Hello, I’m Madison Tate Brott, a
junior Dance BFA student, and I am part of the Engineering Dance Team amongst
other dancers, Psychology students, and Bioengineering students. I found it
intriguing that I could be apart of a study that involved three vastly
different departments, so I chose to spend my summer in a way which was
entirely foreign to me—doing research. What I have learned in these 10 weeks
cannot be summed up in this space—I mean, a Dance major learned code—and the
experience can only be fully understood by having the experience yourself.
Within the Engineering Dance Team, two
groups with different interests were formed and I found myself as part of the
Authority Figure group, which measured and analyzed the effect of authoritative
figures’ presence on dance performance. To do this, knowledge of Motive (motion
capture) and MATLAB (a coding software) were necessary, so the first few weeks
of the project were dedicated to learning these platforms for those of us who
did not have previous backgrounds in one or both. In these beginning stages,
each field represented had information that needed to be related to those in
other fields in a way that would later be useful in our projects. The
introduction to psychology papers and bioengineering terminology almost could
have been a course of its own, but then throw in code, post-processing, and
Adobe Illustrator and you’ve got yourself a 5 for 1 subject class. This all
would have been impossible to learn without the help from our three, incredible
graduate students, whom patiently guided us undergraduates with instructions
and advice inside and outside of our projects.
As the summer comes to a close, and
our studies as consequence, I am left feeling grateful and accomplished in the
leap my team took. Dance research is not nearly as common as research on sports
and other athletics, and especially so once you take the attention off of
injuries. The goal over the last couple of months was to get involved, bringing
attention to dance through research and hopefully inspiring others to do so, as
well. Dancers are curious people, too, and it is not always satisfying to only
be a participant in a study. When dancers can step up and learn outside of what
we know to get answers about what we think we already know, we can diminish the
theory that we are only bodies that move with minds that do not.
