Physics and its dance arts

Cyd M. Zamot

Ever since I was a little girl I always liked to dance, but more to see the dancing ballet. I always found it interesting, intriguing and curious. Ballet is the art of precision and dance. My curiosity as a child always made me ask how these people (the ballerinas) made jumps and maneuvers so perfectly. As I grew, I understood that for the ballet, more than ability they needed a series of knowledge. But what type of knowledge? They needed to have some physics knowledge.

How do we combine physics and ballet? When I made this big question I didn’t know the answer until I took my first physics class in high school. How do the dancers rotate on its axis? How can they make jumps of over 180 degrees? How can the dancers perfect their techniques just knowing about physics? Those are more questions that I asked myself. I learned that dancers can make those movements so perfect by the laws of gravity, dynamism and energy.

Dancers support their force on a support point which is the floor, balancing their weight; thus having balance, obtaining therefore a uniform circular motion on its axis. But even more; using physics, it is estimated that to maintain this movement (the circular motion) the dancer must have a minimum speed of 2.4m/s and a maximum of 5 m/s to maintain the balance. To make the jump of 180 degrees, the dancers have to open their legs with a force of 10 N. We also have to think about the weight. The weight is the measure of the force that exerts the gravity. Another thing is the shoes that the ballerina is wearing. The ballet slippers are made of a special material that makes the dancers use all its weight exerted a support point because the dancers need to turn over 360 degrees on its axis. 

We can see more concepts of physics in the ballet. Examples include projectile motion, center of mass, kinetic energy and momentum. The projectile motion is any object which projected once continues in motion by its own inertia and is influenced only by the downward force of gravity; it can be seen in the pirouettes of the ballerinas. The center of mass of any homogeneous symmetric object is located on an axis of symmetry, which is classical at the ballet when they supported on a specific point of their body and rotate around its axis of symmetry. Also we see in the ballet the kinetic energy which is the work required to accelerate a body of a given mass from rest to the speed that it has. Last but not least we have the momentum which is the amount of movement, or is the product of body mass and speed at a given instant

I finally answered my biggest question: How do we combine physics and ballet? Physics is combined with ballet because each movement exerts a certain force, which applied to physics would help each of the ballerinas to make better moves and check what steps are wrong.  So finally, what is ballet? For me ballet is de dance of physics. Is the combination of forces, laws another physics things that create a scenic and dance art, the ballet.

Reference:

Giancoli, Douglas C. Physics for Scientists & Engineers with Modern Physics. 4th ed. Vol. 1. Upper Saddle River, N.J: Prentice Hall, 2009. 

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballet

http://www.medellin.edu.co/sites/Educativo/Docentes/feriaexplora/Fsica%20y%20Astronoma/La%20F%C3%ADsica%20en%20el%20Ballet.pdf