Improvised Creative Process of Street Dance

Abstract

This paper aims to study the creative process of collaborative improvisation, which
has rarely been the subject of cognitive science research. The special focus is on how
a dancer’s improvisational process is influenced by another dancer’s performance. Bat-
tle performances of street dance are chosen as the target performances of this study
and contrasted with solo performances, because in battle situations dancers have to
generate their original expressions in a highly improvised manner. We conducted an
experimental study, aiming to investigate both the cognitive process of dancers and
the characteristic features of their dance performances. The three main results are as
follows: 1) The generation frequency of new dance movements was not different be-
tween solo and battle dance performances. 2) The generation process of a dancer’s new
dance movements was influenced by another dancer’s performance. In the battle per-
formances, dancers generated new dance movements by combining several movements
that they had already acquired, while they generated new movements by only changing
some parts of their acquired dance movements in the solo performances. 3) In the
battle performances, as distinct from the solo dance performances, dancers generated
their dance movements by adopting movements of another dancers and changing the
structures of their movements. These features resulted in differences in the processes
of generating new patterns.