This article reports on the evolution of breakdance. Given the inclusion of breakdancing in the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, France, scholars have generated substantial international research related to breakdance teaching in recent years. However, few researchers have focused on the impact of formal formative assessment on breakdance teachers’ teaching and students’ learning. We wish to contribute to the quality of breakdance teaching and learning by identifying the positive impact of recent research on formative assessment on (...) student learning and designing a formal formative assessment task related to breakdance. This article lays out a framework of formal formative assessment tasks and identifies the positive impact of formative assessment on dance education. Although our work is far from perfect, it does provide a general methodological framework for assessing breakdance students’ abilities in formal educational settings. (shrink)

In health communication metaphor studies, mental and terminal diseases are often the center of attention. Yet, one of the most important life stages especially for many women, pregnancy, has receiv...

In the performing arts, such as music and dance performances, people actively interact with each other and show their exciting performances. Some studies have proposed that this interaction is a social origin of the performing arts. Some have further investigated this phenomenon based on the synchronization and coordination theory. Though the majority of these studies have focused on the collaborative context, several genres of the performing arts, such as jazz sessions and breakdance battles, have a competitive context. Several studies (...) have suggested that, in this competitive context, performers actively interact with each other and construct some correspondence. Moreover, a few recent studies focusing on competitive conversations, such as debates, have shown that, compared to people's interactions in collaborative conversations, people in competitive contexts frequently coordinate their behaviors in complicated ways. However, the interaction and coordination among performers in these competitive contexts have not been sufficiently investigated. Therefore, we investigated the coordination of expert breakdancers in battle scenes and measured their rhythmic movements using a motion capture system. We calculated the relative phase of the rhythmic movements between two dancers to investigate their coordination. The results showed that the dancers' rhythmic movements tended to synchronize in an anti-phase fashion, which means that there were similarities as well as differences between the two dancers' rhythmic movements. Furthermore, this pattern of coordination changed dynamically as time elapsed, from an in-phase synchronization or leader-follower relationships to an anti-phase synchronization and then leader-follower relationships. (shrink)