Dance is the movement of the body in a rhythmic way, usually to music

What is Dance?
and within a given space, for the purpose of expressing an idea or
emotion, releasing energy, or simply taking delight in the movement
itself.
https://www.britannica.com/art/dance

The Elements of Dance are the foundational concepts and vocabulary that
help students develop movement skills and understand dance as an artistic
What are the practice.

The acronym BASTE helps students remember the elements:

Elements of Body
Action

Dance?
Space
Time
Energy

This framework is a way to discuss any kind of movement. While different

dance styles call for specialized skills and stylization choices, the underlying
elements of dance are visible in all dance experiences.

In dance, the Body is the mobile figure or shape, felt by the dancer,
seen by others. The body is sometimes relatively still and sometimes
changing as the dancer moves in place or travels through the dance
area. Dancers may emphasize specific parts of their body in a dance
phrase or use their whole body all at once.

Action is any human movement included in the act of dancing— it can

include dance steps, facial movements, partner lifts, gestures, and even
everyday movements such as walking. Dance is made up of streams of
movement and pauses, so action refers not only to steps and
sequences, but also to pauses and moments of relative stillness.
 Dancers interact with Space in myriad ways. They may stay in one place
or they may travel from one place to another. They may alter the
direction, level, size, and pathways of their movements.

The keyword for the element of Time is When? Human movement is

naturally rhythmic in the broad sense that we alternate activity and rest.
Breath and waves are examples of rhythms in nature that repeat, but
not as consistently as in a metered rhythm.

Energy is about how the movement happens. Choices about energy

include variations in movement flow and the use of force, tension, and
weight. An arm gesture might be free flowing or easily stopped, and it
may be powerful or gentle, tight, or loose, heavy, or light. A dancer may
step into an arabesque position with a sharp, percussive attack or with
light, flowing ease. Energy may change in an instant, and several types
of energy may be concurrently in play.
https://www.elementsofdance.org/

✓ Ballet Dance
Contemporary Dance
What are the
✓
✓ Modern Dance
✓ Jazz Dance

different Dance ✓
✓
Tap Dance
Street Dance
✓ Ballroom Dance
Genres? ✓
✓
Philippine Folk Dance
Neo-Ethnic Dance
✓ Foreign Folk Dance
✓ Cheer Dance

Jazz dance is no longer solely the domain of fan kicks and shimmies. The term “jazz” now
incorporates a broad range of dance styles. Prior to the 1950s, jazz dance was a style
that originated from African American dance and in the 1950s “modern jazz dance”

Jazz Dance
emerged, with roots in Caribbean traditional dance. Every individual style of jazz dance
to this day has roots traceable to one of these two distinct origins.

Beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s, jazz became a form of dance
that required the dancer to be highly skilled.
https://dancemagazine.com.au/2014/01/whats-jazz-days/
 Dancing demands a lot of energy output because it involves “movement in all
directions,” says Nick Smeeton, a principal lecturer at the University of Brighton
and coauthor of that report. While running, swimming and other propulsive
forms of physical activity use rhythm and momentum to keep you moving,
“there is a lot of accelerating and decelerating in dancing, which the body is
Why dancing is less able to do in an energy efficient way,” Smeeton says.

If running is like driving on a freeway, dancing is more like motoring through a

the best thing busy city, he says. All of that starting, stopping, and changing directions burns
a ton of fuel even though you are not covering a lot of ground.

you can do for Of course, the amount of energy you expend has a lot to do with how hard
you are pushing yourself. A gentle two-step is not going to measure up to an

your body?
intense, hilly run. But torching calories is not the only upside to dancing. Just as
trail running and hiking better engage your lower-body joints and muscles than
straight-ahead, level-ground locomotion, the up-and-down and side-to-side
movements of dance may likewise activate and train many of your body’s little
support muscles and tendons.

Like other forms of cardio exercise, dancing also seems to have mood and
mind benefits. A 2007 study found that hip hop dancing improved energy,
buoyed mood, and lowered stress in ways like aerobic exercise.

