Baptiste Lully, muzică, operă.
The focus of this article is on two Czech and Slovak films, My Friend Fabián (Můj přítel Fabián, 1955) and Gypsy (Cigán, 2011). While the former emerged in the 1950s, in the period of socialist industrialisation, the latter was released in the period of post-socialist consolidation of capitalism. Theoretically this article relies on a mix of approaches from film studies, social anthropology, post-colonial studies and archival research. The central research question is how cinematic representation of Roma were approached in the past and how they have changed over time. The film My Friend Fabián is replete with colonial tropes of uninhibited dancing, singing and exotica stereotypes and depicts imaginary Roma as incompetent individuals who are subject to the paternalistic care of the White socialist functionaries. At the same time this film presents a viable model for Roma integration and social advancement via education and full-fledged integration into the working class. In contrast, the film Gypsy is much more respectful towards Roma, contemporary performers and characters are real Roma and their film destinies are realistic. But the world that surrounds film characters is the world of total racial exclusion, which offers no hope and no prospects whatsoever for Roma and their social advance.
The article analyzes the play Retazos pequeños de nuestra historia más reciente (2010) choreographed by Daniel Payero for the Compañía Nacional de Danza Contemporánea, and its approach to the memory of the last Argentine civic-military dictatorship (1976-1983). Throughout this analysis, the article offers some thoughts on the embodied memory or the embodiment of the dictatorship’s memory as a repertoire or performance. How and what kind of memory do the dancing bodies have and evoke? Here, performance as embodied memory is presented as a fragmentary montage that alters the common place of official memory, allowing an intimate and affective dimension to arise.
Introduction: Osteoporotic fractures represent a major public health burden. The risk of fragility fractures in late adulthood is strongly impacted by peak bone mass acquisition by the third decade. Weight-bearing sporting activity may be beneficial to peak bone mass accrual, but previous studies have focused on elite sporting activity and have used dual energy X-ray absorptiometry as a measure of bone density. The authors performed a narrative systematic review of individual sports (performed non-competitively or at local level) and calcaneal quantitative ultrasound (cQUS) bone measures in young people.Methods: Multiple databases were systematically searched up until the 31st of March 2019. The authors included studies of participants' mean age (11–35 years), reporting any level of recreational sporting activity and cQUS measures as well as excluding elite/professional sporting physical activity. Studies (title and abstract) were screened independently by two reviewers, and a third reviewer resolved any discrepancies. STROBE guidelines were used to check the reporting of observational studies. The Newcastle–Ottawa Scale was used to assess the risk of bias of the studies included in the review. The systematic review was registered with the International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (PROSPERO).Results: A search yielded 29,512 articles that considered relationships between bone density assessed by any technique and sporting activity. Duplicate and out of scope abstracts were removed. This left 424 papers that were screened by two reviewers; of these, six met the inclusion criteria, including assessment by cQUS. The authors identified papers where sports were considered, included soccer (football), swimming, cycling, gymnastics, dancing, badminton, basketball, fencing, wrestling, and judokas. Although study heterogeneity prohibited meta-analysis, all six included studies reported significant benefits of weight-bearing non-elite sports on cQUS outcomes.Conclusion: Our study found beneficial effects of non-elite sports participation on cQUS in adolescence and young adulthood, although further work is now indicated.
Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm inspired by the intelligent source search and consumption characteristics of the real honey bees is one of the most powerful optimization techniques. Although the existing behaviours of the honey bees in standard ABC algorithm are capable of producing optimal or near optimal solutions for the vast majority of the problems, there are still some intelligent characteristics that are not modeled yet such as decision-making mechanism used by employed bees to determine when the dancing will be completed. In this study, a mechanism that adjusts the dancing durations of the employed bees according to the fitness values of the associated food sources is proposed and integrated to the standard ABC algorithm and its well-known variants. Experimental studies on a set of complex continuous numerical problems showed that the newly proposed dance scheduling approach significantly improved the search and consumption characteristics of the artificial bees of the standard ABC algorithm and its some variants.
