Exciting dance research by AUT Bachelor of Dance students
by Dr. Alice Knappstein and Jennifer Nikolai

Current Bachelor of Dance students at the Auckland University of Technology are conducting groundbreaking research in dance fields. As a component of their 3rd year programme of studies, their fields of research encompass dance science, education methodologies and choreographic approaches.

Student Allie Carter was curious to discover how blind students would learn to tap dance. She began investigating teaching approaches and found almost no published research in this area.

She discovered that a blind dancer relies more heavily on precise verbal descriptions and the sense of touch. One of the dancers she interviewed, who had a visual memory prior to his loss of sight, used the facings and directions of a clock as reference points. "Tapping into" his internal sense of direction through his proprioceptors was of paramount importance. As she developed her methodology, Allie saw the necessity to create an instructional CD as a rehearsal tool, which he used regularly in between studio sessions.

The dancer performed in a group piece for the first time in his life at the AUT Dance Studies Graduate Showcase 2004 - and the audience was awestruck.

In another research project, three students thought it would be interesting to meet and interview prominent dance teachers and choreographers in Los Angeles.

So, Grace Crawford, Caroline Rattray, and Aimee Harvey applied and were granted a scholarship, packed their bags and flew off to LA for 5 weeks to embark in a thrilling opportunity to interview numerous dance personalities in North America.

Any dancer's dream would be to take as many dance classes as possible while in LA, and they did. Their research culminated in 18 thorough DVDs of interviews and studio class documentation. You can imagine how quickly they were brought back to earth when they had to transcribe the DVDs using qualitative research methods!

Rebecca Burfield carried out a dance survey to find out whether dance is commonly used as a therapeutic tool in special education. Integrating qualitative and quantitative research methods, she received excellent responses and is currently collating and analysing her data.

Nailing the pirouette is a constant battle for most dancers. Kirsty Ellis, who has a particular interest in dance science, found that muscle conditioning and the use of extensor thrust technique improved the successful execution of pirouettes in her participants. She used video analysis and the RAD pirouette grading criteria for her analysis.

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