A more recent study, published earlier this year in Frontiers in Aging

Neuroscience, linked dancing to improved “white matter” integrity in the brains
of older adults. Your brain’s white matter can be thought of as its connective
tissue. That tissue tends to break down gradually as we age, which leads to a
loss of processing speed and the thinking and memory problems that arise later
in life, says Agnieszka Burzynska, an assistant professor of neuroscience at
Colorado State University and that study’s first author.

Burzynska and her colleagues looked at white matter changes among older
adults engaged in regular walking, stretching, or dancing programs. White
matter integrity declined among the walkers and stretchers but improved
among those who danced three days a week for six months. “We saw this
benefit in one area of the brain, not everywhere, and our findings are
preliminary,” she says. But the early results are promising.

The psychological benefits are also impressive. For decades, some therapists
have prescribed dancing as an effective therapy for those who suffer from
social anxiety or fear of public speaking. The idea: if you can loosen up enough
to boogie in front of strangers, you are a lot less likely to feel self-conscious when
hanging out or speaking in front of an audience. Research dating back to the
1980s supports the idea that dancing can curb anxiety.

https://time.com/4828793/dancing-dance-aerobic-exercise/
 How many of those who are ballroom dancing, doing the foxtrot, break
dancing, doing the foxtrot, break dancing, or line dancing, realize that they

Dancing and
are doing something positive for their bodies—and their brains? Dance, in fact,
has such beneficial effects on the brain that it is now being used to treat people
with Parkinson’s disease, a progressive neurological movement disorder.

the Brain
“There’s no question, anecdotally at least, that music has a very stimulating
effect on physical activity,” says Daniel Tarsy, MD, an HMS professor of
neurology and director of the Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders
Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). “And I think that
applies to dance, as well.”

STIMULATING MOVEMENT
Scientists gave little thought to the neurological effects of dance until relatively
recently, when researchers began to investigate the complex mental
coordination that dance requires. In a 2008 article in Scientific
American magazine, a Columbia University neuroscientist posited that
synchronizing music and movement—dance, essentially—constitutes a
“pleasure double play.” Music stimulates the brain’s reward centers, while
dance activates its sensory and motor circuits.

Studies using PET imaging have identified regions of the brain that contribute
to dance learning and performance. These regions include the motor cortex,
somatosensory cortex, basal ganglia, and cerebellum. The motor cortex is
involved in the planning, control, and execution of voluntary movement. The
somatosensory cortex, located in the mid region of the brain, is responsible for
motor control and plays a role in eye-hand coordination. The basal ganglia, a
group of structures deep in the brain, work with other brain regions to smoothly
coordinate movement, while the cerebellum integrates input from the brain
and spinal cord and helps in the planning of fine and complex motor actions.

While some imaging studies have shown which regions of the brain are
activated by dance, others have explored how the physical and expressive
elements of dance alter brain function. For example, much of the research on
the benefits of the physical activity associated with dance links with those
gained from physical exercise, benefits that range from memory improvement
to strengthened neuronal connections.

A 2003 study in the New England Journal of Medicine by researchers at the

Albert Einstein College of Medicine discovered that dance can decidedly
improve brain health. The study investigated the effect leisure activities had on
the risk of dementia in the elderly. The researchers looked at the effects of 11
different types of physical activity, including cycling, golf, swimming, and
tennis, but found that only one of the activities studied—dance—lowered
participants’ risk of dementia. According to the researchers, dancing involves
both a mental effort and social interaction and that this type of stimulation
helped reduce the risk of dementia.
In a small study undertaken in 2012, researchers at North Dakota’s Minot State
University found that the Latin-style dance program known as Zumba improves
mood and certain cognitive skills, such as visual recognition and decision-
making. Other studies show that dance helps reduce stress, increases levels of
the feel-good hormone serotonin, and helps develop new neural connections,
especially in regions involved in executive function, long-term memory, and
spatial recognition.

