Proto-aesthetic movement in young children: The emergence of expressive dance in children aged one-and-a-quarter to five years old.

摘要

Why do very young children dance? Not the structured steps of conventional Dance, nor simply functional, pragmatic movement, but the dances that are uniquely their own - ones they appear to need to dance, the moves that burst forth from them -- aesthetic expressions of each single, extraordinary individual.;I propose in this study that this primal and intrinsic type of movement in young children, which I define as Proto-Aesthetic Movement, is an expressive, meaning-making early dance, as well as a distinct layer of dance development; the essence of young children's process in the creation of dance as an art, and seminal in its implications for shaping early dance education.;There are specific movements and patterns that appear to be universal at this time, that have been studied in older children, as well as documented in mainstream motor development research. Yet, in this research, I note that their emergence and sequencing are always highly idiosyncratic, and occur when young children are in a uniquely, self-absorbed and concentrated state of being. When one-and-a-quarter to five-year-old children explore the materials of dance - that is, their bodies moving - they enter a state of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997) and express a sense of ecstasy, beauty and freedom in which each child's particular movement chainings, transitions and evolutions are aesthetically and intrinsically their own.