Rebecca Barnstaple is a PhD candidate in Dance Studies and the Neuroscience Graduate Program at York. As a graduate of the National Centre for Dance Therapy (2015), she provides dance and movement programs for people with chronic pain, Parkinson's disease and other conditions through Chigamik Community Health Centre in Midland, Ontario (and now online!). Rebecca is a member of the steering committee of Dance Movement Therapy Ontario, the Research and Practice committee of the American Dance Therapy association, and the Groupe d'intérêt scientifique of the National Centre for Dance Therapy in Montreal.
Today, she shares with us the details of her latest research project.
Dancing is intensively multimodal and complex, involving physical and cognitive coordination, uniting motor control with memory, attention, and artistry. This complexity, I suspect, is why dance provides a potent environment for health and healing; it mobilises all our faculties while challenging us on many levels. As the age of our global population increases, conditions such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s affect a growing number of individuals, along with their families and loved ones. These neurodegenerative ailments manifest in a broad and wide-ranging array of symptoms affecting movement, mood, cognition, and the capacity to carry out tasks associated with daily living.
At this point, there is no cure for either of these conditions; however, there is a growing body of research suggesting that dance-based programs and therapies can be effective in slowing disease progression. The multimodal nature of dance is both a challenge and an opportunity – it presents difficulties for research design, as it is hard to exclude or isolate variables, while at the same time there is a rich opportunity to develop novel study designs and strategies that may slow the progression of neurodegeneration, or provide additional support to people living with these conditions.
In the final year of my PhD I was awarded a Mitacs Globalink Award to travel to Berlin, Germany, where I worked with a lab specializing in the collection of mobile brain/body imaging data.
My research broadly investigates ways that dance can support health and well-being throughout the lifespan, and involves the development of neurobiological models for dance and applications for therapeutic dance programs. While neuroscience of dance and dance in therapeutic contexts are growing areas of research, methodological restrictions associated with recording data while people are moving impose severe limitations on studies. Interdisciplinary research methods and theoretical frameworks that blend sciences and humanities are highly suited to improving our understanding of how and why dance may be useful in therapeutic contexts. Neuroscientific dance research to this point often involves pre/post measures, visualisation, watching videos, or anatomical examinations of experts; my project addressed these elements while adding dimensions of moving, learning, and performing a novel dance.
The project assessed the impact of motor learning while subjects learned a specifically designed 30-second choreography. Trials include watching videos, watching live performances of the choreography, moving with the teacher, imagining performing from a first-person perspective, and finally, performing in space. Sessions were recorded at the Berlin Mobile Brain/Body Imaging Lab (BeMoBIL), a 150 m2 lab space, where we could capture EEG data and continuous motion of the 16 participants.
The collected data explores brain dynamics synced with video and motion capture, along with participant feedback, providing a wealth of information. Preliminary results suggest that participants employed different learning strategies based on their previous experience; further analysis will require substantially more time. This article describes our original research design and outlines plans for analysis over the coming months and year(s).
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