Documents 

Over the past several decades, the lines between dance, theatre and circus have blurred and circus equipment has found its way into all of the performing arts. With this new exploration of circus equipment, Technical Directors and Riggers frequently find themselves needing to rig apparatus that they are unfamiliar with. This rigging not only occurs in traditional theatres that they have experience with, but also often in found spaces, where load capacities may not be as clear. A thorough understanding of the forces involved when circus and aerial dance equipment are used is important when determining rigging hardware and mount points.

This thesis measures how much force is generated in typical single point aerial dance trapeze movements and, after analyzing that force data provides some insight into what rigging hardware might be needed to properly support such movements. Chapter 1 is a brief introduction to the thesis; Chapter 2 discusses the history of “Aerial Dance” and provides background information on it; Chapter 3 reviews the hardware and software used in the research; Chapter 4 analyses the force data, and provides the formulas used to calculate Working Load Limits; Chapter 5 reviews different rigging hardware options and concerns with each; Chapter 6 is a summary of the thesis. [author summary]

Mental health issues, especially among young women, have significantly increased due to Covid-19 pandemic. Although movement activities in Kinesiology and performing arts can have countless health benefits, physical activity declines drastically among mainly freshmen and young females. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of physical theater (e.g., dance, aerial dance, calisthenics, strength training, balance, coordination, flexibility, and bodily expression) on mental health, healthy lifestyles, play, and the love of movement among college students. This was a mixed-methods, phronetic and temporal study encompassing quantitative and qualitative data among seven undergraduate students, who enrolled in a physical theater class. Dependent t-tests were conducted to examine differences in depression and stress between the beginning of the class and the end of the semester. Phronetic research was used to analyze the qualitative data and create themes and categories. Mental health improved with a nearly medium within-subject effect for stress (d = .32, Mdifference = 3.5). These data were strengthened by the three emerging themes of the qualitative analysis. The first theme, positive physical theater experiences, included body confidence in expression, improved mental health, healthier lifestyle choices, and the love of movement. The second theme showcased the playful nature of physical theater (e.g., a non-purposeful, interactive, child-like activity, outside ordinary life). A few participants mentioned a couple of negative physical theater experiences (third theme), such as injury and darkness in expression. Movement educators in Kinesiology and performing arts should emphasize safe, bodily, creative, and playful activities within a supportive and community-oriented environment for the promotion of health and the love of movement.

This paper describes an updated interactive performance system for floor and Aerial Dance that controls visual and sonic aspects of the presentation via a depth sensing camera (MS Kinect). In order to detect, measure and track free movement in space, 3 degree of freedom (3-DOF) tracking in space (on the ground and in the air) is performed using IR markers with a method for multi target tracking capabilities added and described in detail. An improved gesture tracking and recognition system, called Action Graph (AG), is described in the paper. Action Graph uses an efficient incremental construction from a single long sequence of movement features and automatically captures repeated sub-segments in the movement from start to finish with no manual interaction needed with other advanced capabilities discussed as well. By using the new model for the gesture we can unify an entire choreography piece by dynamically tracking and recognizing gestures and sub-portions of the piece. This gives the performer the freedom to improvise based on a set of recorded gestures/portions of the choreography and have the system dynamically respond in relation to the performer within a set of related rehearsed actions, an ability that has not been seen in any other system to date.[author summary]