Synchronization and Coordination of Art Performances in Highly Competitive Contexts: Battle Scenes of Expert Breakdancers

Abstract

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.

Postural and Gestural Synchronization, Sequential Imitation, and Mirroring Predict Perceived Coupling of Dancing Dyads

“…The results of this study underscore the importance of multivariate methods for the study of human motoric coupling, which is multidimensional in nature. At least in dance research, both individual rhythmic entrainment and social coupling studies have often been based on the analysis of a single marker (Brown & Meulenbroek, 2016; Ellamil, Berson, Wong, Buckley, & Margulies, 2016; Shimizu & Okada, 2021; Solberg & Jensenius, 2019; von Zimmermann et al., 2018) or a single‐body region (Sato, Nunome, & Ikegami, 2014) per dancer. However, different types of multivariate approaches, including latent space (Hartmann et al., 2019) and time‐frequency analysis (Toiviainen & Hartmann, 2022) methods, have shown to outperform univariate ones such as correlations between vertical head velocities.…”

Postural and gestural synchronization, sequential imitation, and mirroring predict perceived coupling of dancing dyads

“…The results of this study underscore the importance of multivariate methods for the study of human motoric coupling, which is multidimensional in nature. At least in dance research, both individual rhythmic entrainment and social coupling studies have often been based on the analysis of a single marker (Brown & Meulenbroek, 2016;Ellamil et al, 2016;von Zimmermann et al, 2018;Solberg & Jensenius, 2019;Shimizu & Okada, 2021) or a single body region (Sato et al, 2014) per dancer. However, different types of multivariate approaches, including latent space (Hartmann et al, 2019) and timefrequency analysis (Toiviainen & Hartmann, 2022) methods, have shown to outperform univariate ones such as correlations between vertical head velocities.…”

Time-motion analysis in men’s breaking: A longitudinal study

“…The humble origins of breaking [ 10 ] could perhaps explain this paucity of scientific literature. All that is available are studies on the improvement of physical abilities [ 11 ], the epidemiology of injuries [ 12 ], the acquisition of motor skills in dancers [ 13 ], cardiorespiratory profiles in b-boys [ 14 ] and sociological studies [ 15 ]. Despite scientific efforts made in this discipline and even with the pilot study on time-motion in breaking, for which only two world championships were analyzed [ 1 ], we still do not have longitudinal time-motion studies that allow us to analyze the evolution suffered in the sport and establish the most appropriate training loads for athletes.…”