Displaying my Artefact

I decided to create a separate blog to this one named 'Nutrition for Dancers' to display my professional artefact. I wanted to do this so that it could be found easily by dancers searching for advice. Although, the advice I give is not expert. I refer to dietitians whose teachings they may find beneficial.

First Position Documentary

This is a trailer for the movie/documentary 'First Position.' Maybe it could help some of you. Personally, I am looking into pressures to conform to a certain 'ideal' as a dancer I found the clips of interview with the African American dancer interesting. Either way, I think its going to be an interesting watch and I think most of you will agree.

Answers to Paula's questions on my Professional Artefact

After answering the following, I feel much better prepared to carry out my artefact.

How and why will this be effective with your professional audience in mind?

It will be effective because I am trying out different diets, two which are widely deemed unhealthy particularly for dancers. However, as both the literature I reviewed and the inquiry I carried out shows that dancers do not always give their nutrition the attention it needs. I am also guilty of this and so it is something I am really keen to look at further.

Will your film incorporate any other information – it sounds like a type of documentary – like a postscript about what it meant to you.

The video will be a documentary and will have an introduction where I explain what I did and why I did it. Then, each day that I am doing one of the diets I will film regularly and talk about what I have eaten and why. Before I head to the dance class I shall film to explain how I am feeling and then when I get back I shall do the same.

How will you be displaying this –your YouTube channel – who will access it?

I will be displaying this on my YouTube channel and I shall make it public with a title that incorporates dance and nutrition so that if any dancers should be searching online for nutrition they will be able to find my video.

Have you checked it is ok in terms of copyright – is this Challis menu one that is sold (patented) or can anyone try it out (is it from Dance UK?)

Yes, this information is on DanceUK and is therefore intended to be tried out by anyone and I will give her full credit for the recipe on the video. I will only be taking my evening meal from her because I am not doing an intense rehearsal/performance schedule. Breakfast and lunch will be healthy options too but I will using my own knowledge to decide what I am eating for those.

Where is the less healthy diet coming from?

As Challis reports, carbohydrates are the key to having energy as a dancer. I will miss that food group out as much as possible and eat lots of fats which will take longer to digest and sugary foods which will give me energy at first but will drop and give me low blood sugar level. The idea for this came about because I wanted to see if I would feel a huge difference with regard to my energy levels and ability to perform just from the foods I eat.

Why eat nothing? Is that something in the literature or from you experience?

Eating nothing (or next to nothing) is obviously extremely unhealthy but from results from my inquiry and from experience working with other dancers I know that some dancers take dieting to extremes and this is what I want to look at by eating nothing.

Do you have precedents for your trying out these different eating regimes? Where did you get the idea for your intervention and how does it link to your inquiry?

I hope to get some insight into how food will affect my performance in a dance class. When I was researching ‘nutrition for dancers’, authors kept saying how important food is as a fuel. I am not suggesting that dancers take what I find out as fact because everybody is different and as much as I will try to keep the experiment fair I know it has limitations. I got the idea for this from Challis’ article and other literature on nutrition but also from my findings in my inquiry because many participants said that they did not find lessons they had on nutrition helpful and some dancers stated that they do not normally eat healthily, which could mean they try to diet to extremes or they make unhealthy food choices. I wanted to do this experiment to see how this could be affecting their performance.

Idea for professional Artefact

I haven't blogged for a while because I have been busy writing up my critical review which is getting there. Recently I have been giving a lot of thought to my professional artefact and I am considering doing an experiment of sorts. Since my inquiry has been firstly about body image and secondly about nutrition I have decided to give the topic of nutrition precedence in my artefact.

I am going to attend the same Jazz class every Thursday for three weeks starting this Thursday. The class is at 8.45pm. The first week I shall eat nutritious options for breakfast, lunch and dinner (I will be using meals outlined by Jasmine Challis in a piece of literature I reviewed for my inquiry about healthy eating for dancers). The second week I shall eat foods with are less healthy for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The final week I shall eat almost nothing all day (I obviously do not want to pass out from eating nothing so I will make sure I eat a little food).

I will film myself and comment on what I've eaten in the day how I felt before the class, during the class and once the class is over.