The object of this study is various guides and travel notes about the Crimea of the imperial period. These travelogues present a special picture of the daily life of the Crimean Tatars. In the 19th century, Crimean Tatars had interesting and original traditions of medical practices. This literature has stories about the life style of the Crimean Tatars, their attitude towards diseases and methods of healing. The authors of travel notes looked at the external image of the Crimean Tatars, at their public actions. For example, the pilgrimage of the Crimean Tatars to the “holy well”, dancing of Dervishes, etc. So, this system of medical practices of the Crimean Tatars (in the lens of the authors of travel notes) included pagan beliefs and rituals, Turkic food culture, healing methods associated with the Muslim culture. But they did not see the practice of folk healers of the Crimean Tatars. These works of the 19th century have the same assessments of folk practices of healing, where the authors contrasted “their” and “alien” culture. As a result this attitude hindered constructive dialogue between people of different cultures. But in the second half of the 19th century in the Crimea began intercultural interaction in the scope of public health. During this period the medical service of the zemstvo (municipality) was created, and the Crimean Tatars were in the zone of influence of this service. On the other hand, some methods of folk healing of the Crimean Tatars began to be used in the practice of official scientific medicine.
Traditionally, the Ndebele people of Zimbabwe used to grieve silently and quietly around a corpse. Singing and dancing were considered to be taboo. However, recently this trend has
shifted noticeably because of the growth of Christianity in Zimbabwe and more especially the growth of Pentecostal Churches. This paper examines how Christianity and its beliefs have shaped and influenced Ndebele perceptions of grieving and mourning the passing on of their loved ones. The Christian worldview and the Ndebele worldview regarding death and the
afterlife differ greatly and funeral practises have inevitably brought these worldviews into contact with each other. The Ndebele people's culture of grieving ‘silently’ with singing and dancing being seen as unbefitting around a corpse, has shifted with the growth of Christianity in Zimbabwe and particularly in Pentecostalism. With the shifting of these perceptions, the Ndebele people have warmed up to the idea which was for a long time viewed as being foreign. The Christian Biblical view of life after death is in a way certain and hopeful while the Ndebele traditional religion view of death is shrouded in silence and
mystery. The researcher observed that the assurance of a life in heaven for Christians has made them to view death as not an end, and they thus rejoice in knowing that their loved ones are in God’s hands. Because of the influence of Christianity, singing, clapping and dancing have become familiar occurrences in most funerals. Paradoxically, this atmosphere of ‘celebrating’ has also been extended to those who are not Christians.
Recent resting-state fMRI studies have revealed neuroplastic alterations after long-term training. However, the neuroplastic changes that occur in professional traditional Chinese Pingju opera actors remain unclear. Twenty professional traditional Chinese Pingju opera actors and 20 age-, sex-, and handedness-matched laymen were recruited. Resting-state fMRI was obtained by using an echo-planar imaging sequence, and two metrics, amplitude of low frequency fluctuation (ALFF) and regional homogeneity (ReHo), were utilized to assess spontaneous neural activity during resting state. Our results demonstrated that compared with laymen, professional traditional Chinese Pingju actors exhibited significantly decreased ALFF in the bilateral calcarine gyrus and cuneus; decreased ReHo in the bilateral superior occipital and calcarine gyri, cuneus, and right middle occipital gyrus; and increased ReHo in the left anterior insula. In addition, no significant association was found between spontaneous neural activity and Pingju opera training duration. Overall, the changes observed in spontaneous brain activity in professional traditional Chinese Pingju opera actors may indicate their superior performance of multidimensional professional skills, such as music and face perception, dancing, and emotional representation.
O espaço público como dispositivo no processo criativo da dramaturgia aberta. Este artigo analisa como a escolha por locais de encenação não convencionais influenciou a montagem e a construção das cenas do Coletivo Tombado em sua busca para a criação de um território cênico na peça Para Mahal.