Exploring the Role of Artifacts in Collective Dance Re-staging

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Preparing a new dance performance involves more than asking dancers to learn individual steps. We are interested in understanding how dancers collaborate as they rehearse a new dance piece, with a particular emphasis on how they use physical and digital artifacts to support this process. We conducted a 12-month longitudinal observation study with a dance company that re-staged a dance piece, taken from the contemporary repertoire and unknown to the dancers. This study focuses on the role that artifacts, used during the rehearsal process, play in shaping learning. We show how dancers produced an ecology of artifacts with the aim of distributing their knowledge and sharing it with other learners. We show how artifacts serve to decompose the choreography into simpler components, independent and complementary, with the objective to reduce the difficulty of the learning task. We found that dancers compile artifacts to create a common structure among the group, allowing for improving the learning process. We conclude with design opportunities for technologies supporting long-term dance learning processes.