Review of ‘Advice For Dancers’

‘Advice For Dancers’ is a Q&A section of ‘Dance Magazine’. I am reviewing one question and answer segment from the December 2008 edition of ‘Dance Magazine’. The advice is given by Linda Hamilton. Ph.D., a lecture and psychologist in private practice and also a former New York City Ballet dancer.

The question I am reviewing comes from a 20 year old, female student dancer named Lauren who has aspirations to be in a ballet company. Lauren states that takes 2 classes a day and eats 3 meals per day with whole grain carbohydrates and lean sources of protein and dairy. She says she also snacks on fruit and nuts. According to Lauren she eats 1200 calories per day. And her question is whether or not she is eating the right amount.

The advice Hamilton give to her is that she is doing well to eat nutritious food yet the quantity is too low. She recommends Lauren eats between 2000 and 2700 calories due to her age and level of exercise. However, if Lauren wants to lose weight she should never dip below her BMR (Basic Metabolic Rate) because all that will do is slow her metabolism down. She gives web address which will calculate her BMR for her. Finally, she refers Lauren to perhaps seek advice from a dietician who specialises in dancers.

This piece is relevant to my inquiry because Lauren is writing in to seek advice about her diet and perhaps this shows that she is unable to obtain nutritional advice from other sources. Whether or not dancers feel they get enough advice on this topic and whether they know how to best eat for their health and performance is one aspect I am looking into specifically for my inquiry. As the research in another piece I reviewed, ‘Body composition, weight control and nutrition in dancers’, showed dancers wanted to be healthy but lacked the guidance on how. That research was done in 1996 but the piece I am currently reviewing is from 2008. Does this mean that this guidance is still lacking?

There is no way to tell the answer to that question from this piece because it is far too limited and basic. There is only one girl in question not hundreds like in the research piece. Also, it could be argued that what she does know about the kinds of food she is eating has insight. She is not, for example, cutting out carbohydrates.

I think the advice given by Hamilton is helpful to dancers but she knows her limits in the field and refers Lauren to other sources, which in itself, is helpful. However, despite Hamilton’s experience in the field of dance and psychology she is not a dietician and therefore her advice can only go so far. If Lauren had asked a dietician perhaps the answer she got would have been different.

Also, in this piece Hamilton says,

“Because ballet dancers generally need to weigh less compared to the general population”,

Showing that it is a given that ballet dancers need to be light. It is interesting that Hamilton danced at the NYC Ballet because in another piece I reviewed, ‘Frozen Landscapes: A Foucauldian genealogy of the ideal dancer’s body’, the author Ritenburg uses Balanchine’s ideas of ‘perfect’ dancers in the NYC Ballet to explain why ballet dancers look the way they do. If Hamilton practiced what she preaches i.e. if she used the advice she gives to Lauren and was healthy enough to perform at her best yet slim enough to fit the NYC Ballet’s ideals, then she is probably a great source of information.

Review of ‘Tiny dancer: Body image and dancer identity in female modern dancers’

‘Tiny dancer: Body image and dancer identity in female modern dancers’ by Susan W. Langdon is a research piece which looks into if and how the identities of dancers’ can affect their body image. Their identities come from the type of dancer they are, for example ballet, street etc and their level of experience, for example professional or amatueur. Langdon mentions in the introdution that there has been previous research into body image with regard to level of experience. Which directly relates to the another piece I reviewed ‘Body image in female professional and amateur dancers’ Pollatou et al. As the title suggests, Landon’s research is based specifically on modern dancers.

Langdon gathered her participants at a national dance festival in the USA. She asked the dancers to fill out a survey which 103 of the 180 dancers there did, from this:

·         75% of the dancers were female, modern dancers

·         Ages 18 – 55 years

·         84% were White

·         10% were non-white (African-American, Asian American and Hispanic)

·         6% did not specify their race

·         Number of years dancing ranged from 5 – 42 years

·         All participants had taken ballet at some point. 8% no longer did, 17% did on occasion and 75% still did.

