How Do Dancers Learn To Dance? A First-Person Perspective Of Dance Acquisition By Expert Contemporary Dancers

We are interested in supporting motor skill acquisition in highly creative skilled practices such as dance. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 11 professional dancers to better understand how they learn new dance movements. We found that each dancer engages in a set of operations, including imitation, segmentation, marking, or applying movement variations. We also found a progression in learning dance movements composed of three steps consistently reported by dancers: analysis, integration and personalization. In this study, we aim to provide an empirical foundation to better understand the acquisition of dance movements from the perspective of the learner.