Science-Empowered Dance Pedagogy: Theoretical Construction and Practical Translation of Sports Biomechanics
Abstract
This paper discusses how sports biomechanics pushes dance teaching from "experience inheritance" toward an "evidence-oriented" paradigm shift. Traditional master-apprentice teaching depends on oral transmission and personal demonstration and on the ethic of "enduring pain and practicing hard," and it brings about a high injury rate, the neglect of individual differences, and the "black box" difficulty that training effects are hard to quantify and to reproduce. Sports biomechanics, through analyzing the kinetic chain, load thresholds, and mechanical mechanisms, provides a scientific basis for injury prevention, efficiency improvement, and individualized training, and it carries out "teaching according to age" in the dialectic of universality and particularity. Taking the seven-year continuous program of Taipei National University of the Arts as the field of observation, this paper proposes a systematic construction of the teaching model: the scientific reconstruction of warm-up, the integration of body-mind techniques such as breathing training, the Alexander Technique, the Feldenkrais Method, and Ideokinesis, and an inquiry-based course structure centered on "movement understanding." The deeper meaning of this transformation lies in the renewal of educational philosophy—moving from the "instrumentalized body" toward dancer-centered whole-person education that cultivates the "aware body," letting experience and science be driven by two wheels, and realizing dance education that is safe, excellent, and sustainable.
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