The survey used various methods to determine the participants’ body images. The ‘Body Appreciation Scale’ (BAS) developed by Avalos, Tylka, & Wood-Barcalow, (2005) was the method Langdon chose for the surveying body image. The participants could answer 1 - 5 (i.e. never – always). The drive for Thinness Subscale of the Eating Disorder Inventory-2 (EDI-2) developed by Garner (1990) was used to correlate body image. In this scale infrequent behaviours are given a score of 1 and more frequent ones 1-3. The Self- Objectification questionnaire (SOQ) developed by Noll and Fredrickson (1998) was used to determine what 10 attributes the participants thought are most important. 5 were physical (i.e. attractiveness) and 5 were from within (i.e. strength). The participants had to rank the 10 items.  Langdon assessed the participants’ dance specific body image by using a questionnaire developed by Price and Pettijohn (2006). This questionnaire uses a 5-point Likert-type scale an example of the questions asked is, ‘My body right for dancing’. Finally, in order to assess the participants’ Langdon used the Athletic Identity Measurement Scale developed by Brewer, VanRaalte, & Linder (1993). However, the word athlete was replaced by the word dancer.

The results of this research are as follows:

1)    The participants had lower levels of self-objectification and drive for thinness compared to non-clinical college women.

2)    The participants had higher levels of dancer identity relative to the neutral midpoint.

3)    White women had positive levels of body acceptance and higher levels of body appreciation than the normative body appreciation.

4)    Non-White women had negative levels of body acceptance and similar levels of body appreciation to the norm.

Langdon believes that these findings indicate that the White participants focus more on competition than their appearance because they have lower drive for thinness and higher body appreciation than dancers of other ethnic backgrounds. She thinks this may indicate the athletic character of Modern dance. Langdon states that the findings she came to about Non-White dancers contradict previous research by deCasanove (2004) and Molloy & Herzberger (1998). Langdon’s findings suggest that Non-White dancers have a poorer body image than their White counterparts and lower body appreciation.

This piece is relevant to my inquiry because it considers body image and identity in modern dancers. Similar to the last piece I reviewed the participants in this research are not ballet dancers. In this piece they are Modern dancers, again they are not quite the same as most dancers in my community of practice but they are another type of dancer that are not required to be a thin as a ballerina and therefore potentially have feel less pressure to look a particular way.

The results show that White dancers, of which the participants of my inquiry predominantly are, seem to have high levels of body acceptance and a lower drive for thinness than the norm. This I find very interesting indeed and it may prove that dancers are happier with their bodies than I may have thought.

At this point I must address ethnicity. It is strange to say this but the vast majority of dancers I have worked and trained with have been White. I trained in the U.K and have worked in the U.K, Egypt, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the U.S (basically all over) with dancers from countries other than the U.K also. Yet, dancers who perform the kinds of shows I do are mostly white which is very interesting. However, to start looking into this now would be a step too far, even though this piece brings up some interesting ideas about how ethnicity can affect a dancers’ body image I think that this would be an inquiry on its own.

The research carried out by Langdon seems thorough and the questionnaire seems as though it covers all types of body image and identity questions. The research was completed in 2009 and published in 2010. The recentness of this piece makes the findings relevant today. However, the fact that the research was carried out in the U.S makes it less relevant to my inquiry because the majority of my participants will be European and perhaps the findings would be different if this research were to be carried out here.

Susan W. Langdon is a psychology lecturer at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine. Her background in psychology gives this piece credibility. The piece is designed to be read by other psychologists investigating similar topics. This is her first piece of research into dancers and she does not have a dance background. I think this is a positive thing because she has no preconceptions about the dance world and what dancers may or may not think or feel about their body image.

Review of ‘Body composition, weight control and nutrition in dancers’

‘Body composition, weight control and nutrition in dancers’ is a research piece by Paul Pacy, Magita Khalouha and Yiannis Koutedakis which was written for and published in ‘Dance Research; The Journal of the Society for Dance Research Winter 1996, Vol. XIV Issue 2’. The research in this piece was carried out in order to see what dancers’ know about nutrition, how they know what they know about nutrition and what their body composition is compared to non-athletes. This research mainly uses contemporary dancers as participants.

In 1996 when this article was published there had not been much attention paid to the nutrition of contemporary dancers either in research or within the art itself. The team state that it was because of this lack of guidance DanceUK commissioned their Healthier Dancer Programme, of which this research is a part. I have reviewed piece from DanceUK already about the types of foods dancers should be eating and why.