MOVEMENT AS THERAPHY

Dance has been found to be therapeutic for patients with Parkinson’s disease.
More than one million people in this country are living with Parkinson’s disease,
and, according to the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation, each year another
60,000 are diagnosed with the disease. Parkinson’s disease belongs to a group
of conditions called motor-system disorders, which develop when the
dopamine-producing cells in the brain are lost. The chemical dopamine is an
essential component of the brain’s system for controlling movement and
coordination. As Parkinson’s disease progresses, an increasing number of these
cells die off, drastically reducing the amount of dopamine available to the
brain.

According to the foundation, the primary motor symptoms of Parkinson’s

disease include bradykinesia (slowed movement), stiffness of the limbs and
trunk, tremors, and impaired balance and coordination. It is these symptoms
that dance may help alleviate. “A lot of this research is observational, not hard
science,” says Tarsy, “but it’s consistent and there’s a lot of it.”

Tarsy says that dance can be considered a form of rhythmic auditory

stimulation (RAS). In this technique, a series of fixed rhythms are presented to
patients, and the patients are asked to move to the rhythms. Studies of the
effects this technique has on patients with Parkinson’s or other movement
disorders have found significant improvements in gait and upper extremity
function among participants. Although there have been no side-by-side
scientific comparisons of RAS with either music or dance, Tarsy says people with
Parkinson’s “speak and walk better if they have a steady rhythmic cue.”

COMPLIMENTARY MOVES
At the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Brigham and Women’s
Hospital, Peter Wayne, AM ’89, PhD ’92, an HMS assistant professor of medicine
at the hospital, studies the clinical effects of mind-body and
complementary/alternative medicine practices on patients with chronic
health conditions. He has conducted clinical trials designed to evaluate the
safety and efficacy of tai chi for patients with Parkinson’s and other balance
disorders. Tai chi is a Chinese martial art once used for self-defense but now
performed as exercise. Wayne considers tai chi to be a more ritualized,
structured form of dance.
“The focus of our work is to take advantage of traditional exercises in which it’s
implicit that the mind and body are connected more efficiently,” says Wayne.
“Tai chi is one such exercise that we focus on because of its benefits for both
balance and mental function.” Research, he says, has shown that the
increased susceptibility to falls that occurs among people who are aging or
who are dealing with disorders such as Parkinson’s can be mitigated by the
practice of tai chi; it improves their strength and flexibility as well as their
cognitive performance.

One such study appeared in 2012 in the New England Journal of Medicine. In
this study, a team of investigators led by a scientist at the Oregon Research
Institute found that tai chi helped improve balance and prevent falls among
people with mild to moderate Parkinson’s disease. After six months, those who
practiced tai chi twice weekly were physically stronger and had better
balance compared with those who did either weight training or stretching. On
average, the participants who did tai chi achieved balance measures that
were two times better than those achieved by weightlifters and four times
better than those participants who stretched. Those people who practiced tai
chi also fell less and had slower rates of decline in overall motor control.

Wayne says tai chi may possibly benefit people with Parkinson’s disease in other
ways, too. “Practicing mindful movement,” he says, “may help compensate for
some of the motor deficits that are common in Parkinson’s and aging.”

Under Tarsy’s direction, BIDMC has initiated several wellness programs,

including ones that feature tai chi, Zumba, yoga, and drumming, designed to
help people manage the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Although it is still
unclear to what extent these programs benefit patients, Tarsy says there is
evidence that such activities as dance and tai chi can stabilize the effects of
the disease and slow the degree to which everyday movement is affected.

Certain parts of the brain can be stimulated and rewired by constantly learning
new and complex steps or movements in dance. It can create new pathways
in the brain by recognizing patterns and anticipating the next movement
combination to execute helps improve cognitive abilities. Thus, making many
split-second decisions while performing can cause people to use their critical-
thinking ability frequently and repeatedly. Dancers respond to dance and to
one another with strategies and gestures; orchestrates the choreographic
techniques with his/her temporal consciousness to dance. With these, areas of
the brain are stimulated, utilized, and rewired including those not typically
involved in dance.

https://neuro.hms.harvard.edu/harvard-mahoney-neuroscience-institute/brain-
newsletter/and-brain/dancing-and-brain

Jemmar T. Azucena
DLSU IS SHS I HOPE
June 2020