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IEFSEM – BAS6A Moskovska Street
Winter Garden Hall
February 16, 2025, 5:00 p.m.
Lecturer: Yoana Cholakova, MD
Over the last decades, dance has been increasingly explored as a therapeutic intervention in medical and rehabilitation research. A substantial body of evidence demonstrates the beneficial impact of dance practices, ranging from improvements in mental health – such as boosting mood, reducing depressive symptoms, and bettering quality of life – to enhancement of physical functions, including balance and postural control. Dance intervention studies, such as in Parkinson’s disease, exemplify the therapeutic relevance of dance, with reported improvements in gait, mobility, and balance.
Although dance therapy is most commonly delivered in group settings, it is still predominantly approached and studied as an individual therapeutic intervention. As a result, group dance is often implicitly treated as a series of parallel individual movements accompanied by parallel individual physiological responses. This creates a gap between actual dance practice and its scientifc characterization as a therapy, as the collective conditions under which dance is performed – including interpersonal and sociocultural influences – are rarely examined as dimensions of the therapeutic process.
Research in social neuroscience and physiology suggests that synchronized group movement may be associated with
behavioral and physiological coordination between individuals, contributing to social bonding and modulation of autonomic
processes. However, the conditions under which such coordination emerges, its specific characteristics, and its
relevance for health-related outcomes remain insufficiently examined from a medical perspective. In particular, there
is a lack of integrated approaches capable of simultaneously capturing movement dynamics and physiological parameters
in collective movement settings.
This seminar addresses this conceptual and methodological gap by examining the transition from dance as an evidence-based individual therapy to collective movement as a potential domain of health-relevant processes. It focuses on traditional group dance practices as structured, rhythmic, and socially embedded forms of movement that provide a valuable model for investigating how collective organization relates to coordination at motor and physiological levels. Rather than presupposing causal relationships, the aim is to contribute to a more comprehensive and empirically grounded understanding of group-based dance practices within medical and rehabilitation contexts.
The seminar is held within the framework of project BG-RRP-2.011-0008-C01, "3D data for cultural heritage through three-dimensional, automated science-based digitization”, funded by the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism in implementation of investment C2.I2 "Enhancing the innovation capacity of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in the field of green and digital technologies". For more information about the project visit: https://3ddance.eu/
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Национален етнографски музей - БАН/ National Ethnographic Museum - BAS, Sofia, Bulgaria
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.