The team sent out a questionnaire to dance professionals and dance students, the questions asked were about training, injury, health characteristics and nutrition. The team received 658 responses. 76% of respondents were female, 24% were male. 50.2% were students, 49.8% were professionals. 78% engaged in Contemporary dancing, 55% engaged in Ballet dancing and 27% engaged in Jazz dancing. The age ranged from 16-44 years old with 60% falling into the 16-24 category.

35% admitted to smoking and 68% said they drank 1-14 units of alcohol per week. 56% had sustained an injury.

19% said that they had tracked down specific nutritional information on nutrition. Of these 54% went to their G.P, 71% saw a dietician, 79% got their information from magazines and 37% got their information from the television. The team wondered if this low number shows that dancers do not think that their nutrition is important. However, the next part of the questionnaire was about nutritional supplementation. The results showed that 69% of all participants took some form of supplement. The team believe this shows that dancers are making a conscious effort with nutrition however; they do not know where to gain advice about it from.

The team comment on the fact that extensive research has been done into ballet dancers’ body fat percentage. This research proves that dancers have low amounts which can lead to thinning bones due to low levels of oestrogen which helps build up bone density. However, the research piece I reviewed on this topic indicated that the dancers used in their study had healthy bones even though their BMIs and body fat percentages were low. Yet in that research piece the authors did state that there has been research that contradicts their findings. Going back to the current piece, the team allude to research that proves low levels of oestrogen in ballet dancers is to do with a reduced calorie intake. The problem is that at this time research into other kinds of dancers had not been carried out so how can somebody advise them they do not know what need to be suggested. DanceUK’s Healthier Dancer Programme began to collect relevant information on non-ballet dancers.

The team carried out further research into the body composition of contemporary dancers. They used matched female, professional contemporary dancers, matched female, student contemporary dancers, matched non-athletic controls and matched male contemporary dancers. The researchers used a number of techniques to gage the participants’ body fat percentage.

The results showed that women had considerably more body fat than their male equivalents no matter what technique was used to obtain the result. The researchers were not surprised by this outcome. However, each technique did not give the same percentage. Despite this, the research showed that contemporary dancers had considerably higher body fat percentage than ballet dancers whose is around 16-17%. The team used available literature which examines ballet dancers to build their conclusion. Male contemporary dancers also have higher body fat percentage than male ballet dancers. Male ballet dancers’ body fat percentage is around 5-9%. On average the female contemporary dancers had lower fat percentage than their non-athletic counterparts.

This research is relevant to my inquiry because it looks into body composition and nutrition in contemporary dancers, instead of ballet dancers which has been the majority of the focus of the pieces I have reviewed so far. I am not a contemporary dancer and neither are the most of the dancers I work with. However, there is less pressure on contemporary dancers to be as extremely thin as ballet dancers. I think this applies also to the jazz dancers and show girl cabaret dancers I tend to work with. I believe, from personal experience, there is still intense pressure to look a certain way. I chose this topic for my inquiry in the first place in order to find out whether others feel the same. Therefore, the fact that other dancers besides ballet dancers were used in this research make the findings more relevant to what I am researching.

The results show that dancers do not get enough help and information on the topic of nutrition. This is relevant to my inquiry because I am keen to find out whether dancers know how to eat properly for their health and performance. I have questions in both my questionnaire and interview on this subject. It interests me to know whether dancers have lessons on nutrition and, if so, are they helpful? This research was published in 1996 so it would be expected that education on this topic would have improved in 15 years particularly with help from organisations like DanceUK.

The age of this research means that the state of affairs may have changed since it was published and methods used might be out of date. Therefore, it leaves the research less relevant to dance today and thus, less relevant to my inquiry.

This research was commissioned by DanceUK as part of the start of their Healthier Dancer Programme and it was included in ‘Dance Research; The Journal of the Society for Dance Research’ which gives the research a lot of credibility. It was designed to be read by other academics in the same field was used to help educate dancers on how to improve their nutrition.

This piece has also given credibility to the DanceUK piece I have previously reviewed. Before I was questioning how helpful it would be to dancers because nutrition is such a personal thing. However, if the information provided by DanceUK is based on findings like this I can see that there is a lot of factual evidence behind the advice they are giving.