trol and bad manners; they are unreflective artists and inept dance partners. However, they are strikingly good at learning the meanings of words. Children learn their first words by 12 months of age, are relatively proficient at word learning by 16–18 months, and eventually come to learn new words at a rate of over ten new words per day (see Box 1). Their early vocabularies include personal pr...

existence and gave it order; the universe is thus viewed as Nataraja, the ‘Cosmic Dance of Shiva’. Dance and yoga have long been described as two rivers stemming from the same source (The One), and this paper will illustrate a few interesting aspects of this relationship: how are yoga and dance similar as a physical discipline, how they are different, what is required of the practitioner, some ...

In this paper Histogram Oriented Gradient (HOG) features are extracted to classify the postures in a Indian classical dance video dataset. The aim is to design an automated system that can recognize the steps of Indian classical dance in a video. As a video consists of frames of different actions, so features representing shapes can be used to interpret the dance steps. HOG based features are c...

In recent years, deep neural network approaches have naturally extended to the video domain, in their simplest case by aggregating per-frame classifications as a baseline for action recognition. A majority of the work in this area extends from the imaging domain, leading to visual-feature heavy approaches on temporal data. To address this issue we introduce “Let’s Dance”, a 1000 video dataset (...

Music is an integral part of dance. Over the last 10 years, however, dance stimuli (without music) have been repeatedly used to study action observation processes, increasing our understanding of the influence of observer's physical abilities on action perception. Moreover, beyond trained skills and empathy traits, very little has been investigated on how other observer or spectators' propertie...

BACKGROUND Professional dancers are at risk of developing low bone mineral density (BMD). However, whether low BMD phenotypes already exist in pre-vocational dance students is relatively unknown. AIM To cross-sectionally assess bone mass parameters in female dance students selected for professional dance training (first year vocational dance students) in relation to aged- and sex-matched cont...

Two hundred and four dance students, professionals, and former dancers in the UK completed questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and a body scanning and mapping process aimed at gaining an increased understanding of how dancers interpret pain and its relationship to injury in the context of their careers. The research was targeted at modern and contemporary dancers, as they are an underre...

Surface electromyography (sEMG) has been used in dance medicine research since the 1970s, but normalization procedures are not consistently employed in the field. The purpose of this project was to develop a portable anchored dynamometer (PAD) specifically for dance-related research. Due to the limited studies in the dance research literature using normalization procedures for sEMG data, a revi...

Honey bee dance language is a unique and complex form of animal communication used to inform nest mates in the colony about the specific location of food sources or new nest sites. Five different sensory systems have been implicated in acquiring and communicating the information necessary for dance language communication. We present results from neuronal tracer studies identifying the central p...

Steven J. Chatfield, Ph.D., is in the Department of Dance at the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. Donna H. Krasnow, M.S., is in the Department of Dance at York University, Toronto, Canada. Amanda Herman, is a candidate in the Masters of Fine Arts program at the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. Glenna Blessing, M.F.A., is in the Department of Dance at Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland.