This paper describes the design and implementation of a lead and follow dance to be performed with a human follower and PHANToM leader, or executed by two humans via two PHANToMs, reciprocally linked. In some contexts, such as teaching calligraphic character writing, haptic-only communication of information has demonstrated limited effectiveness. This project was inspired by the observation tha...

I am a professional dancer, choreographer, and Alexander Technique instructor. I joined the Performing Arts faculty at Washington University in St. Louis in 1994, where I teach contemporary concert art dance and somatic practices. Dancing is fundamentally a study of coordination, balance, and movement control. Because these essential goals are shared in movement therapies, I have become interes...

The tremble dance of honey bee nectar foragers is part of the communication system that regulates a colony's foraging efficiency. A forager that returns to the hive with nectar, but then experiences a long unloading delay because she has difficulty finding a nectar receiver bee, will perform a tremble dance to recruit additional nectar receiver bees. A forager that experiences a short unloading...

We present a system that generates arm dancing motion to new music tracks, based on sample motion captured data of dancing to other pieces of music. Rather than adapting existing motion, as most music-animation systems do, our system is novel in that it analyzes both the supplied motion and music data for certain characteristics (eg. melodic contour, loudness, etc), and learns relationships bet...

Stress fractures of the anterior cortex of the mid-tibial shaft in dancers are rare, with a 1.4 % incidence in injured eli- te dancers. Treatment can be difficult and long-lasting and can seriously influence the dancer's career. The authors pre- sent the case of a 26-year-old professional dancer of a folk dance ensemble who suffered rare simultaneous bilateral mid-tibial shaft stress fractures....

This paper presents a methodology for the composition of complex dynamic behaviors in legged robots, and illustrates these concepts to experimentally achieve robotic dancing. Inspired by principles from dynamic locomotion, we begin by constructing controllers that drive a collection of virtual constraints to zero; this creates a low-dimensional representation of the bipedal robot. Given any two...

The social self-preservation theory states that humans have a fundamental motivation to preserve the social self and that threats to the social self perturb biological markers such as cortisol. Five studies were designed to examine the cortisol response to competitive ballroom dancing as a paradigm for real-life social-evaluative threat. Competitive dancing produced substantial increases in cor...

Neuroscientific research on creativity has revealed valuable insights into possible brain correlates underlying this complex mental ability domain. However, most of the studies investigated brain activity during the performance of comparatively simple (verbal) type of tasks and the majority of studies focused on samples of the normal population. In this study we investigate EEG activity in prof...